Australian Football

As one of the oldest country football clubs in South Australia it should come as no surprise to learn that Kadina boasts a magnificent achievement record. Formed as the Wallaroo Mines Football Club in 1878 it first engaged in formal competition exactly a decade later when it was a foundation member of the Yorke Peninsula Football Association. Its first grand final in 1899 was lost in unusual circumstances in that the victorious side, Wallaroo, did not register a single goal, winning 0.13 (13) to 1.4 (10).

The club was not to achieve premiership success until 1908, which also happened to be its last season as Wallaroo Mines. The following year saw Kadina taking to the field for the first time and the name change appears to have provided the spark needed to elevate the club to a new level. Over the ensuing four seasons Kadina shared one premiership with Moonta Mines Turks and won the other three outright. Further progress was interrupted by world war one but after the war the club quickly re-established itself as a force, contesting seven out of ten grand finals during the 1920s, and emerging victorious from five of them. By the time the YPFA went into recess in 1941 because of the second world war the Bloods had added another five flags to emphasise their status as, beyond question, the competition’s pre-eminent force.

Kadina continued to compete in the YPFA until 1965, adding another quintet of senior grade premierships. The club’s achievements over the past four decades, both in the Yorke Valley Football League and, from 1995, in the Yorke Peninsula Football League have been rather less noteworthy, but the club’s overall feat of claiming a flag every four years over the course of a complete century entitles it to be regarded as one of Australia’s genuinely great grassroots sporting organisations.

The twenty-eighth and most recent of these flags was obtained in 2017 courtesy of an 11.8 (74) to 9.8 (62) grand final defeat of CMS Crows following which, astonishingly, the Bloodhounds plummeted to the wooden spoon in 2018.