SOUTH AUSTRALIAN TEAM OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Half Back Line

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Left Half Back Flank - Walter Scott (Norwood)

Walter Scott was one of South Australia's finest ever defenders and arguably the most illustrious name in the history of the Norwood Football Club.

His abilities were evident right from the start of his League career in 1920 when, in a Norwood team that was good enough to play off for the premiership, he won the club's best and fairest award.

The following season saw Scott (known affectionately as 'Wat' or 'Wacka') make the first of what would end up being an Australian record 38 consecutive interstate appearances.  He was also runner up in the Magarey Medal despite receiving the same number of votes as the winner, South Adelaide's Dan Moriarty. [see footnote 1]   Consolation was later to arrive in the shape of the 1924 and 1930 Medals.

Along with Dan Moriarty and Jack Hamilton ( who was later replaced by Jim Handby) Walter Scott completed South Australia's most celebrated interstate half back line.  Normally placed on a flank, with Moriarty in the middle, Scott was arguably the most defensive member of the unit.  A strong, safe mark when in front position, he was also a redoubtable spoiler from behind, with uncanny judgement of the flight of the ball the key to both skills.  Sound judgement was also a major element in Scott's prowess as a ground player, and he shared with the likes of Bruce Doull, Guy McKenna, Frank Jenkins and Kevin Murray the quintessential defender's capacity for seldom lowering his colours in a one on one contest.

A club record 6 times winner of the Norwood best and fairest award Walter Scott's career effectively ended after he sustained a serious knee injury in the last minor round game of 1930 against Port Adelaide.  He did later play 2 further games, but all this did was prove to him that his knee was genuinely 'gone'.  It is perhaps no coincidence that the Redlegs, who had won 4 premierships and contested 7 grand finals during Scott's 11 year career, would have to wait another 11 years for their next flag.  

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Centre Half Back - Dan Moriarty (South Adelaide)

Dan Moriarty was an unlikely football hero. Unable to secure a regular game with anyone until he was 20 years of age he went on to become one of the greatest defenders in football history. Playing chiefly at centre half back, a position for which, at 178cm and 76 kilos, he would be considered much too small and lightweight nowadays, he excelled both in stymieing opponents and in generating attacking thrusts. Despite his lack of centimetres he was a superb aerialist, combining a gargantuan leap with formidably strong hands that seldom relinquished control of the ball once claimed. On the ground his play was characterised by excellent anticipation – a factor which he himself regarded as the single most significant reason for his success – and a resolute, single-minded decisiveness which more than made up for any alleged deficiency in pace.

Sadly, Dan Moriarty’s football career was all too brief. Prevented by the onset of the Great War from making his League debut with South Adelaide until he was in his 24th year he graced the football scene in South Australia for a mere 7 seasons and fewer than 100 games. A measure of his greatness is that he was selected in every single South Australian interstate team to take the field during the first 6 years of his career, a total of 22 consecutive games. 

Although team success continually eluded him Dan Moriarty’s individual achievements – most famously his 3 consecutive Magarey Medals in 1919-20-21 – remain the stuff of legend.

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Right Half Back Flank - Jack 'Snowy' Hamilton (North Adelaide, Subiaco, West Adelaide)

Possessed of exhilarating pace, extraordinary fluidity and grace of movement, deft ball handling skills, and aerial prowess of the highest order it is small wonder that Jack Hamilton was accorded the title by his contemporaries of ‘the Prince of Footballers’. Of course, this was very much a contemporary assessment, made at a time when footballers tended to be judged first and foremost in terms of the ability they displayed rather than the competition in which they performed. This perhaps goes a long way towards explaining the omission of ‘the Prince of Footballers’ the AFL’s much vaunted, but often singularly myopic, ‘Hall of Fame’.

