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| == Bernard Whimpress & Counting in Football==
| |
| Reference: [http://la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/ASSH%20Bulletins/No%2021/ASSHBulletin21j.pdf Australian Society for Sports History paper Dec 1994]
| |
|
| |
| '''A Mad Game: The Crazy World of Footy Statistics'''
| |
|
| |
| Bernard Whimpress
| |
|
| |
| Flinders University
| |
|
| |
| In the nineteenth century a verse writer (one would hesitate to say poet)
| |
| came up with some lines about football which began ‘A mad game, my
| |
| masters!1 At the time the game couldn’t decide whether it was Victorian
| |
| Rules or Australian Rules football but it has never been as mad as the
| |
| statistics which surround it.
| |
|
| |
| I am not suggesting anything complicated here. Once upon a time
| |
| before the days of recording shepherds, spoils, knock-ons and run pasts
| |
| it was games, goals and premierships that mattered. But even dealing
| |
| with these is like treading in a veritable minefield. I will deal with each
| |
| in turn.
| |
|
| |
| '''Games'''
| |
|
| |
| What is a game? At the top level of footy we have league games, club
| |
| games, interstate games, intrastate games (in Tasmania), interstate club
| |
| games which may be trials of greater or lesser seriousness, and perhaps
| |
| what might be called special games.
| |
|
| |
| Let us take each of these categories one at a time. League games
| |
| are those played for premiership points and include both those of the
| |
| minor and major rounds. There is simple agreement on these.
| |
| Club games include league games but also the early season knockout
| |
| cup games under the control of a major league. These include the
| |
| AFL Fosters Cup, and in times past there were Escort Cups, Sterling
| |
| Cups, Ardath Cups, Datsun Cups, Coca-Cola Cups, and Advertiser
| |
| Cups, run by the National Football League (NFL), the Victorian Football
| |
| League (VFL), the South Australian National Football League (SANFL)
| |
| to mention just some.
| |
|
| |
| Interstate games should be straight forward enough except as we
| |
| shall see they can provide problems. Interstate club games are often used
| |
| as high class trials but when they draw 35 000 people as Geelong did
| |
| against Port Adelaide in 1990, it is tempting to give them official status
| |
| except crowds alone cannot be used as a determinant. Intrastate games
| |
| consist of those between the three major Tasmanian leagues for most of
| |
| the last century but also such early games as those between the Kalgoorlie
| |
| goldfields and Perth teams in the early years of football in Western
| |
| Australia.
| |
|
| |
| Special games are a strange category but might include Port
| |
| Adelaide against England in 1888; Hawthorn against Carlton in London,
| |
| Vancouver or Athens; the Aborigines against Collingwood this year, or
| |
| Premiers versus The Rest as occurred in the past. The Test Matches in
| |
| Ireland in the early 1980s wouldn’t qualify because they were Gaelic
| |
| Football.
| |
|
| |
| Unfortunately there is not now, and (so far as I have been able to
| |
| establish) never has been, any consistency in how these games are
| |
| recorded. If one association in one state maintains some order it does not
| |
| do so indefinitely. And different associations in each state have conducted
| |
| things the way they wanted to.
| |
|
| |
| In 1975 I was the co-founder of a football newspaper, Football
| |
| Times, in Adelaide and at the time my partner and I agreed on the need
| |
| for a category which we termed senior games.2 The idea behind senior
| |
| games was that it embraced the categories of club, state and other games,
| |
| the latter referring to club and state games played in another state.
| |
| Football Times was pretty successful with this concept and
| |
| continued with it until its demise in 1992. It allowed for a player’s record
| |
| from one state to carry over to another. For example at the end of 1983
| |
| Bob Beecroft’s record stood at 279 games: forty-six for his then club,
| |
| Woodville, and 233 ‘other’ which comprised 127 for Swan Districts, ten
| |
| for Western Australia, and ninety-six for Fitzroy.
| |
|
| |
| The concept was not perfect, however, nor was the South Australian
| |
| paper alone in using it. Ken Pinchin and Alan Neeson’s A Century of
| |
| Tasmanian Football 1879-1979 came closest to accurate record
| |
| keeping with Roy Cazaly’s fantastic forty year career enumerated to the
| |
| extent of 393 senior games. These included 199 in the VFL (St Kilda one
| |
| hundred, South Melbourne ninety-nine), thirteen for Victoria, 162 in the
| |
| major Tasmanian league clubs (City forty-four, North Hobart thirtyseven,
| |
| New Town eighty-one), five for Tasmania, and fourteen intrastate
| |
| games for the Northern Tasmanian Football Association. It did not
| |
| include twenty VFA games (Preston seventeen, Camberwell three) which
| |
| were used as part of a larger 429 total games.3
| |
|
| |
| One problem was the recognition of leagues for senior club status.
