WHO, WHAT, WHY?  CLASSIFYING AUSTRALIAN FOOTBALL MATCHES

by Bernard Whimpress and Ross Smith

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Ross Smith is progressively adding specific information about some of the matches referred to in this essay to his website at http://au.geocities.com/sportandhistory/list.html.

The American mathematician John Allen Paulos once suggested that innumeracy was a  greater problem than illiteracy because faulty reasoning was based more on the misunderstanding, as well as the misrepresentation, of numbers than of words. Paulos added that worse still, mathematical illiteracy is often flaunted (see footnote 1).

Forty-five years ago the eccentric English cricket historian Major Rowland Bowen took the game’s Bible, Wisden, to task for the nonsense of its list of early county championship winners in an eight page article in the almanack itself. At the end of the article the criticism brought a famous acknowledgment from Wisden editor Norman Preston and a determination to do nothing:

Without in any way disputing the conclusions reached by the author, I do not think we can alter the accepted list as regularly published in Wisden for over forty years, even when there are good grounds for disagreeing with it (see footnote 2).

Rowland Bowen, how did you feel? In 1973 Bowen had another crack at cricket’s statistics in the first edition of The Cricket Statistician, the newsletter of the Association of Cricket Statisticians (ACS). In an article headed ‘The Classification of Matches’ he began:

The classification of matches has bedevilled many valiant attempts to arrive at statistics which command general agreement. There have been and are, two main reasons for this: firstly decisions by national governing bodies and later by the ICC, often lacking in logic or even consistency; secondly the inherent desire on the part of statisticians to have ‘everything neat and tidy’, to suit their mathematically inclined minds, which compels them to ignore history, a discipline of the mind often inherently opposed to the mathematical mind (see footnote 3).

Bowen’s first point about the lack of logic and consistency is entirely reasonable but one can argue with his second. Of course, Bowen may not have been aware then of the influence of chaos theory which makes mathematics less tidy. Good numbers and good history can march together.

As far as cricket record keeping is concerned ACS (later Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians) has been remarkably successful in getting its house in order and its publishing record is outstanding. The most ambitious books are probably The Who’s Who of Cricketers and A Chronicle of W.G. Grace but then there are first-class match guides, first-class match scorecards, 76 statistical biographies of famous cricketers, biographical registers of players by county and state, histories of county grounds used for first-class cricket and so on. It is easy to sneer at much of this work as being by the anorak brigade but it is much more besides.

The ACS began with Robert Brooke and Dennis Lambert meeting in the White Lion Inn in Hampton-in-Arden , Warwickshire, Brooke’s watering hole, to talk cricket statistics and later Brooke met another statistician, Brian Heald, perhaps a little more appealingly at Euston Station with each carrying a Cricketer magazine to identify himself (see footnote 4).  In 1978 a group of Football Experts (soccer) got together and an Association of Football Statisticians (AFS) was formed.

In 1975 a friend (Ashley Hornsey) and I began a football yearbook, Football Times, in Adelaide , and in our first is sue we introduced the concept of senior games. The idea behind the classification was that it took into account a wide variety of club, state and other games. Ten years ago in an article in the ASSH Bulletin (see footnote 5) I discussed some of this background and went on to detail anomalies in counting games, goals and premierships across various competitions. Without being repetitive what follows are some examples mentioned at the time.

Club games would include home and away premiership matches, early season knock-out cup matches under the control of a major league or leagues, and various night competitions provided that a designated number of players competed for complete matches. Abbreviated lightning carnival games such as those played around the time of the Second World War would not qualify and neither would trial games where large numbers of substitute players were used. Interstate games were more straightforward although not when three Victorian teams appeared on one day. Intercolonial and interstate club games were in an unmeasured category as were intrastate games such as those between the three major Tasmanian leagues, North versus South matches which used to be played annually on Adelaide Oval in the nineteenth century, and various matches involving league teams and association sides from Broken Hill and Kalgoorlie. ‘Other’  games consisted of fixtures such as Port Adelaide against England in 1888, Hawthorn against Carlton in an exhibition game in London or Vancouver , and an Aboriginal All Stars team against Collingwood.

Goalkicking threw up a number of problems, particularly when sorting out who won the major awards in the major league competitions, but also when trying to establish whether players had kicked 100 goals in a season.  As pointed out Glenelg full-forward Fred Phillis’ club records revealed him kicking 100 goals five times whereas the South Australian National Football League only accorded him the honour on three occasions. In the other years Phillis had kicked the goals in extra SANFL knockout competitions but only the premiership competition counted for major recognition.

