The best-and-fairest player at Collingwood in any one season wins the E.W. Copeland Trophy.
It is a lovely, storied award – originally a shield, now an engraved medal in a display box – that reaches back to the very origins of the foundation club and now carries the names of some of the greatest players to play VFL /AFL football.
One name on it that is not one of the greatest players in the club’s history, nor that of the VFL/AFL, is that which gives the award its name: E.W. Copeland.
The trophy to acknowledge the greatest player for the club in a season is named after an administrator who donated the trophy.
Ernest “Bud” Copeland did a lot for Collingwood as a life-long administrator, a club secretary whose business acumen reportedly helped them survive the depression of the 1890s, to rescue Victoria Park from dilapidation and to grow the Magpies into the fearsome club they became.
It was he who felt the club should do more to honour their best champions, and donated the shield for the club’s best player. He was a working man whom the working-class club rightly should remember and respect, but just not by giving his name to the award that recognises the best-and-fairest player each year.
When – or if, at this rate – football’s Methuselah Scott Pendlebury finally retires, the club should also retire the E.W. Copeland Trophy and rename it the Pendlebury Trophy. The time has come. Collingwood should change, and so should Essendon.
The award for the best player should be in the name of one of the club’s greats. Richmond do it with the Jack Dyer Medal. Carlton, too, with the John Nicholls Medal. But Collingwood, and Essendon with their W.S. Crichton Medal, continue to carry a respected administrator’s name on the best-and-fairest medal.
There is a legitimate place to honour great administrators, but on the award for the best and fairest each year is not it.
Essendon presently have more compelling issues confronting them, like wining games, so this sort of change is not front of mind. At Collingwood, Pendlebury’s games record is absolutely front of mind. It provides the impetus for a change.
It is arguable if Pendlebury is the club’s best-ever player, and not, say, the phenomenal Nathan Buckley, who won a Brownlow and one more Copeland than Pendlebury, or Bob Rose whose brilliance was curtailed by football’s economy of the time, or maybe Len Thompson – another Brownlow medallist and the archetype for modern rucks. And then there’s either of the Coventry brothers – Gordon, the goal-kicking record holder, or Syd, the two-time best-and-fairest winner who was captain when “the Machine” won the four-peat – or Peter Daicos, because you had never seen anything like him.
But the games record now makes for a persuasive case for Pendlebury’s career and what he represented for the club more broadly as a modern Collingwood player.
Pendlebury has won the Copeland Trophy five times. Six more times he’s been runner-up, so in 11 of his 20 completed seasons Pendlebury has been in the best two players at the club. If you add the fact he was third on another three occasions, it stretches to 14 of his 20 seasons – more than two thirds of his career – that he finished in the best three.
Then there are the six All-Australians, the Norm Smith Medal, the four Anzac Medals, of course the two premierships, and he also captained the club more times than any other Collingwood player.
Recency bias is hard to resist in sport, but it should not blind the club to the fact Pendlebury’s achievements span comparison with the entire sweep of the history of the game.
He has now played more VFL/AFL games than anyone else, which is a record that joins his earlier achievements of having had more disposals, tackles, and goal assists than any player to have ever laced up a boot.
These are not facts that should be considered lightly, but what elevates Pendlebury beyond those numbers as a player is what he did for Collingwood in helping them build what they have become as a club. He walked in the footsteps of greats Tony Shaw and Buckley in helping to carry this club to become the behemoth it is today.
Pendlebury, in his time as a player, has been box office. He has been in teams watched by more than 23 million people – more than any player in the history of the game.
If and when 90,000 people turn out on Saturday for a game that would have probably drawn half that were it not for his milestone, it will be the 25th time he has played in front of a crowd of 90,000 or more. About half the games he has played – more than 200 – have been played in front of crowds of more than 50,000.
The club will rightly spend the next months – maybe a year or more if he goes on – working out what to do to properly recognise him when he is done. They will no doubt think about this Copeland renaming idea, maybe naming the high-performance centre or the precinct after him, and maybe building a statue. All are worthy ideas. But they should not be the only ones who should consider what to do to recognise his exceptional career.
On the walk from Jolimont Station to the MCG, you pass statues of Norm Smith, Kevin Bartlett, John Coleman and Jim Stynes. Champions all.
The MCG should consider adding another for the man who, on top of the records above, has played more games on the famous ground, and been watched by more people (and so significantly helped fund the redevelopment of the ground) than any other.
This is not hyperbole. Pendlebury’s achievements defy hyperbole.
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Michael Gleeson is an award-winning senior sports writer specialising in AFL and athletics.Connect via X or email.
