Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 11 September
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Before that One Day in September, before the face-paint’s applied and the Grand Final Breakfast’s eaten, before the blue carpet and the WAGs and football’s night of nights … is it possible that we need to just take a moment? Because we’re not 100% sure that old Chas Brownlow’s idea of ‘fairest and best’ means exactly the same thing in 2013.
Best on ground is all well and good, but footy used to be more about pep-talks than peptides. What are the real measures of greatness: in the players and the clubs, the coaches and the administrators, the umpires and the fans. If we’re nominating champions across the game, shouldn’t we be factoring in on- and off-field performance in equal measure?
The irrepressible Sam Pang will chair a panel of footy experts including Age journalists Tim Lane and Jake Niall, and star coach Peta Searle.
Featuring
Jake Niall
Jake Niall is a senior sports writer at the Age, specialising in AFL football.
Jake joined the Age in 1998, having previously worked as a sports writer on the Sunday Age. He writes a blend of news, feature articles and a weekly column during the football season.
Before joining the Sunday Age, Jake was a freelance reporter in the US and a regular contributor to the Sunday Age and the Age from Los Angeles, covering diverse areas like politics, earthquakes, celebrity trials and American sport. Jake ghost wrote the autobiography (Collingwood and Me, 1991) of champion Collingwood footballer Peter Daicos.
While he writes primarily about the AFL, he spends the month of January covering tennis, especially the Australian Open. In 2008, Jake won the Melbourne Press Club Quill Awards' Best Sports Story in any medium for his profile piece on David Schwarz.
Peta Searle
Peta Searle is an Australian Rules football coach. The Port Melbourne assistant coach to Gary Ayers during the team’s 2012 VFL title defence, she was subsequently named head coach for the Western Bulldogs Women’s team.
Searle’s football coaching pathway is filled with firsts. She was the first Victorian Women’s Football League (VWFL) coach to coach a team (Darebin Falcons) to five consecutive Premier Final wins; the first female coach in the TAC with the Western Jets; the first head coach of the AFL Victoria VWFL Academy Coach/Mentor and the first female to coach in the VFL.
She has put on hold her assistant principal role at a Melbourne based secondary college (as a PE teacher majoring in Biomechanics) to focus on her two young children – as well as to give coaching at the highest level her full attention.
Sam Pang
Sam Pang is a writer, presenter and broadcaster. His television credits include the hugely popular Santo, Sam and Ed’s Cup Fever and SBS’s coverage of The Eurovision Song Contest.
2012 sees Sam co-hosting Santo, Sam and Ed’s Sports Fever on Channel 7 and will also be seen in Agony Uncles on ABC1.
Previously, he hosted the history based comedy quiz show, ADbc, and for the past 3 years he has been the co-host of SBS’s coverage of The Eurovision Song Contest. In 2011 he was a creative consultant and writer for the The Marngrook Footy Show on ABC2.
Sam’s work in radio has seen him work for a variety of stations including Triple R, 3AW, ABC and Radio National.
In 2010 he was named in The Age Magazine as one of Melbourne’s Top 100 most influential, inspirational and creative people for the year.
Tim Lane
Tim Lane has been broadcasting and writing about sport for more than 40 years. He spent three decades with the ABC covering football and international cricket, and worked at five Olympic Games. Today, he writes a weekly column for the Sunday Age and continues to broadcast AFL games and cricket on 3AW.