Premierships also raised problems of when to start counting. The Victorians could start in 1858, 1877 or 1897 but the Australian Football League should surely only begin in 1991. South Australians could begin in 1877 or 1897 although for a long time 1907 was a crazy marking point because of the simple change of title from South Australian Football Association to South Australian Football League. In 1994 the hope was that wise people might begin to make sense of Australian Football record keeping and do something about it. What happened? Nothing!

In 1999 I re-entered the argument of football statistics in the Bulletin of Sport and Culture by questioning Tony Lockett’s record goalkicking and the dubious practice of the Australian Football League (AFL) tacking its records on to those of the Victorian Football League. There was also a reference back to the 1994 piece:

I hoped that an outcome of that article might be the formation of a body of statisticians, similar to the associations of cricket and football (soccer) statisticians in Britain , which have done so much to regulate the records of those sports. Unfortunately no-one has picked up the challenge nationally so that shoddy record-keeping remains (see footnote 6).

What happened? Again, nothing!

Call it bulldog tenacity but it is worth having another go. Maybe I need to invite everybody to the pub or stand under the Flinders Street clocks with a Footy Record under my arm and hope to run into someone else doing the same thing.

Late last year Max Sayer ’s monograph, Champions of Australia was published (see footnote 7).  Sayer documented the largely forgotten intercolonial and interstate club premiers matches from the 1880s to the 1980s and has reminded us that an important national dimension of the game preceded the AFL. A number of ASSH members own copies of the book and Santo Caruso at Melbourne Sports Books has said that Ron Barassi bought four copies. That means there is knowledge of these games but unfortunately they have no official status. South Australians have taken umbrage at this omission for several reasons. As Sayer points out the successes of South Australian clubs in these games in the pre-First World War era was an important measure and we continued to be interested in our competitiveness against chiefly Victorian teams. The Adelaide Oval has been the most regular venue for the games and large crowds attended them. We like to feel we were not just attending for nothing. And when Alex Jesaulenko applauded his opponent Barrie Robran after one of his high-flying marks, in his best-on-ground performance in North Adelaide ’s victory over Carlton in 1972, it was a never to-be-forgotten moment in football history in Adelaide . The appreciation of the skills of one champion by another overrode the team performance although the fact that North Adelaide won the same game by one point was also a matter of state pride. Of course, the Championship of Australia games need not be missing from statistical records as they can be easily incorporated into my 1994 formula:

Senior games = league and club + interstate + intrastate + interstate club + other games

Around the time Sayer’s book appeared Ross Smith and I began a football statistical discussion which was useful because I had not being doing any original football research for a long time. Through the agency of Rob Hess we posted some of our discussion on the Footy Collective and invited other members to correspond. Again, the correspondence fell on deaf ears because we had a nil response. This was disappointing because one of the critical questions is determining which clubs, associations and states should be involved. From our point of view senior league clubs should be those from the AFL, VFL, VFA (at various times), SANFL, SAFA (1877-97), WAFL, NTFA, NWFU, TFL, SFL, QAFL and the ACT but not Darwin, Broken Hill or the Western Australian goldfields. However, matches in which the Northern Territory or Australian Capital Territory are involved against state sides would be interstate games but if they played senior association clubs would be ‘other’ games. Broken Hill or WA Goldfields association teams playing senior association or club teams would be regarded as intrastate games or ‘other’ games. I don’t know about Ross but it appears to me that football’s statisticians, and its historians who should be marching arm-in-arm are doing no such thing.

Tasmanian football history throughout most of the twentieth century featured three distinct regional competitions at senior level: NWFU (North West Football Union) based along the north-west coast of Tasmania; NTFA (Northern Tasmanian Football Association) centred on the northern city of Launceston and surrounding rural districts; and the TFL (Tasmanian Football League) based on the city of Hobart and nearby areas.

Ross has compiled a list of over 400 Tasmanian games between 1901 and 1986 involving matches by representative or club teams from those regions. According to the senior games category many of these probably fit what might be regarded as ‘other’ games. Naturally, they are not without problems.

In our view the games which need to be discounted at the outset are odds matches. The only odds matches which might qualify as senior games are those which fall under the category of official league games. In Tasmania 's case this would mean those played by TFL, NTFA and NWFU clubs as part of their regular premiership competition. Ross has done detailed work on the early NTFA, but is unsure about the early TFL games. He suspects that odds matches had finished by the time of the formation of the NWFU in 1910.  I only mention this because odds games most certainly did occur in the early days of the South Australian Football Association (SAFA). From this list, however, we would exclude the 1901 and 1902 games against VFL club teams.

