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Midfield prodigy Patrick Cripps was a surprising omission from the 40-man All Australian squad this week. The Carlton midfield behemoth is playing in the lofty shadow of fellow 2013 draftee Marcus Bontempelli.
At just 20 years of age, the Western Bulldogs playmaker is the sixth-best player in the competition, according to the official AFL player ratings.
Bontempelli this week finished fourth in the AFL Coaches Association’s Player of the Year award, and is widely considered to be a lock for the All Australian team.
He and Cripps likely will win their respective clubs’ best and fairest awards, with Cripps set to earn that honour for the second straight year. Few players in AFL-VFL history can have secured the gong by the age of 21.
What makes Cripps’ feat even more incredible is that he played only three games in his debut season, due largely to a broken leg. In his first proper season of AFL last year, he announced himself as a contested-ball goliath.
Exploiting his 194cm frame, he immediately began to lord it over opponents at the stoppages, averaging 6.6 clearances a game. His brutish power struck me as extraordinary for such a young player.
This year, Cripps has been even more monstrous in close, with an astonishing 8.8 clearances a game, well clear of the next best player, Sydney’s Josh Kennedy (7.8).
To put into context just how phenomenal that stat is, of footballers who have played at least 20 games in a AFL season, only one has ever averaged more clearances per game in a season.
That man was fellow Blue Brett Ratten, who was probably the best clearance player I’ve ever seen. In 1999 Ratten hoarded a jaw-dropping 265 clearances, at a rate of 10.19 a game, and is still the only player ever to exceed 200 in a season.
Cripps would have broken 200 this year if his team had played finals, and they may well get there next season, even if the Blues don’t figure in September.
Much is made of Cripps’ size advantage at the stoppages, and there’s no doubt it is significant. But he also reads the ball off the palms of ruckmen remarkably well. So well that it doesn’t matter.
Carlton have an average ruck division. For example, take the Round 22 clash against Melbourne and their expected All-Australian ruckman Max Gawn. Cripps continually sharked Gawn’s taps en route to a game-high 12 clearances, which he coupled with 13 tackles in a best-on ground display.
As the match wore on it was plain to see the frustration of Gawn, who couldn’t understand how his ascendancy in the ruck was being neutered by Cripps. Carlton scored an upset win in that match and Cripps’ clearance wizardry was a major reason.
Where Cripps is a bigger version of Ratten, Bontempelli is a scaled-up James Hird. Ratten and Cripps were stats machines. Bontempelli, like Hird before him, seems to make his possessions count more than most players.
He doesn’t need 30 touches to slice a game open. Bontempelli can play that hybrid midfield-forward role as well as few players since Hird mastered it. Similar to Hird, Bontempelli has a knack for imposing himself on games when it matters most.
So much has been written about Bontempelli already this season, including this piece on Tuesday, that I won’t bother fawning over him any further.
All I know is that were I offered the chance for either he or Cripps to join my club West Coast it would be a very tough decision. Bontempelli might get a lot more headlines than Cripps, but the fans don’t overlook the Blue, as we saw in June when they him the best young player in the competition http://www.afl.com.au/news/2016-06-12/fans-survey-patrick-cripps-and-alastair-clarkson-come-out-on-top
In the end, debates about which sportsman is better than another tend to be tedious. Cripps and Bontempelli are contrasting players and footballers we’ll be fortunate to watch for many seasons to come.