Herbie Matthews played 191 games for South Melbourne from 1932-45. He was club captain from 1938-45, including 1939 as captain-coach, and later coached the club from 1954-57.

He won five club best and fairest awards in 1936, ’37, ’39, ’40 and ‘43, won the club’s first Brownlow Medal in 1940, was runner-up in the Brownlow in 1937 and 1941, third in 1936 and eighth in 1939.

He was a member of the 1933 premiership side and losing grand final sides in 1934, ’35 and ‘36, is a member of the Swans Team of the Century and a Legend in the Swans Hall of Fame.

Matthews will always find his way into any conversation about the club’s all-time greats – and a couple of stats where he tops the charts above every one of the other 1413 Swans players.

The 177cm wingman/centreman averaged 0.86 Brownlow Medal votes per game. Or almost eight votes in every nine games.

Among players who have played a minimum 50 games, the only five players ahead of him on this list at the start of the 2018 season were Fitzroy’s three-time Brownlow winner Haydn Bunton (1.04), current Fremantle captain Nat Fyfe (0.98), former Essendon ruckman and Brownlow Medallist Graham Moss (0.95), St Kilda centreman Harold Bray (0.88) and current Geelong star Patrick Dangerfield (0.87).

This figure is calculated on votes received as a percentage of games played in which votes were awarded on a 3-2-1 basis. No finals, and no games at all from 1942-45, when voting was suspended due to World War II.

To put it into perspective, Skilton, a triple winner of the game’s highest individual honour, averaged 0.76 votes per game, having polled 180 votes from 236 eligible games. He ranks 16^th all-time.

Matthews, who polled 32 votes to share the 1940 Brownlow with Collingwood’s Des Fothergill, also sits equal fourth with Fothergill and St Kilda’s Robert Harvey on the list of medal votes in any one season.

After the two-umpires votes of 1976-77 are halved for comparison purposes, only Richmond’s 2017 winner Dustin Martin (36 votes), Geelong’s 2016 winner Dangerfield (35 votes) and Collingwood’s 2011 winner Dane Swan (34 votes) have polled more.

Not insignificantly, too, Martin and Dangerfield played 22 games and Swan 21 in their medal years. In 1940 Matthews and Fothergill each played only 18 games.

Under the 3-2-1 voting system, the 1.78 votes per game of Matthews and Fothergill in 1940 has been bettered only by Essendon’s Dick Reynolds when he averaged 1.80  votes per game to win the second of his three medals in 1937.

In 1925, in the second year of the Brownlow when only one vote was awarded in each game, St Kilda’s Colin Watson polled nine votes in 15 games. On an adjusted basis he is credited with 1.80 votes per game.

Sadly, there are no records of the Matthews/Fothergill round-by-round voting in 1940 to allow comparisons with Martin’s record 11 three-vote rankings last year, or the nine three-vote rankings of Dangerfield in 2016 and Fyfe in 2015.

Similarly, there can be no comparison with Dangerfield’s record 15 polling games in 2016, or the 14- polling games of Martin last year, Swan in 2011 and Harvey in 1998.

Any faint hope Matthews might have privately known these numbers and may have passed them on were lost on this day 18 years ago, on 8 June 1990, when Matthews passed away. He was 76.

But Matthews lived just long enough for the AFL in 1989 to rectify an extraordinary wrong of 1940, when he and Fothergill were presented with cheap replica Brownlow medals after they had tied in the vote-count, each playing 18 games.

This injustice had followed a three-way tie of 1930 between Richmond’s Stan Judkins, Footscray’s Allan Hopkins and Collingwood’s Harry Collier, when the medal was presented to Judkins because he had played fewer games.

With officials unable to split Matthews and Fothergill in the same way the original medal was retained by the League.

It wasn’t until 1989, nine months before Matthews’ death, that he and Fothergill, plus Hopkins and Collier, were presented with the genuine item from then AFL chief commissioner Ross Oakley.

Having retired with wife Rita to Apollo Bay on the south-west coast of Victoria, Matthews, whose son Herbie Junior played 82 games for South from 1964-69 after 20 games with Melbourne in 1961-64, was in good spirits despite walking with the aid of a cane.

In a delightful interview with Channel Seven’s Sandy Roberts that can be seen on YouTube, Matthews confirmed how throughout his career “to get fit and stay fit” he would run from his home in Fairfield to South Melbourne for training every Tuesday and Thursday. According to modern records, it was about 12km each way.

He also took great delight in confirming that as Swans captain he took very seriously his job of getting the best out of his players. “Yes, I was a talker,” he said. “I had to make sure they were doing their best and to get the best out of them I used my voice.

“If they didn’t go they knew. I didn’t pull any punches. No matter who they were if they pulled out or didn’t go for the ball I used to give it to them.”

Swans old-timers say that was Matthews to a tee. Blessed with great pace, stamina and skill, and a beautiful high mark for a player of his size, he was as committed as any Swans player.

And yet history says things could so easily have worked out very differently.

He was the son of Herb ‘Butcher’ Matthews, who played one game for South Melbourne in 1914, 13 games for Richmond in 1915, 50 games for Melbourne from 1919-22 and a further 31 games for South in 1923-24, when he partnered the great Roy Cazaly in the South ruck division.

But the young prodigy had moved from the family home in South Melbourne to live with his grandparents in Fairfield, not far from Collingwood’s Victoria Park headquarters, and was heavily targeted by the Magpies.

Happily for South fans, he chose the club where his father had started and finished his career, and debuted at 18 in Round 1, 1932. He was one of four Swans debutants in a 20-point win over Melbourne at South Melbourne – and the best. The other three debutants that day played a total of eight games – Alick Black (1), Roy Selleck (3) and Herb Boschen (4).

Similarly, at the other end of the ‘if only …’ debate, Matthews, also a handy district cricketer with South Melbourne, could easily have been more than just a one-time Brownlow Medallist.

In 1936 he polled 20 votes to finish third in the medal behind Fitzroy’s Dinny Ryan (26) and Geelong’s Reg Hickey (21). In 1937 he polled 23 votes to finish second behind Essendon’s Reynolds (27). And in 1941 he polled 22 votes to finish second behind Footscray’s Norm Ware (23).

With Skilton, who won the medal three times and was third once, Matthews is the only Swans player to have finished top four more than twice.

Also, with five top 10 finishes, Matthews ranks third among Swans players in this category behind Skilton, who finished top 10 a staggering nine times, and Adam Goodes, who in addition to two medal wins in 2003 and 2006 was six times was in the top 10.

Matthews’ career vote tally of 117 sees him ranked fourth among Swans players behind Skilton (180), Goodes (160) and 1949 winner Bill Clegg (121), and ahead of 1995 winner Paul Kelly (103) and Dan Hanneberry (100).

Included in the AFL Hall of Fame in the second intake in 1997, Matthews was chosen in 2003 on the wing of the Swans Team of the Century, completing a centreline of Matthews, Greg Williams and David Murphy.

He was an inaugural inductee to the Swans Hall of Fame in 2009, and in 2015 he became the club’s fifth Hall of Fame Legend alongside Skilton, Kelly, Bob Pratt and Peter Bedford. In 2016 Clegg became the sixth Legend, and in 2017 Peter Burns, the game’s first superstar from the pre-VFL era in the late 1880’s, became the seventh Legend.