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)