AFL Tasmania has announced today that the eighth memorable game to be inducted into the Tasmanian Football Hall of Fame is the last gasp victory by the Tasmanian state representative team over Western Australia at North Hobart Oval in 1970.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Tasmanian representative football was at a low ebb. The State competed unsuccessfully at the 1969 and 1972 Australian National Carnivals, being comprehensively beaten by the big 3 states of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. There were many rumblings that the teams that pulled on ‘The Map’ at this time were a shadow of those from Tasmania’s golden era from 1953 to 1966. There were a number of reasons for this, but chief amongst them was that Tasmanian football had lost scores of high quality players to Victoria to play in the VFL (precursor to the AFL).
The 1970 interstate game pitted a state, in Tasmania, which was feeling the full force of the emerging power of the VFL against a state, in Western Australia, which was still enjoying its relative isolation in an era when airline flights were still very costly and a novelty. So while nearly as many Western Australians were playing in the VFL they had six times the population to draw from and the overall impact was proportionately reduced.
The Western Australians arrived in Hobart in confident frame of mind. On Saturday 13 June they had come closer than ever before to recording an upset victory over the VFL in Melbourne, ultimately losing by just 6 points despite managing 30 scoring shots to 24. Moreover, the last time Western Australia had played Tasmania, at the previous year's Adelaide carnival, the Sandgropers had done virtually as they pleased all day en route to 113 point victory.
Subsequently, team captain Graham 'Polly' Farmer told Tasmanian journalists that his side simply could not countenance anything other than a convincing win. "If we can't beat Tasmania, we ought to give the game away," he declared, presumably with the intention of thereby inspiring his West Australian team mates.
Well, the statement was inspirational all right, but it would not be the men in yellow and black jumpers who would be thanking Farmer after the game. Such provocative declarations have a strange tendency to back fire, it seems, and after the supposedly undermanned Tasmania's had played superbly to buck the odds with a 2 point win, 'Advocate' journalist Allan Leeson could not restrain himself from archly observing that, in lieu of Farmer's comments, "there are now 20 redundant interstate footballers".
The official induction of the ‘Memorable Game’ will take place on 6 July at the Hall of Fame gala function at Wrest Point Casino.
Last Modified on 12/06/2012 17:14