I Love Footy

Just wanted to say that I love being an AFL fan, in particular a Collingwood Fan! Such a great game!

The Machine, by Michael Roberts, tells the inside story of the great Collingwood side of 1927-30.
A freak piece of play

Some critics pointed to the St Kilda match at the Junction Oval as the game in which Collingwood might be tested. The conditions were bleak and the ground was caked with mud. Almost 30,000 people turned out to watch a “gloriously sustained struggle on a horrible day”.

St Kilda led by five points at half-time, the Magpies by one point at the last change. Late in the match it appeared as if the home side would become the first to knock the Magpies off their perch in 1929. Then, just when all looked lost for the Pies, a freak piece of play made it seem as if fate was playing its part in the Collingwood streak.

Gordon Coventry, well held for most of the day, gathered a loose ball just before the final bell. Almost simultaneously he copped a bump from St Kilda’s full-back Ernie Loveless, and tried to kick the ball in the direction of goal. The bump “shook Coventry to his foundations”, while the ball miraculously made contact with the side of his left boot and trickled through for a goal, to give the Magpies the game by four points. Ever the gentleman, the self-effacing Coventry all but apologised to his opponent, saying, “It was one of the flukes of the game.”

In keeping with [club president Harry] Curtis’s pre-season pledge to aim for records, Gordon Coventry booted an individual record of 16 goals in a game against a hapless Hawthorn before a deliriously happy Victoria Park crowd. He bagged four goals in the first five minutes and an astounding eight in the first quarter, to set him up to break the decade-old record of 14 kicked by South Melbourne’s Harold Robertson. ‘Nuts’ broke the old mark in the last quarter and was then congratulated off the ground by friends and foes alike. Even the umpire shook Coventry’s hand. Another to shake his hand in the rooms was John Wren, the club’s occasional benefactor, who slipped a 50-pound note into Coventry’s enormous palm. That was a huge sum of money in those dark times.

The only fear for those within the club was that the team could “go stale” late in the season, as they had in the previous year.

There were, however, no signs of staleness when the club ended the regular season with an emphatic 56-point win over Melbourne in front of 41,316 fans. It was the first and only time a team has gone through a home-and-away season undefeated, and seemingly the perfect entrée into the finals.


Sorry Saints! Better Luck next time!