It's Not Easy Being Green(e)

Tom or Toby? We’ve got the superstar captain miraculous goal-kicking forward, and the inside contested bull going head-to-head for who will poll the most votes for the Giants. Obviously there’s also the likes of Stephen Coniglio and Josh Kelly, but realistically it’s a Green vs Greene.

Toby is the obvious selection, currently paying $1.57 for GWS’ highest poller. He’s had a monster year and from the 20 counts we’ve collated, he’s leading 18 of those with Coniglio the leader according to Betfair and Tom Green according to afl.com.au. But according to the ever-trustworthy averages, Toby is over 7 votes clear of Tom in second place.

Game-to-game, it should be Toby Greene who comes out on top, but historical data gives Tom Green a huge chance.

Prior to this season, Toby Greene had played in 105 losses or draws during home-and-away seasons. From those games, he only polled on 7 occasions resulting in 13 votes – in five of those games he recorded 30+ disposals and the other two games he had 5+ goals. He failed to do either of these things in losses this season.

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But even in wins across his career, Toby has had to produce some big performances to poll. When kicking anywhere between 0-3 goals across 64 games, Greene has polled just eight times resulting in 17 votes – that’s just over 1 vote every four games.

From the 11 games Greene had kicked 4 goals in wins he polled in just six games for 14 votes. It takes Greene to kick a bag of 5 in a win for the Giant to get the umpire’s attention, with eight votes from three games. Unfortunately for Toby, this happened just once this year against the Bulldogs.

Now for Tom, there’s no great polling history in his three seasons prior to 2023, but this season we’re talking about a player that has ranked first in disposals and contested possessions per game – and stats matter.

14 of the last 15 #1 ranked ball-winners have finished top 15 in the Brownlow, with 12 of those 15 finishing top 10.

The correlation for being ranked 1 in contested possessions is even stronger – the last 15 have all finished in the top 20, with 13 of the last 15 finishing inside the top 10.

So even though we can do this game by game analysis on what should happen which would result in Toby finishing top-10 this year, historical analysis indicates we could see Tom Green as a surprise Giants leader and a very strong poller this year.

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