Smelters in 1901 provides an interesting case regarding the recognition of a club. If it was a club team from one of the three major associations the matches should count. If it was simply a works team from another association it should not. Smelters came from the mines of the west coast of Tasmania and provided competitive sides. In effect it was like an inter-association game but not an intrastate game. Because it was not a major league club it should probably therefore be excluded. As a matter of contrast in 1906 NW Coast can be regarded as preceding the NWFU and as a result its match against the NTFA can be considered an intrastate game and merit senior game status.

The 1907 NTFA–St. Kilda match is a bit of a curly one because three senior players from the visiting squad had origins in Tasmania and played for the combined side rather than for their VFL club. Research in the contemporary press indicates that St Kilda were asked beforehand to allow them to appear for their former region. The request was acceded to and St Kilda played what was virtually an NTFA Invitation Eighteen. Given those circumstances the match probably deserves first-class status. One wonders, however, if the same can be said of the NWFU v Melbourne match played at the end of the 1956 season. While the mainland club named virtually the same side which had won the VFL flag a week earlier, the coastal combination included a handful of Melbourne players who were part of the larger club group enjoying an end-of-season trip.

The AIF and RAAF games played during the First and Second World Wars were contested between very strong sides. For example, the RAAF side which played Northern Tasmania in 1945 was noted in the Hobart Mercury of 12 October 1945 as appearing ‘more like a representative Victorian league and association team’. Players such as Ron Todd, Bill Pratt, Don Bauer, Eric Zschech and Les Foote took part in this match. The local side included many players from the Launceston team which had won the 1945 NTFA premiership, plus others such as NW Coasters Len Hayes and Ray Stokes, and a teenager who was later to make his mark at numerous Australian National Football Council carnivals – Arthur Hodgson.

The 1923, 1924 and 1937 games against North Broken Hill and South Broken Hill are a problem. Even though Broken Hill and Kalgoorlie teams were often strong we believe that senior games should be restricted to matches where they appeared as an association. Broken Hill association teams, for example, played a number of matches against South Australian sides which should be counted.

Cananore was a very strong TFL side before the Second World War. The great Horrie Gorringe (arguably Tasmania ’s greatest non-VFL player) played for the club in the 1910s and 1920s. Its game against Port Adelaide in 1925 is thus an interstate club game and against Devonport in 1927 an intrastate club game. Both merit senior game status as would another interstate club game, the New Town–Carlton match of 1926.

In 1929 the TFL–NSW match is not an interstate game but an inter-association game between states. Perhaps this will create some difficulty in classification if we allow the VFA matches to continue to have full status as interstate games. The difficulty with the VFA is that even after it lost precedence to the VFL in 1897 it remained a strong league, and a number of matches (including those in ANFC Carnivals) continued to be recognised as interstate matches throughout much of the twentieth century. When South Australia met the VFA separately in 1980 that game had interstate status.

The 1935 NTFA-Northcote match would pass as an interstate club game as would that between the TFL and Prahran in 1949. The same would apply for the 1938 Launceston-North Melbourne match, that between New Town and North Adelaide in 1948, the 1950 North Launceston-Melbourne clash, Hobart versus South Adelaide (1954), and the game between City and Sturt in 1955.

The Fitzroy-Essendon (1938), Richmond-Collingwood (1939) and Carlton-South Melbourne (1952) matches were demonstration games and neither VFL matches played interstate or trials. As such they would count as ‘other’ games.

The 1947 combined Tasmanian associations against combined state teams of South Australia and Western Australia are definitely senior games. A similar case can also be made for the same two states combining against Victoria in that year; the NTFA-NWFU combinations against the VFA (1957), St. Kilda (1974), and ACT (1974 and 1977).  These are all ‘other’ and not interstate games.

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Other Senior Matches – Tasmania

A List For Discussion

REPRESENTATIVE GAMES

NTFA or Northern Tas v NWFU or NW Coast: 1906-12, 1922-39, 1945-85 (regular intrastate series - often 2 games per year)
NTFA or Northern Tas v TFL or Southern Tas: 1902-1985 (regular intrastate series - mostly 2 games per year)
NWFU or NW Coast v TFL or Southern Tas: 1912-13, 1923-30, 1945-85 (regular intrastate series - often 1 game per year)

Greater Northern League v VFA 1981-82

Nthn Tas v ACT 1974, 1977
Nthn Tas v RAAF (HQ) 1945, v SthAust/WestAust 1947, v VFA 1957, v St Kilda 1974

