IN AN extraordinary round of footy where the top three teams lost, and clubs all the way down to 14th on the ladder remained alive for finals, four individuals with huge auras lit up matches and provided more hope for big dreams.
Charlie Curnow, Toby Greene, Max Gawn, Tex Walker. Four men with prodigious ability, a sense of occasion and a desire to create theatre.
We are regularly told that all are equal inside an AFL team, but there's never been a successful outfit without elite and moment-seizing individuals. This quartet in round 20 led Carlton, GWS, Melbourne and Adelaide to wins which allowed those clubs to believe the extraordinary can still happen in 2023.
Forget the midfielders, for a moment at least. The big men, or in Toby's case the sort-of-little-man who plays as a big man, will often be the players who impact most on team success.
Curnow has booted 16 goals in the past two matches; 10 against the bottom team West Coast in round 19 and six against the top team Collingwood, with his opponent on Friday night being the likely All-Australian captain, Darcy Moore.
There were Wayne Carey-like moments for Curnow against Collingwood, not in pack-crunching marks, but in passages of play where the ball being in his vicinity was guaranteed to result in mayhem for the opposition. With 67 goals for the season, he is beautifully placed to retain Coleman Medal status.
No player in the competition single-handedly wins more matches for his team than Greene, and he again unleashed that aspect of his repertoire against the Western Bulldogs on Saturday. Thirty-five points down in the third quarter, Greene proceeded to boot five goals, taking his season tally to a competition third-best 49.
Gawn was part of the Melbourne decision to abandon the Brodie Grundy dual-ruck project three matches ago. Those would have been tough, emotional conversations, led by coach Simon Goodwin. But Gawn is proving them to be the right ones for his club, which is desperate to add another premiership to the one secured in 2021.
With Grundy out of the team, the six-time All-Australian has rucked solo and produced his three most impactful matches of the year, against Brisbane and Adelaide in rounds 18 and 19, and on Sunday at the MCG against Richmond, where he was again supreme.
In matches before round 18, Gawn averaged 15 disposals, 20 hitouts, 3.5 clearances and four marks. In rounds 18-20, it’s 20, 39, eight, six. If statistics could measure leadership, those figures would be off the charts. As hard as this is for Grundy, Melbourne is a premiership prospect with Maxxy going it alone.
Walker's seven-goal performance in Saturday night's Showdown was among the very best of his 15-season career. He is second to Curnow on the Coleman Medal race with 61, a tally just two short of his 2012 total, when he was on the verge of establishing himself as the competition's best forward. By round five the following year, he had ruptured an ACL. That in 2023 he can be producing such explosive, game-shaping football is allowing the Crows to hope they can salvage their 2023 season.
Since round 15, Walker has kicked seven goals against the second-placed Power, five against top team Collingwood in a two-point loss and four against fourth-placed Melbourne in a four-point loss. Even after Saturday's Showdown win, the Crows have lost more matches than they've won in 2023. But because of Walker, they can still dream big.
Curnow's and Greene's performances have already contributed heavily to minor miracles in the back half of 2023. After losing eight of nine matches, Carlton was 15th after round 13. It finished round 20 in seventh position. GWS, too, was 15th recently, after round 12 when its formline was 4-8. The Giants enter round 21 from sixth place on the ladder.
Sam Walsh, Harry McKay and Adam Cerra will be missing for Carlton for some time yet with injury, but while Curnow stays fit, there is no reason the Blues can't believe of preliminary final, maybe even Grand Final, possibilities.
There hasn't been a Giants win in which Greene hasn't significantly contributed.
Greene deserves to poll very well in the Brownlow Medal, and I hope the umpires acknowledge his performances as much as the myriad midfielders who can at times rack up meaningless disposals. In my eyes, a 15-disposal game from a forward-line anchored Toby is nearly always the equal of a 30-plus disposal output from a Nick Daicos, Zak Butters or Christian Petracca.
Regardless of Brownlow voting, Greene has done more than enough in his 17 matches of 2023, and 208-game career, to mount the case he is the best player in the competition. He won't care. He is leading his team to the most unlikely of high-end finals outcomes.
