Australian Football

Audaciously talented, and well ahead of his time in terms of tactical acumen and nouse, Jack Broadstock almost certainly failed to achieve anything like as much as he ought to have done in the game he loved. Part of this failure was attributable to the war, which coincided with the peak years of his career, but Broadstock's temperament also played a part. In 1947, for example, according to West Adelaide skipper Johnny Taylor, "West was the first SA team to develop handball as an attacking weapon - and Broadstock was the king-pin"² but a needless altercation with Port Adelaide ruckman Bob McLean in the preliminary final led to his missing the club's first Grand Final victory in twenty years. Accused of hacking by boundary umpire Aplin, he was found guilty by the Tribunal, and handed a three-match suspension

Broadstock actually had three separate stints with West, playing a total of 62 games over eight seasons, the first of which was in 1938, and the last, as captain-coach, in 1950. From 1943 to 1946 he played for Richmond, and was centreman in the club's 1943 Grand Final defeat of Essendon. Although he only played 33 VFL games for the Tigers, he did enough to persuade Jack Dyer that he "was the most talented footballer I have ever seen".³

Many others shared this vaunted opinion of Broadstock's prowess, including Jeff Pash, who during his first year as a football journalist, and Broadstock's last as a league player, wrote of him that:

Jack Broadstock can be taken as a very good example of a player who moves with perfect balance. He is so well poised that changes in his movements are effected with lightning rapidity. He can change direction, kick, or handball equally quickly. Knowing to the full the value of sudden immobility, he is the present expert in the art of throwing opponents off balance.⁴

In 1948, Broadstock spent the early part of the season with West Torrens, before accepting the position of captain-coach of GNFL club Boulder City, whom he promptly steered to a premiership. The 1949 season saw him once more at West Torrens, and he was a major driving force behind the side's reaching that season's Grand Final. In the preliminary final defeat of Norwood he produced a truly virtuoso display that made it seem he was playing football on a different level to everybody else, but a pulled thigh muscle badly hampered his performance in the Grand Final and Torrens went under to North Adelaide. The following year saw Broadstock heading back to West Adelaide for one last season in the "big time".

The peripatetic nature of much of his career, coupled with the inimical impact of war in terms of the number of games he managed to play overall, have led to Jack Broadstock being accorded a somewhat less prominent place in football's unofficial "Hall of fame" than he perhaps deserves. He was one of those inordinately rare individuals who possessed the ability to turn a match on its head almost single-handedly - something Jack Dyer saw him do for South Australia against the Vics on one occasion, for example. 

He also played a significant, if largely uncredited role, in pushing South Australian football down an avenue later explored more thoroughly, and with greater ostensible success, by the likes of Jack Oatey; an avenue in which constant, fluent movement of the ball, by hand as much as by foot, was pivotal. Perhaps future generations will accord him greater credence and approbation, but you would have to be very brave indeed to bet on it.

Author - John Devaney