Possibly the best performance ever by a VFL/AFL team in the home and away season occurred in round 13, 1983 when Fitzroy defeated North Melbourne at the Junction Oval.
It was more than half way through the season, with North on top of the ladder and Fitzroy third.
Fitzroy totally obliterated the Kangaroos to win 34.16.220 to 10.10.70. I’m pretty sure it was the highest winning margin ever recorded against a ladder-leading side.
The current AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou played for North Melbourne in that game, probably one he would rather forget. Ruckman Matt Rendell booted eight goals for the Lions, Mick Conlan and Bernie Quinlan seven each.
Here’s a clip showing two of Conlan’s goals:
Conlan is best remembered for kicking the winning goal in the 1986 elimination final against Essendon:
The question of the greatest team performance in V/AFL history is one that has been of considerable interest to me for many years. Fitzroy’s undoubtedly would be the leading candidate, but there are a few others that certainly might match it.
In his book The NBA from Top to Bottom, Kyle Wright attempted to rank all 1,153 NBA teams from “most dominant” to “least dominant”. The small number of games in a football season has made me think of what Wright would do trying to rank the best team performances in V/AFL history. I can actually think of a few that would have a chance of comparing with Fitzroy’s in Round 13 of 1983:
- Essendon in Round 4 of 1911: a sensational attacking performance for its time on a ground that could hardly have been easy with poor drainage and the wettest summer on record beforehand
- Richmond in the 1929 Second Semi: a superlative display to end the run of Collingwood, unbeaten since 1928, they played so tough that the Magpies kicked only 2.8 to half time on a dry day
- Carlton in Round 2 of 1969 (one very like Fitzroy fourteen-and-a-half years later) they obliterated a class Hawthorn team to the point of being the first team to achieve 200 points, With sixty scoring shots and Jesaulenko kicking twelve behinds, the Blues might have won by more. This was Hawthorn’s only loss in ten games over 1968 and 1969.
- West Coast in Round 4 of 1999: An absolutely super defensive display kept an Essendon side with the nucleus of the unbeatable 2000 combination to 1.3 (9) for three quarters in perfect conditions. So super was the Eagles’ defence that Matthew Lloyd was moved into the backline!
It would be interesting to see what expert football historians would rate as the best team performance in V/AFL history? (I myself believe both from reading and experience that finals would actually account for very few of these. In chess, it is said that players blunder more under the pressure of title matches than in tournaments; the same may well be true of football teams in finals pressure vis-à-vis home-and-away games)