A little bit of history... 

Going back many decades, it wasn’t commonplace to have joint winners of your annual Best & Fairest awards. If multiple players finished tied on votes, then the winner would be determined by a countback – whoever had the most best-on-ground performances would be named the winner, despite one or more others finishing on the same number of total votes.

Over the years, the countback system was widely abolished and multiple winners instead declared. Many clubs and leagues also chose to award retrospective wins to those players who’d tied for a best and fairest but weren’t declared winners due to a countback. The AFL did this, awarding a number of Brownlow Medals retrospectively to players who had lost them on a countback.

It was recently brought to our attention that we had an example of this at Mulgrave. In 1980, Gary Tucker won our Senior Best and Fairest, with Gary Winterton polling the same number of votes overall, but placing second after a countback.

With countbacks since abolished and multiple instances of joint B&F winners since, the club thought it was appropriate to put this right and officially recognise Gary Winterton as the joint winner of the 1980 Senior Best & Fairest. Our records will be updated to reflect this.

Part of the Winterton clan of fairly handy footballers, Gary played 80 senior games for Mulgrave from 1977 to 1980, including our 1979 senior premiership.

So it’s a few years late, but congrats Gary on your Best & Fairest!