| |
| The then VFL, WAFL, and SANFL counted, as did the then three
| |
| Tasmanian leagues when a player crossed state boundaries but no one
| |
| worried about the VFA, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, or Darwin. A
| |
| player’s games for Devonport might be counted but not Williamstown,
| |
| Ainslie, St George, Kedron or St Mary’s.
| |
|
| |
| As I mentioned earlier the problem of getting uniformity between
| |
| different state leagues and associations is difficult in a given year but
| |
| how much worse when one is trying to make sense of records of the past.
| |
| For instance even the relatively straightforward case of league
| |
| games provides nightmares. How often (for example) is former Richmond
| |
| star Royce Hart credited with playing one league game for Glenelg? Hart
| |
| who was on national service and stationed at Woodside in the Adelaide
| |
| Hills was a controversial inclusion in the 1969 South Australian Grand
| |
| Final at a reported match fee of $3000, a huge amount in those days.
| |
| Glenelg lost!4
| |
|
| |
| And what about the problem of league games during wars?
| |
| In South Australia during World War II an SANFL rule enabled
| |
| players to count all games missed due to service towards league player
| |
| life membership and this led to some funny recording. In one example a
| |
| prominent South Adelaide and state player, Len Lapthome was recorded.
| |
| as having played 222 games when his real figure was about 130 games.
| |
| Another problem created by war-time football in Adelaide was when the
| |
| eight teams split into four combined teams. Who exactly played for
| |
| whom has never been worked out.
| |
|
| |
| The most ludicrous record keeping regarding league games,
| |
| however, has to be the result of the VFL ruling of 24 September 1969
| |
| which credits a game to players who appeared in an interstate game on
| |
| the same day as their club was playing a game. Jim Main and Russell
| |
| Holmesby in their comprehensive book, The Encyclopedia of League
| |
| Footballers (published in 1992), point out that they have followed this
| |
| ruling which I believe detracts from the credibility of their task.5
| |
|
| |
| How could Alex Jesaulenko kick ten goals against South Australia
| |
| in Adelaide and be credited with representing Carlton against St Kilda at
| |
| Moorabbin on the same day?, not to mention the player who replaced
| |
| him who undoubtedly also recorded a game.
| |
|
| |
| Let us consider a hypothetical
| |
| question. If Geoff Southby, Bruce Doull and Robert Walls all represented
| |
| Victoria in the same match, and (for arguments sake) St Kilda had no
| |
| representatives would they have been able to demand, retrospectively, a
| |
| count of the players supposed to have played against them? It is not as
| |
| ridiculous as it sounds. Double counting could have been avoided by
| |
| adopting the category of senior games.
| |
|
| |
| Club games can be curly with the proliferation of extra competitions
| |
| from the mid-1970s, but what status do the older night football
| |
| competitions conducted in Melbourne and Adelaide in the 1950s and
| |
| 1960s have? Someone like Neil Kerley in South Australia played 297
| |
| senior games made up of 149 for West Adelaide, fifty-seven for South
| |
| Adelaide, and fifty-nine for Glenelg, as well as thirty-two for South
| |
| Australia. However, he also played thirteen Advertiser Cup night games
| |
| for West which have not been counted. So far as I know Bill Kelly’s 1965
| |
| History of the West Adelaide Football Club is the only history which
| |
| records these games in South Australia.6 In Victoria the old night games
| |
| used to be recorded separately but have been ignored in Main and
| |
| Holmesby’s book.
| |
|
| |
| Club games provide further headaches when it comes to a matter of
| |
| regarding interstate club fixtures. From the 1880s to World War I these
| |
| games were more common than intercolonial and interstate games, and
| |
| often were played for the Championship of Australia. When Norwood
| |
| beat South Melbourne in 1888 it was a best of three series but what status
| |
| do these games have in record keeping? In the late 1960s and early 1970s
| |
| the concept was briefly revived and Championship of Australia club
| |
| games involved the premiers from Victoria, South Australia, Western
| |
| Australia and Tasmania. Again the status of such matches has not been
| |
| resolved.
| |
|
| |
| Interstate games can also send the statistician in search of some
| |
| panadol. Although an excellent idea, the State of Origin matches opened
| |
| several cans of worms, but especially when the four Daniher brothers all
| |
| rolled out to play for New South Wales against Victoria.
