Tony Smith is a senior sports writer for Stuff

OPINION: Shaun Johnson’s snubbing for Dally M player of the year is as vicious a blow as Trevor Chappell’s cricket underarm skulduggery.

It’s another kick in the guts to New Zealand Rugby League from Australian league patricians who owe the very existence of their sport to Kiwi vision.

A generation ago – around the time of the Warriors’ 2002 grand final appearance – this columnist provocatively posited that Stacey Jones had eclipsed Andrew Johns.

“Mate, mate,’’ an Australian replied, rising to the bait like a barramundi to a poppet lure. “Stacey’s a great player, mate, but nobody’s better than Joey. Nobody.’

If we were having that conversation today the Lake Macquarie local’s lament could be reversed: “Kalyn Ponga’s pretty good, e hoa, (Māori dad, you know?). But no one’s been better than SJ this year. Not Nathan Cleary, or Adam Reynolds, or Patrick Carrigan”.

How Johnson could beat Cleary to the best halfback jumper but lose the Dally M by a single vote? The Dally M judges’ jape makes a Kiwi politician’s pledges seem credible by comparison.

Ponga had his standout moments in the Knights’ 10-match unbeaten run to the playoffs, but anyone watching the way the Warriors dispatched Newcastle in the elimination final would have agreed that Johnson was the more influential individual in 2023.

On one level, the Dally M voting system seems fair and transparent. Judges award points each regular season game on a 1-2-3 basis. It’s not simply star-kissing, like so many sport’s season awards.

The format makes it possible for a player from a non-grand final team to win the gong. Penrith are on the brink of a third successive title, yet Manly’s Tom Trjobevic won the Dally M in 2021 and Cronulla’s Nicho Hynes was anointed last year.

But shouldn’t context be considered?

The Warriors wouldn’t have got to the grand final cusp without Johnson at the tiller. Was Ponga necessarily any better at the Knights than centre Bradman Best or wing Dominic Young?

The Warriors, of course, have been here before.

Andrew Johns won the Dally M in 2002 when Jones was jilted despite the Warriors beating the Knights to the J T Giltinan Shield as minor premiers and making their first grand final.

Organised rugby league began in Australia in 1908, after Albert Baskerville and his pioneering 1907-08 swung by Sydney for a game and swiped Wallabies star Dally Messenger.

We might not even have the Dally Ms had the great man remained marooned in rugby union.

Yet these Aussie ingrates have since day dot treated Kiwi rugby league as poor cousins. The NRL Hall of Fame was formed in 2018 with only one Kiwi – Mark Graham – among the first 100 inductees.

It would have been impossible to ignore the New Zealand player of the century, one of the greatest international players of the 1980s, alongside Wally Lewis and Ellery Hanley.

Stacey Jones and Ruben Wiki were only admitted to the cloistered sanctum in the 2019 intake.

What about Gary Freeman, Quentin Pongia or the first Kiwi to make it big in Sydney, Bill Noonan?

You wonder whether Dally M judges are Kiwi blind. The Dally Ms have been around since 1979, yet just three Kiwis have won the prize: Gary Freeman (1992), Jason Taumalolo (shared with Cooper Cronk in 2016) and Roger Tuivasa-Sheck in 2018.

A special award should have been struck for the Warriors this year. Peter V’landys and co have been spouting for years about the debt owed to the Kiwi club for relocating to Australia and keeping the competition afloat during the pandemic.

The fanatical support here since the Warriors’ return home has broadened the NRL’s commercial reach. The Up the Wahs zeitgeist means the Warriors now truly play in a stadium of five million. Every sold-out game is a celebration of Aotearoa working class culture, and the dynamic sport of rugby league itself.

Sometime soon New Zealand will surely have a second NRL team. It was telling that this year’s expansion team, Wayne Bennett’s Dolphins, had to call on 10 New Zealand-born players.

In the meantime Kiwi league fans look forward to the day the Dally M judges take the green-and-gold blinkers off and the Warriors win a maiden crown.