First of all let us say Congratulations to Ian McMurray for being the inaugural winner of the Gary Marocchi medal as the player of the final in the Football West All Flags Finals series. It is a huge honour to win such an award carrying a legend of the game in WA’s name.
However we are going to rain on his parade to a certain degree. Watching the announcement he looked almost as stunned as most of the spectators at the game that he was declared the man of the match. Ian is an honest man and I am sure that he will not believe that he had an outstanding game by his own standards.
This caused us to ask who had made the decision, and we were duly advised that it was Heritage FM who was calling the game on the radio.
Football is a game of opinions, and we all see different things when watching the game, which makes a coach’s life that much harder when we share our opinions with them. It was obviously Heritage’s opinion that McMurray was the man of the match.
Our quick straw poll of ten former professional players and officials came up with a very different result, and interestingly a poll that saw the same three players names come up with each person asked.
For future years Football West may want to look at two options, the first is that they let Gary Marocchi name who he thinks is man of the match, as the medal is actually carrying his name. Or as with the Marsden medal – and as someone who has voted on this – have a group of three people who give their votes as to the player of the match.
The one decision made by Heritage yesterday by general consensus seemed to be so far off the mark, that this system should be tweaked for next year. It is a massive honour and we congratulate Ian McMurray on being the first recipient of such an award.