| |
|
| |
| Another difficulty with interstate matches is whether one regards
| |
| them as being between the first eighteens, twenties, or twenty-threes as
| |
| the years go by or whether other matches also fit the bill. Again, let us
| |
| take a walk through footy history.
| |
|
| |
| In the 1920s it was a common practice for state second eighteens to
| |
| play each other when a triennial Australian Football Council Carnival
| |
| was being played. Thus a second South Australian team played second
| |
| Victorian side in Melbourne when the first team was playing Western
| |
| Australia at the Perth Carnival in 1921, and South Australia and
| |
| Victorian second teams met in Adelaide in 1924 on the same day the first
| |
| sides were playing at the Hobart Carnival. Should the second matches
| |
| count? 7
| |
|
| |
| At later periods second South Australian sides played representative
| |
| teams from Broken Hill. Should these games receive interstate status?
| |
| Bring the clock forward to when the VFL on a couple of occasions
| |
| fielded three interstate teams in different cities over the same weekend.
| |
| Should all players feel entitled to say they wore the ‘big V’? What price
| |
| a Victorian jumper, Teddy Whitten?
| |
|
| |
| Intrastate games can perhaps be left to the Tasmanians except that
| |
| their status lies between that of club and state games. They are certainly
| |
| senior games. Special games I briefly alluded to at the beginning and
| |
| would generally include one off specials. Certainly they should not be
| |
| overlooked.
| |
|
| |
| If recording games matter, and plainly they have exhausted the
| |
| energy of a lot of people for many reasons, it seems essential that they be
| |
| placed on a proper footing which each of the states major Australian
| |
| football bodies is willing to recognise. As I have said already the concept
| |
| of senior games is the best way of going about this but perhaps the
| |
| Football Times model did not go far enough in the past. Accordingly I
| |
| offer a new formula which could be expressed in the following equation.
| |
| Senior games = league and club + interstate + intrastate +
| |
| interstate club + special games.
| |
|
| |
| I would argue that senior games should be the criterion for
| |
| membership of special bodies like the 300 club. If a player has played
| |
| 280 matches and twenty for Victoria surely he would merit a place in
| |
| such a group.
| |
|
| |
| It seems to me that very able statisticians such as Norm Sowden
| |
| and Graeme Atkinson in Melbourne, and Ian Everett8 in Adelaide have
| |
| been tearing their hair out over these problems long enough.
| |
|
| |
| '''Goals'''
| |
|
| |
| What is a goal is not difficult to determine under the rules but for record
| |
| keeping purposes the story is again different.
| |
|
| |
| I have no argument with the awarding of the leading goalkicking
| |
| awards such as the Coleman and Farmer Medals to the player who scores
| |
| most goals in minor round matches but then the VFL/AFL, SANFL,
| |
| WAFL and other leagues also keep separate records which include the
| |
| finals series. By this means there can then be two leading scorers.
| |
| In 1993 for instance Gary Ablett won the Coleman Medal with 124
| |
| goals but Tony Modra ended the season with the same tally by virtue of
| |
| three finals appearances.
| |
|
| |
| At the moment we are discussing league matches for premiership
| |
| points. But there are further anomalies. In 1980 the Western Australians
| |
| really threw a cat among the pigeons by not counting five goals kicked by
| |
| Warren Ralph in a league game for the purpose of deciding the WA
| |
| leading goalkicker award.
| |
|
| |
| The logic behind this was that Ralph’s tally occurred when the
| |
| Western Australian team was playing a match in Adelaide. The end of
| |
| year leading goalkicker award was thus shared by Simon Beasley and
| |
| Ralph with eighty-two goals even though Ralph’s tally was eighty-seven.
| |
| This situation is a startling reverse of the earlier Jesaulenko example
| |
| where he was supposed to be in two cities at once. Warren Ralph’s match
| |
| on 14 June 1980 just didn’t exist at all.
| |
|
| |
| Let me raise a further point about the status of AFL games versus
| |
| the other leagues’ games. The AFL obviously has higher status yet
| |
| record keeping in the other main football states is taken seriously (if not
| |
| as I have been arguing) accurately. But taking the question of one
| |
| hundred goals in a season what would have happened if someone like
| |
| Scott Hodges had scored fifty goals for the Crows and fifty goals for Port
| |
| Adelaide? Would that constitute a one hundred goal league season?
