Teams 9 Bernie Naylor Medallist Brad Smith (Subiaco) | Matches played 94 | |
Premiers West Perth
(18th premiership) Minor premiers Subiaco
(8th minor premiership) Sandover Medallist Shane Beros (Swan Districts) | ||
The 2003 WAFL season was the 119th season of the various incarnations of the West Australian Football League. For this season the WAFL reverted briefly to playing its semi-finals as a “double-header”, a policy abandoned for good at the end of the 2005 season, and also reverted to a twenty-game home-and-away season with three byes which has continued to this day.
On the field, 2003 saw the end of East Perth’s hat-trick of premierships as longtime rivals West Perth avenged their thrashing in the previous season’s Grand Final, in the process becoming the first WAFL team to hold an opponent goalless since soon-defunct Midland Junction held West Perth themselves goalless in the opening round of 1916. Their Grand Final victims, Subiaco, were however to use this season as a springboard to the longest dynasty in the WA(N)FL since South Fremantle’s famous teams of the late 1940s and early 1950s, with four consecutive minor premierships and five flags between 2003 and 2008. East Perth dominated the first two thirds of the season with the Falcons but after their goalless score they suffered major problems off the field and fell to third.
On the debit side, Peel Thunder, after three relatively promising seasons and the granting of a new five-year licence during April to secure their status in the WAFL, returned to rock bottom, losing their first seventeen matches and looking certain of a second winless season before an upset victory at Fremantle Oval against a South Fremantle team expected to break into a seemingly settled top four. They were not helped by the loss via transfer to East Fremantle after six games of their only competent forward in Scott Simister. The Sharks, historically the league’s most successful club, sunk to a level not seen during the twentieth century owing to the loss due to injury and transfer of their regular ruck division, which left them critically short of height after David Dwyer fell injured in the fifth round. The blue and whites lead Peel by only one match for most of the year, and despite winning five of their last seven matches, East Fremantle were to win a mere nineteen of eighty matches between 2003 and 2006, the worst four consecutive seasons in their history.