Vested Interest: Grand Final Edition

The Thornley–Hopkins Trophy

Award for most vests – both red and green.  With one game to go it’s going down to the wire.  Whips are cracking for the coaches’ whipping boys.

Bewick and Breust lead on 7 vests, one ahead of Armfield, Christensen, Rodan and Masten.

My jeweller is on standby to make several copies of the trophy in the case of a tie.

Full standings:

Where is the sub likely to be named on Thursday night?

Green vested subs have become less of a problem as the year has progressed and most DT coaches have less rookies.  However, a wrong vested player might still determine a few grand finals.

So what have we learned?

• Collingwood is the least predictable – Malthouse is obviously of the Bruce Lee school of sub selection – “my style is no style”.
• Brisbane is the most predictable – the sub is usually on the interchange in no.4 spot or having a surname starting with Bewick (or Karnezis which is Greek for Bewick).
• The Scott twins are probably the most frustrating with lots of late exclusions and inclusions, as well as naming subs on the field.

Some teams have quite strong biases for some positions, but these wash out in the overall stats.  In order to be meaningful you have to look on a team by team basis.

The full list follows – I’ve highlighted biases.

I’ve used this information to pick 2 potential green vested players in each team for the last 10 rounds (in order to avoid naming them in my starting 22).  So far my success rate is 55% for 22 man squads, and 48% for 25 man squads.

I’m still in 3 grand finals this week, I lost 2 prelims last week (don’t get me started on Puopolo and Riewoldt).

Good luck everyone,

Nix