Opinion
When Joel Selwood announced his retirement after captaining Geelong to the 2022 premiership, he certainly left the game as a highly decorated and respected champion. He played 21 of the possible 25 games in 2022, but these were enough to add to his already impressive chronicle of achievements:
Firstly, as a member of an extremely talented generation of footballers, the Selwood brothers – twins Adam and Troy, Joel, Scott – played a total of 786 games of football, an all-time record.
At the start of the season Selwood was only two games behind Carlton’s Stephen Kernahan as the player who had played the most games as captain of a VFL/AFL team. He now holds the record at 245 games.
Another stat Selwood appears in prominently is most career wins. Geelong won 17 of the 21 games he played in 2022, taking his overall wins total to 259, higher than anyone except three of the five players who played over 400 games, those being Michael Tuck, Shaun Burgoyne and Kevin Bartlett.
It also meant that he holds the record for the most wins at his football club along with three of his long-time opponents: David Mundy (Fremantle), Travis Boak (Port Adelaide) and Shannon Hurn (West Coast Eagles).
Games-wise, Selwood finished his career on 355 games, a record for the Cats. Sitting in second position is Corey Enright, who retired in 2016, but lurking behind him in third position in Tom Hawkins, who started his career in the same season as Selwood (2007) and is the same age (34). Hawkins has already signalled his intention to play on next year but sits 28 games behind Selwood, so he would need to play into 2024 to claim the title.
Selwood played all of his games in the No. 14 guernsey originally made famous by South Melbourne’s triple Brownlow medalist Bob Skilton (1958-1971), and he holds the AFL record for the greatest number of games in that jumper. He is not alone, as 2022 contemporaries Jack Riewoldt (Richmond, No. 8), Scott Pendlebury (Collingwood, No. 10), David Mundy (Fremantle, No. 16), Shannon Hurn (West Coast, No. 25), Tom Hawkins (Geelong, No. 26), Mark Blicavs (Geelong, No. 46) and Ben Brown (Melbourne, No. 50) also are record holders for their number.
Joel Selwood certainly made his mark on the AFL and will appear in the record books in a number of ways for generations to come, but for other reasons the retirement of another champion needs to be acknowledged for his contribution to the game.
As I mentioned at the start of the article, Joel Selwood represented part of a family that has had a significant impact on the AFL for the past two decades, but Josh Kennedy was part of a football dynasty that started in 1950 when John Kennedy Sr ran onto the ground to represent Hawthorn for the first time. It was in Round 1 against Geelong, and he played every one of the 18 home-and-away games for that season, which was memorable only for Hawthorn failing to win any games. He went on to play 164 games for the brown and gold.
Twenty years after his retirement he was followed by John Jnr, who played 241 games for the club.
In 2008 Josh was recruited by the club but let go two years later in what ex-coach Alastair Clarkson admits was one of their bigger mistakes. Another 277 games followed at Sydney and, as a result, an impressive record of father-son and grandfather-grandson games was created.
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