Early History of Australian Rules On Anzac Day
Further information: The VFL during the World Wars and VFL/AFL players who died in active serviceDuring many wars, Australian rules football matches have been played overseas in places like northern Africa and Vietnam as a celebration of Australian culture and as a bonding exercise between soldiers. Despite this, League football was not played on Anzac Day for many years; in 1959, for example, when all VFL games were played on Saturday afternoons, Anzac Day also fell on a Saturday, and the entire round was postponed to the following Saturday. The first VFL matches played on Anzac Day occurred the next year after an Act of Parliament which lifted the previous restrictions on this activity.
Over the years these games sometimes drew huge crowds, with the 1975 Carlton versus Essendon game attracting 77,770 fans to VFL Park, a then record for the day, while two years later Richmond and Collingwood drew 92,436 to the MCG.
In 1986 the league used Anzac Day to attempt its first ever doubleheader. Held at the MCG, Melbourne and Sydney played in the afternoon, followed after a 30 minute break by North Melbourne and Geelong in the evening under lights; due to a total crowd of only 40,117 and various logistical problems, the league has never attempted another doubleheader as of 2012.
Through the years until the mid-1990s, it was common for at least two matches to be played on the Anzac Day public holiday.
Read more about this topic: Anzac Day Clash
Famous quotes containing the words early, history, australian, rules and/or day:
“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“Each Australian is a Ulysses.”
—Christina Stead (1902–1983)
“The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a sincerity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)