1887 VFA season
1887 VFA Premiership season | |
---|---|
Teams | 18 |
Premiers |
Carlton (2nd premiership) |
← 1886 1888 → |
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 remained unchanged from the fifteen clubs which contested the premiership in 1886. However, for 1887, the three Ballarat-based clubs – Ballarat, Ballarat Imperial and South Ballarat – which had played matches against metropolitan clubs for several years, were more formally considered to be senior clubs in the Association.
1887 VFA premiership
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. Under the conventions of the season, the premiership was awarded to the club which suffered the fewest defeats during the season.[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; Ballarat Imperial 3.4 defeated Geelong 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, contending that the match was arranged informally as part of a country trip, which occurred only because a planned tour of Adelaide was cancelled, that it was not included in the Association fixture at the beginning of the season, that the club had not expected the match to be counted, and that there were some other procedural irregularities with such details and the appointment of 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 to the premiership; and the Geelong's protest was rejected by a large majority of delegates.[3] Had Geelong been successful in having the match discounted 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 played 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. The clubs are listed in the order in which they were ranked in the Sportsman newspaper; however, other than announcing the top three place-getters, the VFA had no formal process by which the clubs were ranked, so the below order should be considered indicative only.
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TEAM | P | W | L | D | GF | GA | ||||||
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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:[5] |
Notable events
- Melbourne president Frank Grey Smith replaced James Garton as president of the Association. Garton had presided since 1882.[6]
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
- ↑ "Opening of the Football Season". The Argus (Melbourne, VIC). 5 May 1888. p. 14.
- ↑ "Ballarat Imperial v. Geelong". The Argus (Melbourne, VIC). 4 July 1887. p. 7.
- ↑ "The Premiership". Traralgon Record (Traralgon, VIC). 16 August 1887. p. 3.
- ↑ "The Football Season". The Argus (Melbourne, VIC). 26 September 1887. p. 6.
- ↑ Goal Post (5 October 1887). "The Past Football Season". The Sportsman (Melbourne, VIC). p. 2.
- ↑ Fiddian, Marc (2004), The VFA: a history of the Victorian Football Association, 1877–1995, p. 21
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