1887 VFA season

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1887 VFA premiership season
Carlton fc 1887.jpg
Carlton FC, premiers
Teams18
PremiersCarlton
(2nd premiership)
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The 1887 Victorian Football Association season was the 11th season of the Australian rules football competition.

The premiership was won by the Carlton Football Club. It was the second and last VFA premiership in the club's history.

Association membership[]

The metropolitan membership of the Association (including Geelong) remained unchanged from the fifteen clubs which contested the premiership in 1886. The three Ballarat-based clubs (Ballarat, Ballarat Imperial and South Ballarat) also remained senior clubs; however, unlike in previous years, they were included in the premiership lists by all of the major sportswriters.

1887 VFA premiership[]

Tom Leydin and Bill Strickland, captain and vice-captain of Carlton FC

The premiership was won by the Carlton Football Club, which played eighteen matches for the season, winning fifteen and drawing two. The runner-up was Geelong, which won sixteen and drew three matches from twenty-one played. South Melbourne was ranked third.

Although no official system for deciding the premiership existed, it was conventional for the club which suffered the fewest defeats during the season to be named premier.[1]

On July 2, a weakened Geelong, which was missing eight of its best twenty due to unavailability, suffered one of its two losses for the season when Ballarat Imperial beat them 3.4 to 0.2 at the Eastern Oval in Ballarat.[2] Geelong lodged a protest with the Association that the match should not be counted toward the premiership on the following grounds:

  • Firstly, the match had been arranged informally as part of a country trip after a planned tour of Adelaide was cancelled.
  • Secondly, it was not included in the Association fixture at the beginning of the season.
  • Thirdly, the club had not expected the match to be counted, and in any event, there were other procedural irregularities, including the appointment of the umpire.

However, the Association had in place a stringent rule in place that any match played on a Saturday between two Association clubs would count towards the premiership, and Geelong's protest was rejected by a large majority of delegates.[3]

Had Geelong been successful in having the match excluded from the premiership, ceteris paribus, it and Carlton would each have finished with only one defeat for the season, and a playoff match would likely have been arranged to decide the premiership.[4]

Club senior records[]

The below table details the records of the eighteen clubs in senior matches during the 1887 season.

In addition to Saturday matches, matches played on Queen's Birthday were counted towards the premiership, but matches played on the celebration the Golden Jubilee were not counted.[5]

The clubs are listed in the order in which they were ranked in the Sportsman newspaper. The VFA had no formal process by which the clubs were ranked, so the below order should be considered indicative only, particularly since the fixturing of matches was not standardised; however, the top three placings were later acknowledged in publications including the Football Record and are considered official.[6]

1887 VFA Results
TEAM P W L D GF GA
1 Carlton (P) 18 15 1 2 94 43
2 Geelong 21 16 2 3 110 57
3 South Melbourne 20 12 4 4 103 53
Fitzroy 20 11 4 5 71 56
Port Melbourne 20 12 6 2 97 50
Williamstown 19 9 8 2 64 73
Richmond 19 8 8 3 63 70
Hotham 18 6 8 4 73 79
Essendon 16 5 9 2 49 67
Melbourne 18 6 10 2 64 80
Prahran 18 5 11 2 42 75
University 17 4 13 0 45 94
Ballarat Imperial 13 6 4 3 52 44
Ballarat 13 5 6 2 49 43
St Kilda 18 4 13 1 48 95
South Williamstown 18 3 13 2 35 78
South Ballarat 10 3 2 5 50 40
Footscray 14 2 10 2 25 47
Key: P = Played, W = Won, L = Lost, D = Drawn, GF = Goals For, GA = Goals Against, (P) = Premiers Source:[7]

Notable events[]

  • Melbourne president Frank Grey Smith replaced James Garton as president of the Association. Garton had presided since 1882.[8]
  • Prior to the season, the distance between each goalpost and its adjacent kick-off post (behind post) was reduced from twenty yards to ten yards, greatly reducing the area through which a team would be credited a behind.[9]

See also[]

  • Victorian Football Association/Victorian Football League History (1877-2008)
  • List of VFA/VFL Premiers (1877-2007)
  • History of Australian rules football in Victoria (1853-1900)

References[]

  1. ^ "Opening of the Football Season". The Argus. Melbourne, VIC. 5 May 1888. p. 14.
  2. ^ "Ballarat Imperial v. Geelong". The Argus. Melbourne, VIC. 4 July 1887. p. 7.
  3. ^ "The Premiership". Traralgon Record. Traralgon, VIC. 16 August 1887. p. 3.
  4. ^ "The Football Season". The Argus. Melbourne, VIC. 26 September 1887. p. 6.
  5. ^ Follower (1 October 1887). "Football – The past season". Leader. Melbourne, VIC. p. 20.
  6. ^ Caroline Wilson (20 June 2014). "History of the AFL could be turned on its head". The Age. Melbourne, VIC. Retrieved 18 October 2014.
  7. ^ Goal Post (5 October 1887). "The Past Football Season". The Sportsman. Melbourne, VIC. p. 2.
  8. ^ Fiddian, Marc (2004), The VFA: a history of the Victorian Football Association, 1877–1995, p. 21
  9. ^ "Intercolonial Football Conference". Adelaide Observer. Adelaide, SA. 13 November 1886. p. 16.
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