1886 VFA season

1886 VFA Premiership season
Teams 15
Premiers Geelong
(7th premiership)
← 1885
1887 →

The 1886 Victorian Football Association season was the 10th season of the Australian rules football competition. The premiership was won by the Geelong Football Club. It was the club's seventh VFA premiership, and the last won by its senior team.

Association membership

The senior membership of the Association increased substantially in 1886, from ten clubs in 1885 to a record-high fifteen clubs in 1886. Four clubs were elevated from junior to senior status: Port Melbourne (maroon and navy blue), Footscray (red, white and blue), St Kilda (red and black) and Prahran (light blue and dark blue). The fifth new club was the newly established South Williamstown Football Club (light blue and white), which came into existence out of a dispute between the existing Williamstown Football Club and the Williamstown Cricket Club: the football club was unable to agree to terms with the cricket club for use of the Williamstown Cricket Ground, forcing the football club to play its matches without charging for admission at the unfenced Gardens Reserve; so the rival South Williamstown Football Club was established, and received permission to play its matches at the cricket ground.[1]

1886 VFA premiership

The 1886 season was dominated by Geelong and South Melbourne, the clubs which had between them won all of the previous eight premierships. When the two clubs played their only match against each other for the season on 4 September, both clubs were still undefeated for the year – and, in fact, South Melbourne was undefeated since 1884 – and as such, assuming both clubs continued winning in the final month of the season, this match became seen as a de facto premiership deciding match for the season. The match generated unprecedented public interest, with more than 25,000 spectators attending the South Melbourne Cricket Ground – despite the venue being suitable to accommodate around half that number – and the venue took more than £700 at the gate. Geelong comfortably outplayed South Melbourne in the match, and won by the score of 4.19 to 1.5.[2] Geelong went on to remain undefeated for the season and was awarded the premiership, its seventh in nine seasons; South Melbourne's loss to Geelong was its only for the season, and it finished as runners-up. Carlton finished third.

Club senior records

The below table details the playing records of the fifteen clubs in all matches during the 1886 season. Two sets of results are given:

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, particularly since the fixturing of matches was not standardised. This was more noticeably the case in the 1886 season than in other seasons, as the five new senior clubs played few matches against the stronger long-established clubs; South Williamstown, for example, finished with a positive record of 6–3–5 against senior clubs in its first season, but achieved it without playing any of the teams ranked in the top five by the Sportsman.

1886 VFA Results
Senior Results Total Results
TEAM P W L D GF GA P W L D GF GA
1 Geelong (P) 17 15 0 2 128 23 25 23 0 2 199 51
2 South Melbourne 20 17 1 2 97 46 22 19 1 2 119 51
3 Carlton 20 13 6 1 112 77 22 15 6 1 125 80
Melbourne 19 10 8 1 65 59 22 13 9 1 79 75
Williamstown 23 11 10 2 78 83 25 13 10 2 88 84
Fitzroy 21 10 9 2 73 66 23 10 11 2 77 73
Port Melbourne 19 9 6 4 65 44 23 12 7 4 82 57
South Williamstown 14 6 3 5 53 39 19 10 3 6 70 46
Hotham 20 7 7 6 62 70 21 8 7 6 68 78
St Kilda 17 6 9 2 51 96 21 6 11 4 60 109
Essendon 18 6 11 1 55 79 22 7 13 2 61 86
Richmond 21 5 15 1 47 87 23 5 17 1 52 96
Prahran 13 3 8 2 32 62 18 6 8 4 57 78
Footscray 16 2 9 5 29 50 18 3 9 6 34 56
University 20 0 18 2 28 88 21 1 18 2 34 91
Key: P = Played, W = Won, L = Lost, D = Drawn, GF = Goals For, GA = Goals Against, (P) = Premiers Source:[3]

Awards

Intercolonial matches

A New South Wales representative team toured Victoria during May, playing one fully representative match intercolonial match against an Association representative team.

1886 Intercolonial Matches
Saturday, 22 May Victoria 8.20 def. New South Wales 3.3 Melbourne Cricket Ground (crowd: 12,000) [5]

Notable events

External links

References

  1. ↑ "The Football Season". The Argus (Melbourne, VIC). 30 April 1886. p. 6.
  2. ↑ "The Football Championship". The Argus (Melbourne, VIC). 6 September 1886. p. 10.
  3. ↑ Goal Post (6 October 1886). "Football – The Past Football Season". The Sportsman (Melbourne, VIC). p. 6.
  4. ↑ "Close of the Football Season". The Argus (Melbourne, VIC). 26 September 1892. p. 6.
  5. ↑ "The Intercolonial Football Match". The Argus (Melbourne, VIC). 24 May 1886. p. 3.
  6. ↑ Fiddian, Marc (2003), Seagulls over Williamstown, Williamstown, VIC: Williamstown Football Club, p. 11
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