May 8, 1897 – 120 years ago today – South Melbourne played its first official VFL/AFL match.
It was the match of the round against Melbourne at Lake Oval in the first round of a new-look competition formed via a breakaway by the stronger clubs from the old VFA, which had run since 1878.
The match took top billing after South had been runners-up to Collingwood in the 1896 VFA and Melbourne had finished fourth.
After a cool and misty morning, a glorious autumn afternoon unfolded and at 3pm the official journey of the South Melbourne / Sydney Swans began.
Elsewhere at the same time Collingwood played St Kilda at Victoria Park, Fitzroy played Carlton at Brunswick Street, and Geelong hosted Essendon at Corio Bay.
As renowned football journalist and author Jim Main details so well in his book In The Blood, captain of the first South Melbourne team in the VFL was 30-year-old Bill ‘Buns’ Fraser.
Fraser was a highly-rated forward who had played initially for fierce rivals Port Melbourne in the VFA before joining South in 1895, after he had been forced to stand out of football for 12 months to secure a transfer.
The South Melbourne Record the following week noted that the ground for the club’s first official VFL match was “nice and springy after the recent heavy rains”, with a good crowd “including a number of ladies”.
South kicked to the outer end in the first quarter and trailed two behinds to Melbourne’s three goals at quarter-time.
Denis ‘Dinny’ McKay kicked the club’s first goal late in the second quarter when he snapped “smartly”, according to the Record, and the ball bounced through the goals.
Melbourne went on to win 6.8 (44) to South Melbourne’s 3.9 (27).
For the first two years of the VFL, all teams comprised 20 players and each player was on the ground from the start.
The first South Melbourne team to play in the VFL against Melbourne on May 8, 1897 was:
B: Fred Sigmont, Charles McCartney, ‘Bob’ Swannie
HB: Tom Gilligan, Dave Adamson, Fred Waugh
C: Jack Southern, Frank O’Hara, Herb Howson
HF: Allen Burns, Dinny McKay, Mick Minihan
F: Jack Adamson, Bill Fraser, Jack Deas
FOLL: Dick Gibson, ‘Mick’ Pleass, Harry Purdy, Bill Blackwood.
ROVER: Bill Windley.
Match Scores:
South 0.2 1.4 3.6 3.9 (27)
Melbourne 3.2 4.3 5.4 6.8 (44)
South Goals: McKay, O’Gorman, Purdy.
The 20 players from the first side will forever hold a special place in club history, listed 1-20 in alphabetical order at the top of the South Melbourne / Sydney Swans all-time player list.
South posted its first VFL win the following week against Carlton by four points, when McKay kicked two of their six goals and all players wore black armbands after the death earlier in the week of Dave Adamson, father of players David and Jack Adamson.
South thrashed St Kilda the following week by 57 points and accounted for Collingwood by eight points in Round 4, but thereafter the team’s form fell away and they finished the 14-match season in fifth position with eight wins and a draw.
Having narrowly missed the finals despite a one-point win over Fitzroy in the last round, the club was hit hard four days later by the sudden death of 30-year-old McKay, who had played every game in the inaugural VFL season and was the team’s leading goal-kicker with 14. He passed away from a burst appendix and ensuing peritonitis, a commonly fatal illness at the time.
The Record reported that the funeral procession comprising a hearse laden with floral tributes, two mourning coaches and more than 100 horse-drawn vehicles, with the South players walking in front of it, took an hour to pass as it made its way from McKay’s house in South Melbourne through the city to the cemetery.
It was a sad end to the first VFL season of the South Melbourne Football Club, which had been operating in varying forms for 30 years.
Two years later, in 1899, Dave Adamson captained South’s first VFL premiership side, when they beat Fitzroy by one point in the grand final. Fraser, Howson, O’Hara, Pleass and Windley also played in that team.
Howson, also a first-class cricketer for Victoria, later coached South to the premiership in 1918 and third place in 1919. He was inducted into the Swans Hall of Fame in 2009.