NTFA v AIF 1915, 1940
NTFA v Claremont 1949
NTFA v Collingwood 1902, 1906, 1923, 1929
NTFA v East Fremantle 1928
NTFA v East Perth 1936, 1948
NTFA v Essendon 1901, 1902, 1926, 1938, 1963
NTFA v Fitzroy 1901, 1909, 1924, 1930
NTFA v Melbourne 1910
NTFA v Nth Broken Hill 1923, 1924, 1929
NTFA v Northcote 1935
NTFA v Norwood 1910
NTFA v Rest of Tasmania 1972
NTFA v Richmond 1927, 1935, 1939
NTFA v Smelters 1901
NTFA v Sth Broken Hill 1930, 1937
NTFA v Sth Melbourne 1903
NTFA v St Kilda 1907, 1914, 1935
NTFA v VFA 1980
NTFA v Victoria 1932
NTFA v West Adelaide 1913, 1920
NTFA v West Perth 1925
NTFA v West Torrens 1920

NWFU v Geelong 1947
NWFU v Hawthorn 1953
NWFU v Melbourne 1956
NWFU v St Kilda 1913

SthAust/WestAust v Victoria 1947

TFL v AIF 1915, 1940
TFL v Carlton 1928
TFL v Claremont 1949
TFL v Collingwood 1902, 1906, 1929
TFL v East Fremantle 1928
TFL v East Perth 1936, 1948
TFL v Essendon 1902, 1905, 1926, 1951
TFL v Fitzroy 1901, 1906, 1909, 1925, 1930
TFL v Footscray 1946
TFL v Geelong 1953
TFL v Glenelg 1922
TFL v Hawthorn 1957
TFL v Melbourne 1907, 1910, 1912, 1913, 1950
TFL v New South Wales 1929
TFL v Nth Broken Hill 1929
TFL v Nth Melbourne 1949
TFL v Norwood 1910
TFL v Port Adelaide 1912, 1946
TFL v Prahran 1949
TFL v Richmond 1912, 1922, 1927, 1935
TFL v Sth Adelaide 1922
TFL v Sth Australia 1923, 1925
TFL v Sth Broken Hill 1924, 1930, 1937
TFL v St Kilda 1905, 1907, 1935

CLUB GAMES

Burnie v Sandy Bay 1946

Camberwell v Williamstown 1946
Cananore: v Collingwood 1914, v Perth 1914, v Port Adelaide 1925, v Devonport 1927
Carlton v Sth Melbourne 1952
City: v New Town 1925, v Nth Adelaide 1954, v Sturt 1955

Collingwood v Geelong 1937

Fitzroy v Essendon 1938
Footscray v Port Adelaide 1946

Hawthorn v Nth Melbourne 1966
Hobart v Sth Adelaide 1954

Latrobe: v Nth Launceston 1930, v Ulverstone 1931
Launceston v Hawthorn 1969
Launceston v Nth Melbourne 1938
Lefroy: v West Torrens 1924, v Fitzroy 1935
Longford v Nth Hobart 1931

New Town: v Carlton 1926, v Nth Adelaide 1948
Nth Hobart: v Fitzroy 1914, v City 1931, v Carlton 1936, v Air Force Assn 1947
Nth Launceston: v RAAF (Laverton) 1945, v Penguin-Yeoman 1946, v Melbourne 1950
Nth Lton/Longford v City/Launceston 1930

Richmond v Collingwood 1939

Scottsdale v Hawthorn 1970
Scottsdale v Melbourne 1971

Wynyard v New Town 1946  

Where now?

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Footnotes

1. John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, Hill & Wang, New York, 1988, pp.3-4.  Return to Main Text
2. Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 1959, p.98.  Return to Main Text
3. The Cricket Statistician No. 1, June 1973, p.5.  Return to Main Text
4. Richard Streeton, Twenty-One Years of the ACS, The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians, West Bridgeford, Nottingham, 1993, p.7.  Return to Main Text
5. Bernard Whimpress 'A Mad Game My Masters: The Crazy World of Footy Statistics' in Australian Society for Sports History Bulletin No. 21, December 1994, pp.38-48.  Return to Main Text
6. Bernard Whimpress, 'Unplugged' in Bulletin of Sport and Culture, No. 19, November 1999, p.18.  Return to Main Text
7. Max Sayer, Champions of Australia: A history of Australian Rules Football competition between the teams from the various state leagues, ASSH (SA), Adelaide, 2003.  Return to Main Text
8. John Allen Paulos, A Mathematician Reads the Newspapers, Penguin, London, 1995, p.4.  Return to Main Text