1988 WAFL season

The 1988 WAFL season was the 104th season of the West Australian Football League in its various incarnations.

In many ways the “end of an era”, the 1988 season saw the membership base of most WAFL clubs severely affected by the transfer of the State’s best players to the West Coast, a problem only marginally ameliorated by reciprocal memberships given to many Eagle members. The WAFL was laced with several off-field controversies, with chief executive Peter Cumminsky refusing to allow an exhibition match in Vancouver which Subiaco and Swan Districts planned to play on the last Saturday in September, and opposing the WAFC over an Eagles reserves team and maximum transfer fees to VFL clubs being set $13,000 lower than what the clubs said was needed to actually develop the highest standard footballers – in effect funding “destitute” VFL clubs.

The season also saw the end of the exceptionally high scoring of the past decade: for the first time since 1977 the WA(N)FL did not see a single score of over 200 points or a match where both teams scored twenty goals, while the highest score of 27.20 (182) was the lowest since 1974. The average score of 103.97 points per team per game was the lowest since 1975.

Claremont and Subiaco continued to dominate the WAFL this year under coaches Gerard Neesham and Haydn Bunton Jr. (who in 1987 was rumoured to be going to Fitzroy as a replacement for David Parkin) but this time the Lions took the honours with their second convincing Grand Final win in three seasons. There was controversy because the Lions played Laurie Keene after the WAFL ruled on 7 September that a VFL match against Melbourne on the Queen’s Birthday, for which Keene travelled to Melbourne an emergency, counted as a WAFL game to determine eligibility for finals. Early-1980s power club Swan Districts, who lost champion coach John Todd to the Eagles and suffered the first of numerous financial crises in the subsequent fifteen years, became the first club since the colts competition began in 1957 to suffer the ignominy of finishing last in all three grades, although expectations the black and whites would suffer another lengthy period in the cellar were not fulfilled in subsequent seasons. South Fremantle, who had lost their last eighteen matches of 1987, convincingly won the WAFL’s pre-season competition and despite a second consecutive injury crisis with twenty-four senior list players unavailable as of Round 12, rebounded for their first finals appearance in five seasons due to the return of Maurice Rioli and the discovery of numerous young stars like Peter Sumich, Scott Watters and Stevan Jackson.