MOOROOPNA
Current Affiliation: Goulburn Valley Football League (GVFL) since 1949
Formed: 1877
Colours: Navy blue and white
Emblem: Cats (since 1949 - previously known as the Blues)
Senior Premierships: GVFL 1894-5-6, 1907, 1923-4, 1936-7-8, 1985-6 (11 total); Central Goulburn Valley Football League (CGVFL) 1946 (1 total)
Most Games: 312 by Billy Wong
| MINI-BIOGRAPHIES: | Fred Hawking |
In 1894, the Mooroopna Football Club was one of half a dozen inaugural members of the Goulburn Valley District Football Association (GVDFA), the direct precursor of today's Goulburn Valley Football League. The club had already been existence by this time for seventeen years, and had participated, along with a variety of local rivals, in numerous short-lived competitions such as the Lindley Cowen Cup, the J.T. Riley Cup, the Skaller Cup and the Heinze Cup. Already, Mooroopna was something of a football hotbed, a state of affairs that the new competition, which would be contested according to VFA rules, would do much to reinforce (see footnote 1).
Mooroopna made a slow start to its inaugural GVDFA campaign, and at the half way mark of the season was seemingly out of contention with just 1 win and a draw from 4 matches. One of the Association's founding clubs in Undera had already withdrawn from the competition by this stage, and Kyabram followed suit soon afterwards, citing travel difficulties as the reason. For some reason, Mooroopna then suddenly found a rich vein of form which propelled them to 3 consecutive wins and a first ever 'proper' premiership. The fact that this was no fluke was emphasised when the side won the next two flags as well, and had the league not gone into temporary recess in 1897 it seems reasonable to suppose that Mooroopna might have made it four in a row, a feat which only Rushworth (1930-33) and Shepparton (1963-6) have ever accomplished in the competition's century-plus history.
Overall, Mooroopna has won 11 senior GVFL premierships, a tally bettered only by arch rival Shepparton. However, most of Mooroopna's success occurred during the first half of the twentieth century, with only the back to back flags of 1985-6 under the inspirational coaching of former Fitzroy player Chris Smith to brighten the gloom since 1946.
That '85-86 combination was without doubt one of the finest ever to represent the club, but perhaps the greatest Mooroopna team was the one that, but for the intervention of politics, might just conceivably have won as many as six successive premierships. In 1935 Mooroopna found itself at loggerheads with the league over the issue of payments to umpires, which the league wanted to increase to a level Mooroopna regarded as excessive. When it became clear that the league was determined to press ahead with its proposals Mooroopna promptly withdrew from the competition.
The following year, presumably feeling that it had made its point, the club returned to the fold, and won the first of three successive flags. Then, in 1939, it once again found cause to fall out with the league, this time over the matter of Saturday versus Wednesday football. The GVFL had long been a Wednesday afternoon competition, but during the 1930s there was a growing lobby in favour of a switch to Saturdays. Prior to the 1939 season, following a protracted series of debates, the matter was put to a vote of league clubs, with four of the six voting in favour of Saturday football. Mooroopna was one of the two clubs to oppose the move, the other being Shepparton, and before the season commenced both had invoked 'principle' once more and decided to withdraw. Mooroopna did not resume in the GVFL until 1949, meaning that the club was deprived - or, more accurately, deprived itself - of the opportunity to create GVFL history by (possibly) winning in excess of four consecutive premierships.
Mooroopna's 'three in a row' premiership heroes were regarded as trend setters at the time. For example, one of the keys to their success was their tactic of using one of their followers, who tended to be of medium height and build, in a running role, rather than, as was the more widespread tendency at the time, as a second tap ruckman. Thus, in effect, Mooroopna were using ruck-rovers a couple of decades or so before the term was generally coined.
When football resumed after the war, Mooroopna lined up in the Central Goulburn Valley Football League (CGVFL), the ostensible second tier of Goulburn Valley football, as did fellow defectors from the GVFL, Shepparton. These two clubs faced one another in a memorable 1946 grand final, which Mooroopna won.
The fifties, sixties and seventies were lean times in terms of grand finals and premierships, but Mooroopna was nevertheless home to many fine players, of whom arguably the most noteworthy was triple Morrison Medallist Ray Willett, a former Collingwood ruckman who for good measure also won a Michelson Medal while playing in the Bendigo competition with Rochester. Willett, who arrived at Mooroopna as captain-coach in 1965, won the first of his Morrison Medals that year, with the others following in 1967 and 1968.
During the 1970s Cats players virtually monopolised the Morrison Medal through Dowie Bux (1972-3), Gavin Saunders (1977) and Barry Ough (1979). Star of the eighties was undoubtedly diminutive but dazzling rover Gary Cooper who, besides being a key member of Mooroopna's 1985 and 1986 premiership teams, won the 1983 and 1985 Morrison Medals, having earlier also won the 1976 Medal while playing for Tatura.
In 2008 it will be more than two decades since Mooroopna's last premiership, and the Cats inconsistency over recent seasons does not suggest that they will be breaking the drought any time soon. After finishing second from last in 2004, the Cats climbed to 8th in 2005, before qualifying for the finals in 4th place in 2006. Unfortunately, Shepparton United then put paid to any premiership aspirations in the first week of the finals, and a year later Mooroopna dropped back to 8th place on the ladder after managing just 8 wins from their 18 home and away matches.
Where now?
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Footnotes
1. The GVDFA had affiliated itself with the VFA at least in part in order to bring some uniformity to the rules under which matches were conducted. Prior to 1894 the football played in the Goulburn Valley had not adhered to any single, coherent set of rules, which inevitably led to considerable confusion (as well as, one imagines, no small amount of ill feeling on occasion).