Who would you rather in your side – Gavin Urqhart or Scott Pendlebury?

I know.

Stupid question huh. But one that was once asked on the North board of BigFooty. And I’m sad to say deluded fools like me thought it was a question with an element of plausibility.

Reading back on that thread is toe-curling, like listening to a recording of yourself calling up a girl’s house when you were 14.

I’m not going to talk any more about Gav Urqhart because quite frankly, for his name to appear in the same sentence as Scott Pendlebury’s is an insult to the Collingwood gun.

It is hard to say Pendlebury is the best player in the competition at the moment because the roles of many players have become so specialised. And there’s a bloke called Lance Franklin at Hawthorn.

I would say that Pendlebury is the best pure midfielder going. He can do the inside stuff, he can do the outside thing, he kicks goals, he runs beautifully, he’s excellent overhead and he does all the one per cent stuff.

But the most impressive quality about Pendlebury is his footy intelligence. He instinctively runs to the right place every time. He takes the right option. He’s creative too – he thinks in a 360 degree full spectrum kind of way that only the truly elite do.

People like to put this down to his basketball background but I think that’s a bit of a stretch. Todd Goldstein and Jack Watts played a lot basketball at a very high level and I don’t think it comes through in their footy. Pendlebury is simply a top line footballer and sportsman in general.

The terrifying thing is that he looks to be improving still. Against Hawthorn, he looked like he’d gone up a notch from last year where Dane Swan is obviously working at a 100 per cent just to stay where he is. This is no sledge on Swan, he’s a gun, but you get the feeling we’re seeing his best ever right now where with Pendles, the best is yet to come.

Now, where was I? I That’s right, must get back to that “Who will be better: Ben Warren or Jack Riewoldt” thread from just after the 2006 draft.

And start deleting everything I wrote.