1956 VFL Season - 1956 Summer Olympics

1956 Summer Olympics

From 22 November to 8 December, the 1956 Summer Olympics were to be held in Melbourne, with a re-configured Melbourne Cricket Ground as its Main Stadium.

The need to accommodate this fact brought certain unusual changes to the 1956 VFL home-and-away season:

• Given VFL requirement that its Grand Final must be held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the 1956 Grand Final had to be brought forward to 15 September in order to allow sufficient time for the MCG pre-Olympic reconfiguration.
• Given the VFL additional requirement of an 18 match home-and-away season, an earlier Grand Final also demanded an earlier start to the season.
• Due to the time constraints of the demolition of the old Grandstand and the construction of the new Northern (Olympic) Stand, the reconstructed and refurbished Melbourne Cricket Ground would not be available to Melbourne for its home matches until 12 May 1956.

It was a well-established VFL practice to treat the Melbourne-Richmond and South Melbourne-St Kilda team pairs in a particular way: at no time would a pair of teams play a home game on the same day. This was done for:

• Casual staffing reasons: the ground managements of the Melbourne Cricket Ground and Richmond Cricket Ground (Punt Road Oval), and those of the South Melbourne Cricket Ground (Lake Oval) and St Kilda Cricket Ground (Junction Oval) drew on the same local casual labour pool.
• Transport reasons: the grounds of each pair were served by the same tram, bus, and train routes.

The fact that Melbourne could not use the Melbourne Cricket Ground before 12 May (round 5), and that Melbourne would therefore have 4 "away" matches in rounds 1-4 was demonstrably unfair to the other 11 teams, because Melbourne would then have 4 "home" matches in rounds 12-15 (closer to the "business end" of the season). It would be even more unjust to its "paired" team Richmond, who would be forced to play 4 "home" matches in rounds 1-4 and 4 "away" matches in rounds 12-15. To overcome this perceived anomaly in the best possible way, the VFL designated Melbourne's round 4 match against Fitzroy as a Melbourne "home" match and scheduled it to be played at the Punt Road Oval.

In order, to accommodate all these extraordinary issues, the VFL eventually determined that Melbourne would play their nine home and nine away matches as follows: (1) Away, (2) Away, (3) Away, (4) Home (Punt Road), (5) Home (MCG), (6) Away, (7) Home (MCG), (8) Away, (9) Home (MCG), (10) Home (MCG), (11) Away, (12) Home (MCG), (13) Home (MCG), (14) Home (MCG), (15) Away, (16) Away, (17) Home (MCG), (18) Away.

All of the other 11 teams' 1956 seasons were scheduled to accommodate Melbourne's extraordinary situation.