Along with Walter Scott of Norwood and South Adelaide’s Dan Moriarty Hamilton formed what, by common tradition, has come to be regarded as South Australia’s greatest ever half back line. Of the three players, Hamilton was arguably the most eye-catching (and not merely because of his blond, vote-attracting hair, which gave rise to the nickname ‘Snowy’). During the 1921 Perth interstate carnival among the many pairs of eyes to be caught by Hamilton’s effervescent displays included those belonging to the committee of the Subiaco Football Club. Negotiations soon began to lure Hamilton west. However, for the 1922 season he contented himself with a much smaller move westwards – from North Adelaide to West Adelaide. At the end of the season Hamilton joined his West Adelaide team mates on an end of year jaunt to Perth, and once there the Maroons’ courting could resume in earnest. The upshot of it all was that the 1923 season saw ‘Snowy’ Hamilton residing in Perth, and bedecked each Saturday afternoon in the maroon and gold of Subiaco.

Had this move occurred half a century or more later there is no doubt that Hamilton would have ended up in Melbourne rather than Perth. However, the sport of Australian football in the 1920s was a much more egalitarian affair than it has since become, a fact for which supporters of the Lions can be eternally grateful.

Football history is replete with the stories of big name imports who flopped. ‘Snowy’ Hamilton was not one of them. Right from the very start he performed magnificently, and for two seasons he provided the Maroons with everything and more they could have wanted, winning consecutive club fairest and best awards, captaining the side to the 1924 premiership, and representing his adopted state with distinction in both years.

A hiccough came in 1925, however, when Hamilton decided to take up an offer to return home to coach West Adelaide, a protracted, and ultimately unresolved, clearance dispute meaning that he was forced to undertake this role in a purely non-playing capacity. Frustration over this state of affairs, coupled with West’s failure to qualify for the major round, saw Hamilton returning to Subi in time for the start of the 1926 season. Playing chiefly as a centreman he spent a further five successful seasons in the west before returning to his original club, North Adelaide, in 1931. He retired just over a year later at the age of thirty-three.

In the opinion of many astute contemporary observers Jack Hamilton was not far short of being the greatest footballer ever. Perth journalist Harry Potter for instance rated Hamilton as better even than Haydn Bunton, calling him "the cleverest footballer.....a player of almost uncanny skills, cool and resourceful, whatever the situation." [see footnote 2] Unfortunately the lenses through which most people are compelled to view the history of football, tinted as they are ‘Big V blue' after years of unbridled revisionism and distortion, mean that assessments as ingenuous as Potter’s are unlikely ever to be accorded the credence or the prominence they deserve.

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Footnotes

1.  The rules of the time dictated that, in the event of 2 or more players tying for the Medal, the umpires would be required to convene and decide the winner.  In 1921, after prolonged deliberation, they chose Moriarty.  Seventy seven seasons later the SANFL, following the highly dubious example set by the AFL in regards to the Brownlow, decided that all players who lost Magarey Medals either on countback or through some kind of post-count adjudication process should retrospectively be declared 'joint winners'.   The implications of this kind of historical revisionism are potentially enormous - and quite disturbing.  What next, one wonders?  If, let's say, the criterion of 'fairness' is at some stage in the future removed from the Brownlow, will we end up with votes being retrospectively allowed for all disqualified players, thereby effectively generating a completely new list of winners?  What if some future rules committee decides to tinker with the game's scoring system?  Would any modifications be applied retrospectively?  (Football's scoring system has been sacrosanct for over 100 years now, but since when did genuine tradition, as opposed to manufactured 'tradition', count for anything with the AFL?)   These examples might, on the face of it, seem far fetched, but they differ from the process of retrospectively awarding extra Brownlows, Magareys or Sandovers only in scale.  When one generation makes assumptions of moral superiority over another (and that, when all is said and done, is what the awarding of retrospective medals is all about) it is actually doing the precise opposite of what it claims, and declaring itself morally bankrupt.  Return to Main Text   

2.  From 'The Western Mail', 19/6/24, and quoted in Diehards: the Story of the Subiaco Football Club 1896-1945 by Ken Spillman, page 89.  Back to Main Text