The Green & Gold Rugby Wallaby Player of the Year award has entered its sixth year and continues to be the premier, and largest, fan-driven player award in Australian Rugby. Forget your generic “Fan Favourite” award, this one is not a popularity contest but rather the culmination of a match-by-match analysis for each Wallaby Test in a calendar year. After each Test our highly knowledgeable (passionate, engaged, verbose etc) forum members provide their 3-2-1s. That is, their best three players for the Wallabies in that Test, providing us an overall top three players for each match. Adding these final scores together gives us the answer to the ultimate question – just who has been our choice as the best performing Wallaby each year.
A quick history of the award is below.
2009 – George Smith
2010 – David Pocock
2011 – Will Genia
2012 – Michael Hooper
2013 – Scott Fardy
A review of the past winners goes to show two things. First, that our readers are a fair judge of performance and, secondly, George Smith and David Pocock got absolutely dudded when it came to their prize. A certificate? Really? But as I am sure they will acknowledge, its the recognition not the reward that counts.
So let’s get to it. Who was our G&GR Wallaby Player of the Year for 2014?