By Paul Daffey ALL Western Region Football League games went ahead at the weekend, which was a relief after the cancellation of all senior matches the previous weekend because of an umpires’ strike, but the rapprochement was not achieved without argy-bargy.

By Paul Daffey What a mess in the west! The Western Region Football League Umpires Association was formed around the same time that the Western Region competition (originally the Footscray District league) was formed in 1931. Umpires to have come through the ranks in the western-suburbs competition include Mathew James, who’s officiated in three AFL [Read more]

By Paul Daffey THE Victorian Amateur Football Association is a Melbourne-wide competition, so clubs accept that occasionally they have to travel across town. Not so long ago that meant that clubs based around the VAFA heartland of the inner eastern suburbs had to cross the river (shudder) to play St Bernard’s at West Essendon or [Read more]

By Paul Daffey JASON Mifsud is a footballer who’s well known at all levels of the game, having achieved success as a playing-coach at Koroit in the Hampden Football League before becoming an assistant coach at St Kilda under Grant Thomas and the Western Bulldogs under Rodney Eade. In recent years Mifsud has worked with [Read more]

By Paul Daffey A FEW years ago, with questions still to be solved about the formation of the Castlemaine footy club, Magpies committeeman Maurie Crooke proposed that the club should take measures to establish just when it was created. Crooke organised for the Magpies to make a donation to the Castlemaine Historical Society, whose Aileen [Read more]

One of the great things about footy is that every ground is different. Unlike soccer and rugby pitches, which are uniform in dimension, footy grounds can be as big as the sky or as small as a pie, with straight wings or bulbous wings or a kink in one pocket. Another factor that sets grounds [Read more]

By Paul Daffey The AFL’s Indigenous Round this weekend will promote unity through sport. For an example of such unity, look no further than the link formed by two clubs on opposite sides of the country, from opposite sides of the demographic coin. Warnum is a West Australian Aboriginal community that was once known as [Read more]

Paul Daffey Essendon’s win over Hawthorn on Friday night has a lot to answer for. Not only did it end David Parkin’s career on ABC Radio (as detailed in The Age yesterday), but it set in train a weekend of madness in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Vermont, Balwyn, Noble Park … these are the powerhouse clubs [Read more]

In the Sheds By Paul Daffey Readers may remember a bag-of-bones midfielder with blond hair who played for Carlton in the Denis Pagan era. His name was Jon “Hopper” McCormick, and although he impressed during his 26 AFL games he was offloaded after the 2004 season. In recent years McCormick has lived in his home [Read more]