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From Wills to Milburn, some things never change

5th August, 2008
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Roar Guru
5th August, 2008
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Darren Milburn of Geelong and Simon Black of Brisbane in action during the AFL Round 12 match between the Geelong Cats and Brisbane Lions at Skilled Stadium.\" title=\"Darren Milburn of Geelong and Simon Black of Brisbane in action during the AFL Round 12 match between the Geelong Cats and Brisbane Lions at Skilled Stadium. GSP Images

With this week’s AFL round named after founding father Tom Wills, it was a pleasant and timely surprise to find a biography of the great man sitting on my doorstep when I arrived home one day last week.

This week’s Walkley Awards

Author Greg de Moore sent it to me on the recommendation of a mutual friend, Kevin Taylor, who puts in countless very poorly rewarded hours in maintaining the Footystats website.

De Moore, a 50-year-old Sydney psychiatrist, has never written a book of any kind before, but has a love of football ingrained in him after he migrated to North Coburg in Melbourne from Sri Lanka with his mother and father.

Dad was a rugby man, but accepted the local code as long as everyone in the house barracked for the same team, which turned out to be Carlton.

The youngster played with the old Paramount club in Coburg and at Fawkner High School before winning a scholarship to Wesley College. There, he came under the influence of a teacher called Roy Park, who played one cricket Test for Australia against England in the 1920-21 season (he was bowled first ball in his only innings) and topped the VFL goalkicking in 1913 with 53 goals for University.

De Moore didn’t played football for Wesley, though.

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“Academic interests took over, particularly maths and science, which led me to study medicine,” he told The Roar.

He says in the introduction to his book that he first came across Wills’ name in a short article which revealed that he had committed suicide by stabbing himself in the heart – no mean feat, when you come to think of it.

I haven’t had time to read all of the book yet, but flicking through the pages reveals some great insights into Wills’s life.

The grandson of a convict who was transported after escaping the noose for highway robbery, young Wills grew up in the foothills of the Grampians, northwest of Melbourne, where he played a lot with Aboriginal children and learnt to speak their language.

De Moore points out that there is no direct evidence of Wills playing their game of Marn Grook, which some credit as being an ancestor of Australian football, but he may have seen it played.

Sent to Rugby in England to be educated, Wills became an accomplished cricket player and later administrator on his return to Australia, and famously wrote to the editor of Bell’s Life in Victoria that if a football club could be “got up,” it “would be of a vast benefit to any cricket-ground to be trampled upon, and would make the turf quite firm and durable; besides which it would keep those who are inclined to become stout from having their joints encased in useless superabundant flesh.”

Wills and three others drew up the first known written rules of Australian football on May 17, 1859, at the Parade Hotel in East Melbourne, ending with the tenth and final rule stipulating: “The Ball, while in play, may under no circumstances be thrown.”

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Which Geelong defender Darren Milburn did, to himself, during last Saturday’s game against Richmond, for which he was caught by an alert umpire.

But that was the least of Milburn’s rule transgressions.

His worst, when he slung Richmond’s Shane Edwards into the ground, concussing him, went unnoticed by any of the three blind mice in a game in which Geelong got the better of the free kicks by 30 to 18.

Perhaps the umpires’ allocation of frees was a reaction to some of Fremantle’s tactics against Geelong a few weeks earlier, but the Cats don’t need any extra protection. They’re more than good enough to win without any help.

And I wonder what Tom Wills would make of some of the umpiring interpretations these days.
One example is when a player is caught in a so-called “chicken wing” tackle, held by one arm when he has the ball in the other hand.

The laws of the game say that if the ball is jolted free in such a tackle it’s play on unless the player has had prior opportunity to dispose of it. But it’s almost inevitably paid as a free against the man who loses the ball, prior opportunity or not.

Milburn’s treatment of Edwards was, fortunately, picked up by the match review committee and rated worthy of a four-game suspension, which he could have had reduced to two because of his previous good record if he had pleaded guilty.

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But he chose to challenge the charge, and escaped with one week as a result of a technicality that downgraded the severity of the contact to Edwards’s head because he was hurt when it hit the ground.
Tribunal chairman David Jones recommended that this anomaly should be cleared up by introducing a rule covering “a dangerous tackle, a throw tackle or a spear tackle.”

Finally, it’s good to see Andrew Demetriou’s admission that there could need to be a change to the way the “all-clear” is given after a score. This came about as a result of the “missing point” in the Swans v Crows game on July 26.

But hopefully those doing the review will also look at the time wasted in this process and get the goal umpire to signal, say by raising an arm, that there has been a score of some kind, thereby stopping the clock, as soon as the ball crosses the line, as happens when the ball goes out of bounds.

The goal umpire could then signal whether the score was a goal or behind after getting the all-clear from the field umpire.

Of course. we won’t know if the clock stops or not if it’s in the last five minutes and we’re watching Channel Ten, will we?

Greg de Moore will be guest speaker at Melbourne Football Club’s lunch on Friday, and has written an article for this weekend’s AFL Record. His book – Tom Wills – His Spectacular Rise and Tragic Fall -is published by Allen & Unwin.

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