| |
| Probably not, because two clubs were involved but let us examine
| |
| another ‘if’. If Port Adelaide wins the second AFL licence from Adelaide
| |
| in 1996, Hodges could well be the spearhead. But Port is also determining
| |
| to maintain a team in the SANFL competition. Effectively Port would
| |
| have an A team and a B team both playing league football. If Hodges
| |
| kicked his fifty goals for each team would he have scored one hundred
| |
| league goals? A real twister!
| |
|
| |
| In the past a player who might score a hundred goals in any
| |
| combination of Under 17s, 19s, reserves or league games as not considered
| |
| to have done so. The leagues insisted it had to be in the one grade.
| |
| Recording goals in other club games such as Foster’s Cup matches
| |
| and local knockout cup matches in the major leagues are frequently
| |
| recorded in club and league annual reports. But this has not always been
| |
| the case. In some years players such as North Melbourne’s John Longmire
| |
| in 1990 recorded more than one hundred goals for his club but ninetyeight
| |
| in premiership matches. The North Melbourne Annual Report
| |
| records the ninety-eight. Did he have a one hundred goal season or
| |
| didn’t he?
| |
|
| |
| In 1971 the SANFL recognised (for a time) Fred Phillis’s total of
| |
| 102 goals because he scored three goals in a bodgie end of season
| |
| knockout trophy known as the Coca-Cola Cup for teams which missed
| |
| the finals. Later, however, the league put his total back to ninety-nine. In
| |
| Glenelg records he is shown as scoring the century tally three years in a
| |
| row and five times in all. In the league records based on premiership
| |
| matches he achieved the mark three times.9
| |
|
| |
| The final confusing area is that goals in interstate matches have
| |
| rarely been recorded. During my time as editor of the South Australian
| |
| Football Budget a list of players interstate matches and goals was
| |
| published10 although this was not without imperfections regarding the
| |
| status of games I alluded to earlier.
| |
|
| |
| Again, the question must be asked should these games be considered
| |
| when one hundred goal seasons or career records are taken into account?
| |
| Certainly a footballer who kicked ninety-nine goals for his team and then
| |
| turned out for his state and booted ten goals in the match would perhaps
| |
| feel he had been denied some honour.
| |
|
| |
| The state which has overcome this situation has been Tasmania
| |
| although until recently they adhered to an even stricter policy than the
| |
| other main states by basing their leading goalkicker tally on minor round
| |
| premiership matches only. It seems the man who inspired the change
| |
| was Peter Hudson when he first returned from Victoria in 1975.
| |
| In the Tasmanian Football League Hudson (playing for Glenorchy)
| |
| was recorded as leading goalkicker with tallies of fifty-four goals (1975),
| |
| 113 (1976) and 142 (1978) in Pinchin and Leeson’s history, yet in
| |
| Graeme Atkinson and Michael Hanlon’s 3AW Book of Footy Records
| |
| published in 1989 Hudson’s totals have leapt to eighty-nine, 157 and 191
| |
| goals respectively.1
| |
|
| |
| 1 What happened in the meantime was that goals
| |
| kicked in finals, state games, intrastate games and state or Australian
| |
| club championship were now added on. No doubt some Tasmanian
| |
| statisticians were ‘cock-a-hoop’ when in all games in 1979 Hudson
| |
| kicked 209 goals and I have recently seen this ‘fact’ referred to in the
| |
| Rising Star advertisement in the Football Record.
| |
|
| |
| By some of the arguments I raised earlier there is not necessarily
| |
| any harm in this except that this record lacked consistency with other
| |
| leagues. Furthermore there was also no attempt to make retrospective
| |
| adjustments to the TFL’s goalkicking records of earlier years, except
| |
| those of Hudson himself but neither do these show consistency. In
| |
| Hudson’s early career with New Norfolk he was the top TFL goalkicker
| |
| and his season’s tallies were originally recorded as sixty-nine goals
| |
| (1963), seventy-seven (1964), 101 (1965) and ninety-seven (1966).
| |
|
| |
| Subsequently, though, the first two years were revised to seventy-nine
| |
| and eighty-six goals to include finals matches but those for 1965 and
| |
| 1966 remain unchanged despite the fact that he kicked nine goals and six
| |
| respectively in the major round.1 2 If Hudson’s figures for the period
| |
| 1963-6 were measured the same way as those at the end of his career the
| |
| TFL would show his season’s tallies as eighty-five, 102, 133 and 140
| |
| goals.
| |
|
| |
| Goals recorded in other club games and special games are not that
| |
| difficult to deal with but should not be abused as in the Hudson examples.
