Australian Football

Jeffrey Pash came from a football, and more particularly a North Adelaide, background, as both of his uncles, Norman and Harold, played with distinction for the club for over a decade, with Norman also representing South Australia. After playing amateur football for a couple of years, Jeff Pash followed in his uncles’ footsteps by lining up with the red and whites against Port Adelaide at Alberton in the opening league match of the 1938 season. It was not a winning start, as the Magpies edged home by 17 points, but the 22-year-old Pash served notice that he was destined for an illustrious league career with a performance full of guile, adroitness and vim. 

He went on to win North’s best and fairest award that year, a success he repeated after an even more auspicious 1939 season which also saw him land South Australian football’s most celebrated individual award, the Magarey Medal. Pash actually tied for the award in the first instance with West Adelaide’s Ray McArthur, whereupon the SANFL conducted a poll among all of the field umpires who had officiated in at least one match involving each player as a means of determining the winner. That winner was Pash, but almost 60 years later the SANFL awarded retrospective Magarey Medals to all players who had originally lost either on a countback or by means of a vote of some kind, including McArthur.

Jeff Pash’s league career was interrupted from 1941 to 1943 when he had to move to Port Augusta because of teaching commitments, but in 1944 he resumed with the Norwood-North Adelaide combined team that won that year’s flag. The resumption of full-scale league football the following year saw Pash, playing mainly across half forward or on a wing, continuing where he had left off five years earlier, albeit in a team that tended to struggle. In 1948 it seemed his career was as good as over as, aged 32, his form deteriorated and he was dropped to North’s Association team (effectively its reserves). 

However, following the appointment of former team mate Ken Farmer as coach in 1949 Pash was given another chance, on which he seized with great tenacity and eagerness. In what proved to be a dream finale to his career, he played his best and most consistent football since his Magarey Medal win to help the club to its first flag for almost two decades. In the Grand Final against West Torrens he was moved from a half forward flank into the centre when the game still hung in the balance and provided a match-winning lift to his team that enabled it to pull away to win by a deceptively comfortable margin of 23 points. Jeff Pash, in his final game of league football, was most observers’ choice as the best player afield, although in those days there was no Jack Oatey Medal with which to reward him.

Once his football career - which included four interstate appearances for South Australia - was over Pash continued to provide sterling service to the sport he loved as a football writer for ‘The News’. From 1950 to 1964 his eloquent and informed commentaries on the game delighted football supporters of all persuasions, and the summary of his writings that was recently published as The Pash Papers arguably constitutes the most important and certainly one of the most vividly evocative appraisals of the game in South Australia during that particular era.

Author - John Devaney