Puneet Varma (Editor)

1915 VFA season

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Teams
  
10

Premiers
  
North Melbourne (5th premiership)

Minor premiers
  
North Melbourne (4th minor premiership)

The 1915 Victorian Football Association season was the 39th season of the Australian rules football competition.

Contents

The season was the first to be played while Australia was fighting in World War One, so the playing stocks of many teams were reduced by enlistments. The season itself was cut five weeks short to encourage more young men to enlist in the war effort. It was the last season played before the Association went into recess for two seasons during the peak of the war.

The premiership was won by the North Melbourne Football Club, after it defeated Brunswick by 48 points in the final on August 7. It was the club's fifth VFA premiership, and its second in a sequence of three premierships won consecutively between 1914 and 1918. North Melbourne won all fifteen premiership matches it played during 1915, becoming the first team to go undefeated through a season since Essendon (L.) in 1893; the season was part of a 58-match winning streak for North Melbourne which lasted from 1914–1919.

Premiership

The home-and-home season was to have been played over eighteen rounds, with each club playing the others twice. However, fighting was intensifying in Europe in World War I, and football was serving as a distraction which was dissuading men from enlisting to fight; as a result, the Association decided on 14 July to end the home-and-home season early after 13 matches, and proceed directly to the finals. The top four clubs contested a finals series under the amended Argus system to determine the premiers for the season.

Notable events

  • Over the off-season, the Association forced Northcote to move its playing base from Croxton Park to Northcote Park; the motion was approved by an 11–1 majority, and Northcote's delegate was the only vote against the move. The move was imposed because Croxton Park had been notorious for more than a decade for the unruly conduct of its patrons, which was generally blamed on the influence of the Croxton Park Hotel which adjoined the ground.
  • North Melbourne organised to play a match on August 14 against League team St Kilda, which had a bye in its premiership schedule that week, at the St Kilda Cricket Ground to raise money for Lady Stanley's Fund for Australian Wounded Soldiers. It was only the second time that a match had been played between the League and the Association since the breakaway of the League in 1897. Between 9,000–10,000 spectators attended, and £254/3/3 was raised. The football was played in bad spirit, and North Melbourne won 8.9 (57) to 4.7 (31) by 26 points.

    • References

    1915 VFA season Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA