Sam Mitchell, Hawthorn's midfield distributor, is winning rave reviews. Martin Blake reports on the man known variously as the Extractor and the New Diesel.

The New Diesel was feeling a little uncomfortable with the sobriquet this week.

Which is not to say that Sam Mitchell, a Mooroolbark boy who grew up watching Robert Harvey and his beloved St Kilda playing at Waverley Park, doesn't understand what it is to be compared with the great Greg Williams, dual Brownlow medallist and hall-of-famer.

It's just that Mitchell could do without the fuss. Interview requests piled up at Hawthorn this week after his 39 disposals and record 18 clearances against Collingwood prompted the Magpies' coach, Mick Malthouse, to draw the Williams comparison.

But in truth, Malthouse was not the first to see the similarity. Todd Viney, Hawthorn's midfield coach and the man working most closely with Mitchell this year, has been saying it for weeks; even was quoted as saying it in the newspaper a while back. To Viney, it is Mitchell's ability to work in traffic, employing clean hands, that makes him a modern-day version of the great Williams.

"He's got a long way to go before he's in 'Diesel's' class," Viney said last week. "But he's got the same ability to read the ball off the hands. I remember playing on Diesel and you'd be right on his jumper, but he'd still find the footy. It's a freakish ability to read the fall of the ball."

Peter Schwab, the former Hawthorn coach, thought the comparison fair. "He's probably the first player since Diesel who plays like him and who's as prolific at feeding the ball out by hand," said Schwab. "The level Sam needs to go to if he's to be compared with Williams is to kick some more goals and I think Diesel was a better mark, and arguably a better kick. But Sam's as good at winning the ball and feeding it out by hand."

Mitchell actually would like it all to go away. "It's a nice thing to have said about you," he said, "but at the end of my career, if that's the way I'm looked at, I don't think I've achieved what I want from my career. I'd like to be looked at as (having) my own career. To be compared to someone like that is a nice thing. He's a guy I looked up to growing up, so it's a nice thought. But it's not something I'd like to last for too long."

Mitchell is now in to $12 for the Brownlow Medal, on the fourth line of betting behind the likes of Ben Cousins, Matthew Pavlich and Mark Ricciuto, big names all. It is heady territory for a 22-year-old who was not even drafted to the AFL when he first made himself eligible in 2000. It is also proof that he has made substantial strides with those short legs.

Mitchell, just 178 centimetres, is evidence for the conservatives in the debate about football's modern obsession with athleticism. He is a footballer first of all, and has been an "inside" player from the time he first laced on a boot, by necessity.

"I had to get a game somehow, and that's been the way I had to do it," he says. "I've got a low centre of gravity and I've got no legs. So that (working inside) is how I find myself in the side. If I didn't do that, I wouldn't get a game. I'm not built for the wide-open spaces as much as some other players."

It is no secret that it was lack of leg-speed that turned off the recruiters at the 2000 national draft, despite Mitchell's two best-and-fairest awards at Eastern Ranges in the TAC Cup. Disappointed, he went to the VFL with Box Hill in 2001, playing in a premiership.

He never despaired. "Pre-season that year in VFL was tough when I thought I could have been with an AFL club," he says. "But (then Box Hill coach) Donald McDonald looked after me and I got drafted at the end of that year. Plenty of guys have done it harder than me. They've done two, three, four years out of the system before they got drafted."

By the end of the 2001 season, McDonald was badgering Hawthorn to give Mitchell a chance. Yet even then, it was not cut and dried. The Hawks took Daniel Elstone with their first pick.

As Schwab recalls, there was debate about whether Mitchell would be required. "I was concerned about his pace," says Schwab. "We took Elstone and he was an inside player and there was a debate about whether we needed another similar type. We always thought he (Mitchell) could play, but it was about whether we needed his type of player. Thankfully, we took him."

Mitchell went at No. 36 in the draft, a bargain if ever there was one. He played almost half the 2002 season for Hawthorn under Schwab, and in 11 VFL games at Box Hill won the Liston Trophy for the league's best and fairest, an amazing achievement. In 2004, he became a midfield regular for Schwab, finishing sixth in the Hawks' best and fairest and becoming the club's No. 1 hard-ball winner.

But this year has been something else again. "He's become the best inside player in the AFL," says Schwab. "To be fair, he's worked on his athleticism and his strength, and he's made himself better."

Mitchell is a driven footballer whose achievements are due to toil on the training track and in the gymnasium as much as natural talent. His ability to stand up in a tackle is out of the ordinary, for he can shrug a tackler like Robert Harvey in his pomp, rolling the shoulders and moving clear.

After playing on Mitchell last weekend, Collingwood's Paul Licuria commented on how hard the Hawk was to shift off the football once he had his nose over it, and Western Bulldogs veteran Scott West will find out a little about this today. (West had 36 disposals and three Brownlow votes against Mitchell early last season, so there is an element of the old guard-new guard about their duel today).

Mitchell is averaging 27 disposals, up with the best in the league, and is second in clearances, despite missing round one through suspension. Out of contract and currently in talks with the club, he is about to command his first big-number salary, at least $300,000 a year by some market estimates.

It is his work at stoppages that is most valuable. Some years ago, clubs realised it was not the number of tap-outs that counted, but what happened on the ground. As it happens, Hawthorn is leading the tap-outs this year, thanks to Peter Everitt, but it is the ability of the likes of Mitchell and Luke Hodge to take it away from the scrimmages that is more significant.

Says Schwab: "It's phenomenal, really. I know Everitt helps him enormously, but they just can't stop him this year. He's so hard to tackle and he always seems to be able to get his hands free to get the ball out."

Mitchell's affinity with Everitt is crucial, and he acknowledges the ruckman's influence. "The more you play together, the better you get at it," he says. "You learn each other's body language, where he likes to hit it, where he's not so keen to hit it. 'Spider' is the premier ruckman in the competition and I'm lucky to play under him."

How important are clearances? Important enough for every club to spend hours every week working on their set plays. Schwab watched Hawthorn's win over Melbourne in round eight convinced the team's superiority at the stoppages had won the game for the Hawks.

"It (clearances) is a huge emphasis for most teams," says Viney. "With the introduction of the new centre circle set-up, the ruckmen can't get a clean hit at it and knock it out of the area. A lot more balls are falling in close and it's more important those inside players read it well and they're strong inside."

There are few secrets to Mitchell's rise into the top echelon. To most people who know him, it is about hunger. "I think his early experiences of trying to get into the system have really become his strength," says Viney. "They've made him hungry. His dedication to get himself physically and mentally right is as good as I've seen."

It's a notion Mitchell doesn't dismiss. "Some guys get it handed to them on a platter and it doesn't mean as much to them. I had to soldier on a bit longer than other people, but if I'd been drafted straight away, I probably wouldn't have developed as far as I have now. Although it was a bit slower, I think it's been a benefit for me now I'm older.

"It's true that I played against men (in the VFL). But the most important thing I learned is that once you get drafted, you're not finished, you're not done. All the work's ahead of you."