History
The Fremantle Football Club (originally known as Unions and unrelated to either an earlier club and the current AFL club of the same name) had won ten premierships in the fourteen years that they were in the WA Football Association (now known as the West Australian Football League). By 1899, however, the club suffered from financial problems that caused the club to disband. The South Fremantle Football Club was formed to take their place following an application to the league by Griff John, who would be appointed secretary of the new club, with Tom O'Beirne the inaugural president. Most players, however, were from the defunct Fremantle club.
The new club did well in its first year, finishing runners-up. However, over the next three seasons the performance fell away badly and, in April 1904 a Fremantle newspaper confidently reported that South Fremantle would not appear again. However, the club decided to carry on and centreman Harry Hodge took over as skipper, but the season was a disaster. The club won only one game.
They won their first premiership in 1916 and went back-to-back in 1917, both times defeating their local rivals, East Fremantle in the final and challenge final. The 1930s were not as successful, marred by the death of the 23-year-old captain-coach Ron Doig as a result of injuries sustained in a match. After World War II, South experienced their greatest era, with the arrival of future Hall of Fame members Steve Marsh, Bernie Naylor, John Todd and Clive Lewington. Between 1945 and 1956 they would win six premierships, be runners-up three times and make the finals in every season. Since then, however, they have won five more premierships, in 1970, 1980, 1997, 2005 and 2009.
South Fremantle was the first WAFL club to have won 10 grand finals since World-War II. Four of their 13 premierships were won against the club's traditional rivals, East Fremantle.
In 2009 South Fremantle's League and Reserves sides won their respective Grand Finals. This was the first time the club had taken the Premiership double since 1954.
Read more about this topic: South Fremantle Football Club
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)