1. The Lightning Premiership – 1996
Like the opening day of World Series cricket or the original Sunbury music festival, if you’ve ever spoken to someone who claims to have attended the AFL Lightening Premiership of 1996 there’s a reasonable chance that they’re telling porkies. The ill-starred pre-season event drew only 25,000 fans across three rain-sodden days of action at Waverley Park, far fewer than the humble 65,000 figure that the league had hoped for.
Essendon went away happy because for 140 minutes of work they picked up a cool $40,000 in prize money. It was also a ratings success for TV network Seven, but no-one else involved was particularly enthused. The league lost a reported $300,000 on the carnival and most coaches grumbled that the season was already long enough without an extra commitment like the low-stakes February fixtures.
As in subsequent seasons, these essentially meaningless games were used by the league to trial a range of new rules, most of which were met with furrowed brows on behalf of the league’s coaches. Games took place across two 17.5 minute halves (of course) and featured four goal umpires, four boundary umpires and six interchange players. The attacking side was awarded 3-points for hitting the goal post instead of one and a free kick was paid against the last player to touch the ball before it went out of bounds.
Some rules eventually found their way into the proper stuff at some point; kick-outs taken without the need to pause for the goal umpires’ flag; ball-ups around the ground; the genesis of the rule targeting the deliberate rushed behind started here, but sides were penalized 3 points for doing so rather than one. At the time, the only innovation roundly approved by coaches was the four goal umpires, a concept that never gained enough traction anyway.
If at all, the Lightning Premiership tends to be remembered by fans as something wacky – a moment of madness that quickly passed, but it also could be seen as accurately foreshadowing the watered-down pre-season fixtures we have now.
If you’d been itching to watch Che Cockatoo-Collins put two goal umpires to work in front of an empty Waverley Park stand, boy have we got a treat for you…
2. Gary Ablett retires - 1991
It wasn’t the greatest time to be living in Geelong, the early 90s. The collapse of the locally-based Pyramid Building Society in 1990 had left the community in a $2 billion black hole of debt, Geelong residents among the hardest hit. Not unreasonable then that a community would turn to its sporting stars for something cheery.
Then in early 1991 came the bombshell; superstar Geelong forward Gary Ablett – at the peak of his awe-inspiring powers - was pulling the pin on his career, retiring at just 31 as his side still hovered around the Premiership window. To say it came out of the blue is an understatement. The Cats had been training at Deakin University on Friday, February 1st when discussions amongst Malcolm Blight’s match committee turned to the composition of the team for a trial game that weekend.
When Ablett’s name came up, Blight excused himself to call Ablett and inquire about his availability. Unusually by his standards, Ablett had actually put in close to a full pre-season that year so there was no reason to expect anything untoward. Five minutes later Blight returned to the room with the shocking news: “He’s not playing… Ever.” The Cats hero told Blight that he no longer enjoying the game and diminished motivation, coupled with personal issues, had taken its toll. Amazingly, it wasn’t until the following Wednesday that Ablett’s teammates, fans and the media got wind of the scoop.
Only 18 months earlier Ablett had been named the Norm Smith medalist after one of the great solos in Grand Final history – 9 goals in a narrow loss to Hawthorn. Now Geelong fans were flooding the Herald Sun switchboard in tears asking for confirmation that the whispers were true. The next day’s headline left them in no doubt: “Ablett Quits”.
Internally, the Cats were in crisis mode. Devastated locals were soon desperate. “Bugger Ford. Bugger Pyramid. Save Ablett. Save Geelong” read one bumper sticker seen on cars in the region. “It was like a death in the family,” said Geelong veteran and Ablett teammate Neville Bruns. “We were all pretty shaken. We knew he had a lot of football left in him.”
Sensing that any extra pressure would push Ablett further away, Geelong officials publicly respected his wishes and gave him space to think. In Blight, he’d also had a coach who knew well the often unbearable strain of expectation and the rabid, parochial fandom that could eat away at a lone-wolf.
