18th season of the Victorian Football League (VFL)
The 1914 VFL season was the 18th season of the Victorian Football League (VFL), the highest level senior Australian rules football competition in Victoria. The season featured ten clubs, ran from 25 April until 26 September, and comprised an 18-game home-and-away season followed by a finals series featuring the top four clubs.
The premiership was won by the Carlton Football Club for the fourth time, after it defeated South Melbourne by six points in the 1914 VFL Grand Final.
Background
In 1914, the VFL competition consisted of ten teams of 18 on-the-field players each, with no "reserves", although any of the 18 players who had left the playing field for any reason could later resume their place on the field at any time during the match. Each team played each other twice in a home-and-away season of 18 rounds; once the 18 round home-and-away season had finished, the 1914 VFL premiers were determined through the amended Argus system.
On 16 October 1914, three weeks after the end of the 1914 season, the University Football Club dropped out of the VFL and folded. The reasons given for this decision were:
- Firstly, after three promising seasons in 1908–1910, University had become very uncompetitive, finishing last in 1911–1914, and losing its last 51 consecutive matches.
- Secondly, the club had found it difficult to maintain a constant lineup since the players' primary focus was on their studies rather than football, particularly during mid-year examinations.[1]
- Thirdly, since University's admission to the VFL in 1908, player payments in the VFL had become commonplace, and were officially permitted from 1911, whereas University chose to remain a fully amateur club drawing solely from university students,[2] which had caused a number of players to defect to other clubs.
As such, both the club and the VFL had conceded it would be virtually impossible for University to become viable and/or competitive in an increasingly professional competition. Despite the outbreak of World War I eleven weeks earlier, the war was not given as a contributing factor in University's decision, especially as the conflict was not, at the time, expected to escalate to the extent it did.[1]
Following University's dissolution, players who wished to continue playing in the VFL were all cleared to Melbourne through an informal arrangement beneficial to both clubs:[3] University wished to see its best players playing together in the same VFL club to retain the strength of its own team for intervarsity competition,[1] and Melbourne, which had mostly struggled since its 1900 premiership due to the lack of a natural recruiting district (formal zoning was not introduced until the following year), gained exclusive access to a valuable source of recruits.[2] Among those who transferred from University to Melbourne were Jack Brake, Claude Bryan, Jack Doubleday, Dick Gibbs, Roy Park, and Percy Rodriguez.[3][4][5] The University club reformed in 1919, and continues to play amateur football in the Victorian Amateur Football Association to this day.
Home-and-away season
Round 1
Round 2
Round 3
Round 4
Round 5
Round 6
Round 7
Round 8
Round 9
Round 10
Round 11
Round 12
Round 13
Round 14
Round 15
Round 16
Round 17
Round 18
Ladder
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Premiers
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Qualified for finals
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Rules for classification: 1. premiership points; 2. percentage; 3. points for
Average score: 60.3
Source: AFL Tables
Finals series
All of the 1914 finals were played at the MCG so the home team in the semi-finals and Preliminary Final is purely the higher ranked team from the ladder but in the Grand Final the home team was the team that won the Preliminary Final.
Semi-finals
Preliminary final
Grand final
