With Fox Footy celebrating ‘Retro Round’ this weekend, Tony Greenberg has tapped into his five decades of dedicated Yellow and Black barracking to provide an interesting snapshot of what the game at the highest level used to look like. Here is his bullet-point summary of how it was back in the day...
- Woollen guernseys.
- Lace-up guernseys.
- Clean guernseys minus sponsor logos.
- Yellow shorts (worn for just a few games by the Tigers in 1975 due to the arrival of colour TV in Australia).
- Umpires in white uniforms.
- Goal umpires in white, laboratory-style coats.
- Goal umpires signalling goals or behinds with their thumbs rather than pointer fingers.
Roger Dean in a woolen Richmond guernsey
- Players wading through a sea of streamers and cut-up, phone book ‘confetti’ on-field.
- Cheer squad banners on fences around the ground.
- Cheer squads conducting coin collections pre-game and/or half-time via a large blanket, which they carried around the boundary line.
- The ‘Peanut Man’ at league venues, particularly Princes Park, spruiking “Peanuts, shilling a bag”.
- The call of “Drinks, lollies, chocolates and potato chips” by the pimply-faced, teenage, mobile food vendors.
- Scanlens footy cards, with pink bubblegum.
- Players wearing special, club-designed, dressing-gowns on match-day.
Kevin Bartlett in a lace-up Richmond guernsey
- Players wearing black shorts at home games and white shorts at away games.
- Fans wearing duffel coats emblazoned with a wide variety of club badges (including their favourite players).
- Membership tickets, which had to be clipped by the turnstile attendants.
- The uniqueness of suburban league grounds, especially the sardine-tin-shaped Glenferrie Oval.
- Standing in the outer at all league grounds, apart from the MCG or Waverley Park.
- Walking from one end of the ground to the other each quarter, to get a better look at Royce (Hart) and co. strutting their stuff up forward for the Tigers.
- A centre diamond formation before the centre square.
- Muddy grounds, especially in the middle, where the cricket pitches were.
- Players sucking on oranges at three-quarter time.
- The Tigerettes, Bluebirds and Swanettes.
- Drop kicks, stab kicks, punt kicks and torpedo punts.
- The reserves played as a curtain-raiser to the main game each week.
- The under-19s.
- All VFL games played on a Saturday afternoon.
John Northey plays through the streamers on the MCG
- VFA football televised on Channel 0 (later known as Channel 10) on Sundays.
- Metropolitan and country recruiting zones for league clubs.
- Form Fours (the means by which league clubs could sign interstate players).
- The June 30 clearance deadline (the final day each year that clubs could recruit players in-season).
- World of Sport on Sundays, hosted by Ron Casey, with the main footy features of the show being the ‘Coaches Corner’ and ‘Football Panel’ segments.
- The Army Reserve Cup on Sundays.
- ‘Football Inquest’ on Channel Seven, hosted by Mike Williamson.
- Channel Seven football commentators – Mike Williamson, ‘Butch’ Gale, Ted Whitten, Bob Skilton, ‘Bluey’ Adams, Jack Edwards, Peter Landy, Peter Ewin, Lou Richards, Ian Robertson, Peter McKenna, Doug Wade, etc.
- Channel Two football commentators – Doug Heywood, Doug Bigelow, Dick Mason, Doug Mason, Thorold Merrett, Ken Dakin, etc.
- Alf Brown’s comprehensive preview of the match of the day in ‘The Herald’ each Friday evening.
A Richmond Cheer Squad duffle coat
- Lou Richards’ ‘Kiss of Death’ preview in ‘The Sun’.
- Harry Beitzel’s ‘Footy Week’ magazine.
- Grabbing the ‘Sporting Globe’ – ‘the pink paper with the punch’, as it was known – on a Saturday night to read the hot-off-the-press match reports.
- ‘The Captain’ (Jack Dyer) and ‘The Major’ (Ian Major) calling games on 3KZ.
- Attempting to listen to football commentary on 3UZ and 3DB in between a multitude of horse-racing calls from metropolitan and country tracks throughout Australia.
- Excellent Grand Final day entertainment at the ground provided by the Army band.
- A huge bunch of balloons, in the colours of the competing Grand Final teams, released when the players burst through their respective cheer squads’ banners on that ‘one day in September’.
- Coloured footballs kicked into the crowd by the competing Grand Final teams, after they ran out on to the MCG for the big season-decider.