Soon ‘Ablett sightings’ became a constant source of speculation in the Geelong region. Someone would see him fishing, then he turned up in North Ballarat. Only months after disappearing into what he hoped was obscurity, Ablett was more famous and more talked-about than ever.
Then, just as surprisingly as he’d disappeared, he bobbed up again in the middle of the season. After a change of heart, Ablett’s one-man sideshow would make for one of the highest-profile Reserves games in history when he turned out in a Round 12 curtain-raiser between the Cats and Hawthorn. Seventeen possessions and 3 goals later, he’d done enough to book a senior return. Ablett was saved and with him, a weight of the misery and gloom had been lifted from the whole of Geelong.
3. Next score wins – 1989 Panasonic Cup
He was already assured his place in West Coast Eagles lore, Paul Peos. Two years earlier - back in the first round of 1987 – the 19-year-old university student fired off the very first kick in the fledgling club’s history in the big time.
If you’re looking for an even more obscure piece of Paul Peos trivia than that, you’re in luck. Peos was also the first and last man to win a game for his side using the ‘first score wins’ rule introduced for the 1989 Panasonic Cup. In a nutshell, this meant that if the scores were level at the end of the game, play would continue until such time as either side scored.
Peos’s big moment came in the dying minutes of the Eagles-Hawks quarter-final clash at Waverley, amid a mad scramble after teammate Laurie Keane had kicked two late goals to tie the scores at 88 apiece. After West Coast repelled a Hawks attack, Peos found himself free at half forward and bounded in to slot the point that won it. The only problem was that no-one seemed to have explained the rule to the players themselves, so Hawks players shaped to receive a kick-in and their opposition to defend.
After what seemed an unnecessary delay in the circumstances, it was the sound of the siren that sparked Eagles players into wild celebrations, though they didn’t appear to have any idea of how Peos’s game-winning score had come about.
“I would say, going by that reaction, that the players didn’t quite know the rule,” said Seven’s Dennis Cometti. For their efforts, the Eagles players were escorted off the ground by mounted police in front of a near-empty grandstand. And Peos? He was dropped for the semi-final and the Eagles lost it by a solitary point to Melbourne. Served them right, really.
4. Collingwood bury the Colliwobbles – 1991
Collingwood had plenty of headline-grabbing moments before the 1991 season kicked off. Club legend Harry Collier predicted that the Pies were not only good enough to go back-to-back, but they’d win four flags on the bounce. No pressure, then.
Maybe it was fair enough that fans were optimistic – their first flag in 32 years was now flapping away gloriously in the breeze, somehow they’d turned Terry Keays into top-rated prospect Jason McCartney, and even speculatively (cheekily?) added retired Brownlow medalist Gerard Healy to their list during the draft period. But letting your cheer squad prepare a Round 1 banner that read ‘The dawning of a decade of dominance’ seemed an excess of both alliteration and hubris.
Still, none of that was as bizarre as the celebration that went down at the Victoria Park ceremony in which club captain Tony Shaw was to be crowned Moomba Monarch. There, Magpies legends Bob Rose and Lou Richards, along with newly-minted Premiership star Darren Millane, dug up a section of Victoria Park turf and ceremonially buried the ‘Colliwobbles’, the club’s curse through those barren decades of toil.
By season’s end the hopes of back-to-back glory felt like a fever dream. With fingers pointing in every direction, Collingwood’s premiership hangover was epic. By the end of Round 12 they’d lost six on the trot and lost their superstar Peter Daicos to a disastrous Achilles injury. Not only had they squandered their shot at a second flag but they missed the finals altogether. Gerard Healy never fronted, either.
5. Kerry Good’s after-the-siren goal - 1980
Okay, technically this shouldn’t count as a pre-season moment because it occurred in the middle of July, but these were the days when the night premiership was spread out over the course of the regular season and was treated with something close to the esteem of a league match. Especially by Collingwood supporters.