| |
| Overall, however, it seems sensible to ensure that at least goalkicking
| |
| records are maintained for all senior games.
| |
|
| |
| This brings me to my final point about premierships.
| |
|
| |
| '''Premierships'''
| |
|
| |
| Every league footballer I ever interviewed (and that was about a thousand)
| |
| said the reason he played was to win a premiership.
| |
| But when it comes to counting the pennants or shields down the
| |
| years where does one start? Don’t forget a lot of the old timers played
| |
| their guts out for their clubs. And the nineteenth century games were
| |
| bloodier than those today.
| |
|
| |
| So in Victoria do we begin in 1858 with the foundation of the
| |
| game, 1877 with the establishment of the Victorian Football Association, 1897 with the foundation of the Victorian Football League, or 1991 with
| |
| the establishment of the Australian Football League? In South Australia
| |
| does one start in 1877 when the South Australian Football Association
| |
| (SAFA) was established, 1897 or 1899 (take your pick) when electorate
| |
| football was introduced, or 1907 when the SAFA changed its name to
| |
| South Australian Football League? It is my view that if a club can show
| |
| that it is genuinely the same entity down the years its records should
| |
| begin at the beginning.
| |
|
| |
| In Victoria the VFA clubs which broke away to form the VFL
| |
| should combine their premierships in both competitions to form a
| |
| complete tally.
| |
|
| |
| In South Australia I have written several times about how, for a
| |
| long time the record keeping used to begin in 1907 when the only change
| |
| from the old SAFA to SA Football League was the substitution of one
| |
| word for another.13
| |
|
| |
| It was a major breakthrough that in the 1980s (acting with some
| |
| authority as an SANFL official) I was able to bring back thirteen extra
| |
| premierships for Norwood and eight for South Adelaide.
| |
|
| |
| Even more importantly, in the light of the way the game has
| |
| developed nationally, was the successful revival of the memory of an
| |
| Adelaide Football Club which existed as the foundation club of football
| |
| in the South Australia well over one hundred years before the advent of
| |
| the Crows.
| |
|
| |
| '''NOTES'''
| |
|
| |
| 1 This poem which celebrated the match between the Adelaide and St Kilda
| |
| Football Clubs in 1877 is quoted in full in Bernard Whimpress, The South
| |
| Australian Football Story, South Australian National Football League,
| |
| Adelaide, 1983, p. 12.
| |
|
| |
| 2 Football Times Yearbook , 1975, pp. 50-3.
| |
|
| |
| 3 Ken Pinchin and Allan Neeson, A Century of Tasmania Football 1879-
| |
| 1979, Tasmanian Football League, Hobart, 1979, pp. 146-7.
| |
|
| |
| 4 Whimpress, South Australian Football Story, p. 64.
| |
|
| |
| 5 Jim Main and Russell Holmesby, The Encyclopedia of League Footballers,
| |
| Information Australia, Melbourne, 1992, introduction.
| |
|
| |
| 6 W T Kelly, History of the West Adelaide Football Club, Adelaide, 1965,
| |
| p. 123.
| |
|
| |
| 7 This information has been obtained from various newspaper sources and old
| |
| record books. An interesting sidelight is that a photograph of the 1924 South
| |
| Australian second team is part of a display of historic memorabilia in the
| |
| relatively new Football Park Functions Room, Adelaide.
| |
|
| |
| 8 Graeme Atkinson is best known as the compiler of Everything You Always
| |
| Wanted to Know about Australian Rules Football but Couldn’t be Bothered
| |
| Asking. Norm Sowden in Melbourne and Ian Everett in Adelaide are long
| |
| time methodical record keepers whose work has been widely acknowledged
| |
| in football publications.
| |
|
| |
| 9 South Australian National Football League records were adjusted in the late
| |
| 1970s.
| |
|
| |
| 10. South Australian Football Budget, 12 June 1982, pp. 44-9.
| |
|
| |
| 11. Pinchin and Neeson, History of Tamanian Football, pp. 149, 170, 180; Graeme Atkinson and Michael Hanlon, 3AW Book of Footy Records, Matchbooks, Melbourne, 1989, p. 271.
| |
|
| |
| 12. Pinchin and Neeson, History of Tasmanian Football, p. 149.
| |
|
| |
| 13. My most recent comment on this was in ‘The Value of Facts in Sports
| |
| History’, Sporting Traditions, vol 9, November 1992, no 1, p. 12.
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| == Welcome practice == | | == Welcome practice == |
