2015 was a massive year for Australian Rugby. Probably the biggest since the creation of Green and Gold Rugby. Certainly it was the Wallabies’ most succesful year. Coach Michael Cheika had them pumped and firing which saw a number of wonderful team performances against the likes of the All Blacks, England and Wales. But there were plenty of exceptional individual performers as well and the readers of GAGR were paying close attention. Every test.
For the seventh successive year, the readers of Green and Gold Rugby have banded together to determine our GAGR Wallaby Player of the Year. In what must be the biggest fan driven Player of the Year award in the country, based on performance, we can now announce our 2015 winner.
But first, a little bit about the process.
After every Wallaby test match, over in the forum, our readers provide their old school for 3-2-1’s for that game. That is, they declare their top three performing Wallabies with the best getting 3 points, 2nd best getting 2 points and the third best getting 1 point.
Finally at the end of the match voting (it usually stops by about the Thursday following a weekend test) we accumulate the votes and come up with the three highest point-getters. They are then assigned the 3-2-1 for that test and kept in a spreadsheet, which accumulates the points across the season.
Then come season end, sometime after the November tests (or the Rugby World Cup in this situation), we name our winner of the largest fan-driven player award in Australian Rugby.
Our readers have time and again showed extreme astuteness in their selections with the list of winners undeniably at the top of their class in Australian rugby.
Previous winners have been as follows:
2009 – George Smith
2010 – David Pocock
2011 – Will Genia
2012 – Michael Hooper
2013 – Scott Fardy
2014 – James Slipper
So how did 2015 pan out? Let’s look back at the season test match by test match as we count down to find out the 2015 GAGR Wallaby Player of the Year.