Poor Kerry Good. I bet it’s all that people want to talk about when he introduces himself. Not the worst thing to be known for, mind you. The Roos utility had a pretty good evening during the 1980 night grand final against the Magpies but he’ll always be remembered for the 35-metre set-shot after the siren that broke Magpie hearts again and got his side home. Pies fans are still filthy about this, claiming that the final siren had blown well before Good took the his mark.
Looking at this clip really is a voyage into a lost world of duffle coats, cold coin entry and appallingly lax security standards. You could re-watch it on a loop; Good moving in to kick with gradually-increasing urgency as a mob of young fans stream towards him attempting to put him off his kick.
One overzealous supporter even jumps from the side a good two metres closer to his boot than the Collingwood player on the mark. If that happened now and Ahmed Saad was taking the kick, he would have been tackled to the ground barely a quarter of the way through his run-up. By the time Good’s kick sailed through fans were swamping the hero, buried as he was under a pile of teammates. Magic.
6. St Kilda ‘breaks the drought’ – 1996
There’s a kind of in-built obsolescence to pre-season games now. They’re purely functional. Tune-ups in which coach and player just hopes to get some match practice in without sustaining injuries and football-starved fans get a fix of live action. They’re not professional sporting contests, they’re corporate brainstorming sessions with spectators.
It wasn’t always like that, so allow me a moment here to address some deeply embarrassing personal failings. To be a St Kilda supporter at any time in history beyond the specific period between 1965 and 1973 is a story mostly paved with either misery and self-loathing or a near-lethal dose of delusion. There’s no third option.
In 1991 the Saints had made their first finals appearance since 1973, got bounced in tight shoot-out against Geelong and then the following year fell to an arguably inferior Footscray outfit. In the context of the previous 20 years this qualified as a raging success. Everything good that fans of proper clubs got to enjoy – star players who didn’t walk out in frustration, a stable administration, a hot-shot coach, Premierships, even the simple but underrated joy of complacency - was just around the corner. Or so we thought.
In actual fact St Kilda was heading for a few more brick walls, but nothing and I mean nothing was going to stop us celebrating our 1996 Ansett Cup ‘premiership’ win against Carlton as though we’d just gone back-to-back-to-back in September. Carlton? Imagine that! The Blues had beaten St Kilda to a pulp as a kind of sideline hobby during years of greater glories. I went to this game with my Carlton-supporter cousins. They must have been wondering why they couldn’t buy a winner’s poster on the way in. They’d barely had time to Blu-tack their ’95 Premiers WEGs to the wall.
Now they were our victim, tossed aside by Nicky Winmar and his electrifying pace. Who needed Tony Lockett anyway?
Is this just projection? It felt like these things mattered in 1996. After the game Saints crowded around the presentation dais as though they were about to be shown the Shroud of Turin. Players smiled genuine smiles at having won and grimaced at having lost. This was something a player put on his CV. Around that time, Dermott Brereton might actually have deed-polled his middle name to “5 day, 5 night”, I’m not sure.
It probably meant more to fans though. I was one of the poor pathetic losers with one foot up on the fence in anticipation of the final siren’s call. We’d waited 30 years for this so running straight onto the ground at the conclusion of the game was a non-negotiable. As I leapt over that fence, crouched into the landing position and then sprinted into the centre of the ground, it wasn’t plain old Waverley Park air in my lungs but the previously unknown taste of Premiership glory.
Pre-season premiership glory, sure, but St Kilda fans are desperados. We have no shame. Frank Lampard once said that the problem with losing to Tottenham is that they print DVDs of it for the next 10 years. St Kilda are Tottenham. Probably always will be.
It’s easy to forget feeling like that about pre-season games. Almost 67,000 people parked in the notoriously horrible VFL Park car park to watch that game. As St Kilda fans stood there watching Michael Tuck present Winmar with the medal struck in honour of Hawthorn’s old skipper, we genuinely felt like the Premiership magic was being passed on to us.
Football: where we go to tell ourselves the most outrageous lies of all.
