Victorian Soccer Season Files - 1926

The 1926 season saw Footscray Thistle once again claim the Victorian Metropolitan League Championship. They were, however, knocked out in the first round of the Dockerty Cup by Melbourne Thistle. The Cup would end up being won by Naval Depot, the boys from Crib Point edging out St Kilda (featuring Sandy Lowe and Maurice Vandendriescche) 4-3 in the Final.

                                             Click on images to enlarge

Johnny Orr, Lyons, Calderwood and Templeton were again prominent for Thistle. They would lose J.Jeffries late in the season, after he was banned for life for striking a referee.

As in the previous season, there were now four divisions of the Metropolitan League. Albert Park, Prahran City, Box Hill and Heidelberg were all on the rise. Issues of promotion and relegation were not to be that straightforward though, as reports throughout the season contained talk of a proposed "District" scheme, which was eventually adopted.

Footscray Thistle became the team of the Footscray district, and in 1927 the Thistle name was not always used in reports. Cup winners Naval Depot, along with Melbourne Thistle and Melbourne Welsh, were among first division clubs that were not accepted into the District League for 1927. Neither was Northumberland and Durham United, which virtually killed them off (a Footscray United would emerge in the Melbourne and District League).

The discarded clubs hastily established the Melbourne and District League, which would end up comprising of two divisions of eight teams in 1927. The split was quite acrimonious, and after two seasons the District Scheme was abandoned, probably having done more harm than good.

The season's representative fixtures included the Local International (a huge win for Scotland), a North v South clash and a First Division v The Rest match. There does not appear to have been any state team games.

It took a bit of work to reconcile published results with the final published tables, as a few lower division results were missing. In this season 1-0 was the standard method of dealing with forfeits/walkovers though there was once case of a team being awarded a win and two points without the goal difference being altered.

Pleasingly enough goalscorers were named in the First Division results to establish that Preston's Doncaster was the top goalscorer with 11 goals for the season. Unfortunately I have yet to see his first name, or even an initial, appear in any newspaper reports. Especially sad given that he was a Victorian representative player, having scored twice in his only (known, as yet) game for the state against South Australia at the end of 1925. It is a shame a complete Victorian state team record has never been established, no "caps" have been awarded and we don't even have the first names of many of those players from that era.

Anyway, here it is, the...

Victorian Season File 1926