Richmond’s Dustin Martin, Essendon’s Dyson Heppell on track for club best and fairest awardsJon Ralph
Herald-Sun
September 03, 2014 IF every AFL player went on a huge football trip, Dustin Martin and Dyson Heppell wouldn’t be found sharing a beer any time soon.
Heppell would be hitting up Scott Pendlebury for recovery tips, joining Joel Selwood for dawn jogs and sourcing pilates contacts from Chris Judd.
Dusty would be returning at daybreak while Heppell was heading out, exchanging war stories with Dane Swan and demanding the quaddy numbers from Campbell Brown.
One is a choir boy, the other used to do his best work at the other end of the spectrum.
Yet both should win their club’s best-and-fairest this year after remarkably similar best-and-fairest results over the course of their early years.
Both are primed to play huge roles for this sides in their respective elimination finals.
And when you consider their extraordinary body of work in nine combined seasons a little-used word comes to mind.
Champion.
Neither of those players are anywhere near that yet, but could either have started more brightly, been more consistent, had more influence on matches at 22 (Heppell) and 23 (Martin)?
Martin has won at least three games off his boot this year, will poll his fourth top-four placing in his first five years at Richmond and adds a dynamic no one else at the club goes near.
Richmond’s only Brownlow Medallist in the last 60 years, triple-winner Ian Stewart, says Martin’s junior pedigree has taught him to hunt for every little gain.
“I have seen somebody that played senior football at 15 and 16 at Castlemaine, has a low centre of gravity so he’s hard to unbalance with growing up in an environment where he had to fight for everything he earnt. You see that coming out in him,’’ he said yesterday.
“He is a fighter and if something has to be done he seems to be able to lift to do it. That could come down to playing senior footy early, it would have been tough to play at 15 against men.”
It was hard to see how Heppell could top his first three seasons — Rising Star Award then a pair of top-three b-and-f finishes — until he just went out and did it.
He had 40 touches against Geelong, he saved the Dons against West Coast with 29 second-half touches, he lifted last week with a broken hand when his side was 30 points down.
And in a blink a player who has averaged 28 touches this year shut up the few critics who wondered if he could thrive in the midfield and with injured captain Jobe Watson on the sidelines.
Former Essendon vice-captain Mark McVeigh believes Heppell is the club’s next captain for so many reasons.
“With his game sense and his mind he thinks quicker than others.
“He has been able to sum up situations better than most, he adjusts his kicks, he adjusts his thinking, he doesn’t just blaze away.
“He has the ability to influence games at their most crucial points, as the absolute champions do and that will only come more and more.
“He has empathy for people, the players really warm to him and throughout this whole saga he has been one of the guys who had shone through that. If you talk about someone who will eventually take over from Jobe, you would reckon he ticks most of the boxes.”
How many champions are currently in our game? Buddy, Selwood, little Gaz, Juddy, Pendles, Pavlich, Nick Riewoldt to name a few, with Nate Fyfe getting there quickly.
If the criteria are consistent brilliance, the ability to lift when your side desperately needs you and a very small margin between best and worst, then these two will have that lofty mantle by the end of the decade.
DUSTIN MARTIN — JACK DYER MEDAL2010 4th
2011 3rd
2012 10th
2013 2nd
DYSON HEPPELL — CRICHTON MEDAL2011 6th*
2012 2nd
2013 3rd
* Rising Star winner
http://www.news.com.au/national/richmonds-dustin-martin-essendons-dyson-heppell-on-track-for-club-best-and-fairest-awards/story-e6frfkp9-1227045583008
