History of the AFL could be turned on its head Caroline Wilson
The Age
June 21, 2014 The history of Australian football will soon be turned on its head if a series of recommendations to the AFL Commission is accepted - recommendations that will rewrite the official birth date of the Australian Football League.
Fairfax Media understands a working party chaired by commission chairman Mike Fitzpatrick has accepted that the origins of the AFL competition should be backdated about a quarter of a century, from 1897 to as early as 1870 - the year Melbourne won the first recorded premiership.
In a move that would lift Carlton to the top of the premiership table on 22, ahead of Essendon on 20, the AFL is also expected to redefine the origins of the expanded national competition. Fitzroy would gain an extra flag, as would Collingwood, with the Magpies moving to 16.
The radical revision would correctly establish Australian football as one of the oldest in international existence. The prevailing view is that the completion of the research should lead to sweeping historic changes and would be announced by Fitzpatrick at the 2015 Hall of Fame presentation.
Although the VFL was officially renamed the AFL in 1990, history in future is expected to record that the Australian Football League truly began in 1987 - the year the Brisbane Bears and West Coast joined the competition. This is despite one consideration that AFL premierships should count from 1982 - the year South Melbourne relocated to Sydney.
Under the working party's proposal, premierships will fall under various categories. For example, Melbourne, should the competition's starting point be dated back to 1870, will increase its premiership tally from 12 to 15 but will boast no AFL flags, rather 12 VFL flags and a further three from the previous era.
Richmond will still boast 10 VFL flags but no AFL premierships, while Geelong's new total of 16 will equal Collingwood's but be broken up into seven VFA flags, six VFL and three AFL.
Hawthorn, which did not exist as an elite club until the 20th century, will not see its total premiership tally change, but the Hawks will boast the most AFL premierships, with four of their 11 falling in the national era.
Fitzpatrick is understood to have been close to announcing the historic changes at the 2014 Hall Of Fame function, but postponed the ratification pending more specific research into previously unrecorded club win-loss records and individual game and goal tallies.
The AFL chairman referred briefly to the historians' work at the recent function, which recognised a group of the game's founding fathers. They will also further examine the true influence of Marn Grook and indigenous Australians on the AFL code.
The league's new chief executive, Gillon McLachlan, told Fairfax Media: "There's a review being done but it hasn't come to the commission as yet. Any speculation as to what the outcome may be is premature."
But it is known that a group of historians and researchers led by the AFL's Col Hutchinson and author and academic Mark Pennings have also been searching to correctly credit some of the game's early champions with games previously not attributed to their records.
These include Australian football Hall of Famers Charles Brownlow, Peter ''The Great'' Burns, George Coulthard and Charlie Pannam. Brownlow's captaincy of a Geelong VFL premiership is not recognised in AFL records, while Burns, the game's first superstar, is credited with only 89 games for Geelong despite his extensive career in the VFA playing for South Melbourne.
Coulthard, three times the champion of the colony, died of tuberculosis at the age of 27 and despite seven years and a premiership with Carlton in the VFA, his playing record, according the the AFL, has a ''NA'' alongside it. Pannam's extensive VFA games for Collingwood are not recognised.
While individual bragging rights could prove a focus in the rewriting of the AFL's historic narrative, the Fitzpatrick-chaired committee is understood to be determined that previously unallocated premierships be categorised according to their competitions at the time.
When told of the proposed historic changes, Carlton's incoming president Mark LoGiudice said: "That's interesting, but to be honest I'd prefer a modern-day premiership."
The AFL Commission could also choose to backdate the birth of the competition, not to 1870 but to 1877 - the year the VFA was formed. This move was pushed strongly and publicly by Geelong in 2011 when its president Colin Carter presented the commission with a detailed submission to reclaim the game's ''lost years''.
In 1877, the VFA's founding, nine senior clubs made up the competition. Six of those - Carlton, Essendon, Geelong, North Melbourne (then known as Hotham), Melbourne and St Kilda - still underpin the AFL. Between 1877 and the formation of the VFL in 1896, Fitzroy, Richmond, Footscray and Collingwood joined the VFA.
Carter, a former AFL commissioner, presented the AFL with a detailed submission requesting the commission reclaim "20 forgotten years of our football history", in a move ridiculed in some quarters as a push to credit the Cats with its seven VFA premierships from that era.
But the commission took the Geelong submission on board and its argument through various historians that the VFA competition and Australian football origins deserved to be recognised as one of the world's oldest and most successful football codes.
"Our present Aussie Rules record book is wrong,'' historian Geoffrey Blainey said. "It is based on an old feud between two sets of football officials. It is time to end the feud.''
Blainey added of the 20 unrecognised VFA years: "The AFL record book ignores them or treats them as phantoms. If they don't take the field in or after 1897, they apparently don't exist, and yet their achievements are astonishing and a glory to the game."
Supporting the revision is the relevant fact that in the 20 VFA years up until the VFL's formation in 1897, traditional AFL clubs recorded 76 of the total 80 top-four finishes.
Among the wider implications for the game in rewriting its already extensive historic records has been the challenge to research team line-ups and scores from statistics seemingly no longer in existence.
Should 1870 be recorded as year one of the competition now known as the AFL, then the game's 150th celebrations would be brought forward from 2046 to 2020.
But as Carter argued in 2011: "Any restatement of history will involve additional research, arouse sensitivities, and spur new debates over gaps in the data. We should expect this but our commitment should be to do what is right rather than what is easy."
The Football Record from 1915 showing the premiers from 1870.http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/history-of-the-afl-could-be-turned-on-its-head-20140620-zsglu.html#ixzz35CqZZsiF
