• Quarter-final voting results
• The No.1 pick who didn't know who'd selected him
SEMI-final time, and we are just a few lazy mouse clicks away from deciding who is the best No.1 draft pick of all time. The Lounders, Baniks, Hoopers, and sadly, Waterhouses of this world have been rejected, leaving two superstars, a solid citizen and a could-be-anything to fight out the title.
It was perhaps inevitable that Luke Hodge and Nick Riewoldt would make the final four. They swept through the early rounds and the quarter finals as expected, strewing top draft picks all over the shop, and will play off in the final should they defeat their respective semi-final opponents, Jaeger O'Meara and Drew Banfield.
O'Meara and Banfield are long odds to make the top two – a bloke we know down the local pub offered us 6,337,876-1 on them both making the final – but anything can happen when the general public is in charge. Jacqui Lambie, for example.
You will decide the semi final winners in Thursday's voting, and then the last two standing on Friday. The winner of the prestigious Lounder-Waterhouse Trophy – a tree with a blond mullet – will be named on Saturday.
You can click here to check out profiles and stats of our four semi-finalists, plus the 28 battered victims of the first three days of voting. And click anywhere on the image below to open the full semi-final bracket in a new tab.
Quarter-final results
And then there were four.
The brave – some said foolhardy – grassroots campaign to have Clive Waterhouse's headless chook footballing style immortalised by having him voted as the No.1 number one draft pick of all time fell at the second last hurdle.
We'd have a terrific play on words there if only Waterhouse's racehorse-training namesake Gai saddled-up hurdlers. Never mind.
Despite #VoteforClive briefly surfacing among Twitter's trending hashtags, the big Docker departed in the last eight at the hands of Banfield, 3249 votes to 5758. Somehow you decided that 265 games, two premierships and a best and fairest trumped 106 games and two leading goalkicker awards. Oh, fickle public.
Waterhouse was joined in the 'out' column by Michael Gardiner, Brendon Goddard and Jeremy Cameron.
Gardiner was always going to be ground into the turf by Riewoldt (8113 to 642 as it happened), but the margin of Goddard's loss to Hodge (1590 to 7302) was a surprise. O'Meara saw off Cameron - 5416 to 3268 - in the only outcome that could reasonably be called close; the contest of the non-number ones.
Semi-final voting
Drew Banfield was like the drummer in a band – but obviously not a band like Aussie rock trio Spiderbait, whose frontman is its singer-drummer Kram.
Incidentally, Spiderbait have a song called Footy, have performed at the footy, and are ardent fans of ... yep, you guessed it, our great game of footy.
No, Banfield plied his trade quietly (OK, maybe the drummer analogy is out of beat now) through his 265-game career and was happy for Hollywood-style teammates to receive the adulation.
However, 'Backseat Banfield' must now take centre stage and deliver a scintillating solo to upstage Nick Riewoldt to advance to Friday's grand final that will determine footy's ultimate top draft pick.
While there is life there is hope, and it's not as though Banfield played his entire career in the shadows – though he often was a shadow for opposition playmakers.
Now 40, he holds the distinction of being the only Eagle to have played in the club's past two premierships of 1994 and 2006. Flags that virtually bookended a long and productive AFL career that began in 1993 and ended after the '06 triumph.
Banfield has also enjoyed some of the limelight that accompanies individual success, winning the 1996 Eagles' best and fairest at the age of just 22, while in 2006 he was named in the club's best-ever team.
If Banfield faces an uphill battle, then Jaeger O'Meara is climbing Mount Everest barefoot and without a harness.
The Gold Coast young gun is taking on Hawthorn captain Luke Hodge in an apparent Mission Impossible. (Coincidentally, the sharply groomed O'Meara could probably pass for a Tom Cruise impersonator, circa Top Gun.)
In fact, there's probably more chance of Suns coaching advisor Malcolm Blight making a comeback as a player than there is of an O'Meara miracle.
That said, the West Australian had established a reputation for performing under pressure long before he made his AFL debut in 2013.
O'Meara, then 16, was best-afield while opposed to current Suns teammate Jack Martin, then 15, driving country team Railways to victory over Towns in the 2010 Great Northern league grand final.
Those lucky enough to witness this duel between the two prodigies felt like all their Christmases had come at once.
They'll need to here for Banfield and O'Meara.
The thoroughbred against the workhorse. The blond glamour forward against the no-frills stopper. Any which way you look at it, Banfield is in such deep trouble that if it was a game of pool, he'd be in danger of being forced to drop his dacks and do a walk of shame around the billard table. His two flags to Riewoldt's none should spare Banfield from such indignity. Are they enough to sway your vote?
The master versus the (Jaeger)meister. Basketballers have always wanted to "be like Mike" (Jordan), and O'Meara appears one of the few with the talent, toughness, leadership potential, etc, etc, to be like Luke. He has cool hands too. In German, Jaeger means hunter. He'll need to be an expert marksman to pick off the seemingly indestructible Hodge.
• The Flounder flops: How you voted in round one
• Clive's alive: How you voted in the round of 16
• How you voted in the quarter-finals
