Comment - One remarkable fact is that for many years Essendon’s score was listed as 23-20 (158), four points less than the record highest score by Geelong twelve seasons ago. I do not know when it was altered to 24-19, does anybody else?
Also, University�
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Comment - The game between Collingwood and Essendon was the 31st game where both sides scored three or fewer goals in fifteen VFL seasons. Although scoring had already increased substantially in the previous dozen seasons – from 37 points per team per game t
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Comment - One notable and possibly critical facet of Port’s record 1914 season is that it occurred in a year as dry as recent winters controlled by man-made global warming (regarding which nobody can be permitted to forget that Australia is alongside the Gul
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Comment - Hawthorn’s 1962 case, more than anything, illustrates how much that season was a turning point in VFL/AFL history. In a long-winded way, the modern national competition can be traced to that season.
Between 1937 and 1961, apart from the uncompet
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Comment - One of the striking things is that Footscray – the wealthiest club by far and most successful in the early 1920s VFA – were excluded from early discussion about a tenth club in favour of Hawthorn, Brighton and Prahran.
Even within the VFA, Haw
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Comment - Doug Strang seems to have hit the League like a meteor – even against a team that was in the middle of a 33-game losing streak, fourteen goals on a second appearance is a sensation.
What seems to have weakened Strang is his inability to cope wit
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Comment - A strange thought! I can’t understand why the streaker – on a cool, grey day during the driest football season in VFL history until the “magic gate” of 1997/1998 – would have had such an effect on Richmond in the long term.
During the 19
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Comment - 19 marks would have been wonderful on paper – looking at the 1989 Football Year no one had more than seventeen in a match, and having that many under the longer, lower kicking of the pre-Docklands era would be much more difficult in theory at least
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Comment - Templeton’s record, whilst a record for the V/AFL, has been frequently surpassed in the WA(N)FL and SANFL.
The most notable case – by a much older Hall of Fame oversight – was of course by West Perth’s Ted Tyson in 1938 and 1939, who kicke
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Comment - The unbalanced competition in the VFL in the late 1920s and 1930s, as historians have shown, reflects the fact that only a few clubs (Carlton, Collingwood and Richmond) had the patrons needed to professionalise - with the result that most of the rema
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Comment - Michael,
the unbalanced character of the 1989 team is pretty obvious from the figures which show they had the third best defence in the league, yet clearly the worst attack! I admit their defence was flattered by the wet conditions and by a couple
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Comment - This study of Footscray is very familiar - in 1989 the Bulldogs were actually a very strong team in the back three-fifths of the ground despite their poor record, probably just as strong as in 1985. Hawkins was still in superb form and Terry Wallace,
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Comment - The 1914 Port Adelaide team was a lesson I and the AFL never learned when considering replacing Waverley by Docklands.
Whilst Port Adelaide’s record is quite extraordinary by any standards, it’s interesting to note that the 1914 season was the
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Comment - It’s strange the people said the same thing about East Perth in the 1961 WAFL Grand Final, when Swan Districts did the same thing to Farmer in his last game for the Royals, which no-one thought Swans had any chance in. Or, going back seven years, i
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Comment - Before one of the most amazing upsets in league history – in the last round the Bulldogs were overrun by a St. Kilda team that had won only two matches – Footscray certainly were favourites to play Essendon in the second semi and grand finals.
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Comment - I’ve been very interested in the history of South Adelaide, partly because of their age as a club and the lack of information or books in local libraries that have quite a bit of good information about football clubs, so this is very revealing.
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Comment - The AFL’s new pricing structure has, in fact, been inevitable for an extremely long time – since well before any national competition became possible.
Once Hawthorn, Melbourne and St. Kilda shed vestiges of amateurism in the 1950s, the setting
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