Jeremy McGovern retires as one of the West Coast Eagles' all-time greats

Australia Broadcast Center

20-06-2025

Jeremy McGovern's footy career was a long-odds bet to begin with.
McGovern, the son of former Fremantle player Andrew McGovern, was taken with pick 44 in the 2011 rookie draft.
The chances of him playing 197 games, winning a flag and earning five All-Australian blazers would have been, at best, very slim.
Then-Eagles recruitment boss Trevor Woodhouse admits he probably only looked at the kid from North Albany because of his surname, and decided to roll the dice.
"I think back then it was probably easier to just take some speculative rookies, I don't think the scrutiny was on them like it is today," Woodhouse told Fox Sports.
McGovern sat on the Eagles' rookie list for three years without playing an AFL game.
Then, in early 2014 at the age of 21, he sat crying in a meeting with new Eagles coach Adam Simpson and an assortment of club staff, fearing the worst.
He had relaxed a little too thoroughly during an off-season trip to Phuket and returned in sub-elite condition.
McGovern's footy career looked over before it began.
"They were talking about ripping contracts up, which was fair enough," he told the Backchat podcast.
In the era of the AFL ultra-athlete, skin-folds and beep tests, McGovern had a refreshingly old-school frame.
"I'm not the fittest-looking footballer," he once said.
That 2014 meeting resulted in him being sent away to train on his own, and after regaining his condition and stringing some solid performances together for East Perth at WAFL level, he was selected to make his senior debut against Carlton in round six.
Two years later he was an All-Australian, the first of five blazers he would earn.
McGovern's greatest strength was his ability to read the play, and the flight of the ball through the air, better than just about anybody else.
It's a trait he traces back to his boyhood, playing footy with Indigenous kids on a red-dirt oval in the remote community of Warburton, about 1,500 kilometres from Perth.
"Every now and then, I'd sit back and watch how the Indigenous boys up there played footy," he told The Age.
"I'd try to mimic how they were doing it. They were so good. They're just natural footballers up there. They don't get taught.
"[They] probably had the best judgement I've seen.
"That's where I started reading the ball."
It was a trait he used to help the Eagles repel opposition attacks, and begin their own, for more than a decade.
The term "intercept mark" should be renamed a "Gov", given all he's done to popularise the term.
Where coaches of a bygone era might have exhorted him to punch, McGovern's vision and magnetic hands offered West Coast the perfect way of turning defence into attack.
It was a trait he used to brilliant effect in the frantic final stages of the 2018 grand final.
With less than three minutes to play, he read Adam Treloar's kick inside Collingwood's 50, peeled off his man and planted his knee in Brody Mihocek shoulder to mark, kick-starting one of the most famous grand final moments — up there with Wayne Harmes's knock back, or Matthew Scarlett's toe poke.
"What a player," Bruce McAvaney said of him as it happened, and McAvaney has seen plenty.
If reading the play was McGovern's best trait, his courage was not far behind.
He needed six painkilling injections to play in that grand final, after he tore his oblique muscles during the preliminary final against Melbourne the week before.
Then, during the game, his ribs were cracked.
Speaking after the match about the ordeal he had endured in the week leading up to the biggest day of his football career, McGovern offered a sore smile and said: "You've got to love your footy."
The site of a banged-up McGovern hauling himself up off the ground after bone-jarring collisions became routine over the years for West Australian football fans.
Just when you thought his day was surely over, he would shrug off a trainer and throw himself into the fray again.
Now, after the latest in what the club has described as "multiple concussions" over his career, McGovern has been advised to retire on medical grounds.
When his case was referred to the AFL's "concussion panel", the writing was on the wall.
With the spectre of lawsuits from former players who played after head knocks hovering over the league, it seemed unlikely the panel would advise anything else.
With a long life to be lived after football, and many more memories to be made off-field, he has read the play here just as well as he did throughout a wonderful career, painful though it may be.
The West Coast Eagles have produced defensive greats like Glen Jakovich, Ashley McIntosh and Darren Glass, and Jeremy McGovern more than belongs in that illustrious company.
When it comes to all-time Eagles greats, he is in the very top tier.
WA footy will be poorer without him patrolling the half-back line, watching his man, but always with one eye scanning ahead reading the play.