Scotch College

Scotch versus Xavier, 1913 style

Being the tale of how Scotch lost the fight but played and won the game.

WORDS: Mr MICHAEL MACNEIL (’50)

‘Fisticuffs and police’ is the heading on a newspaper cutting in the Scotch Archives.

The article which followed was not an account of a brawl or a prize fight but of the 1913 football match between Scotch and Xavier.

The match is described in two cuttings whose source is not known; one is probably from the Melbourne Argus.

Scotch won the match convincingly but not before several fights involving players, spectators and police. The reporter tells in the verbose style of the era how, in the first quarter, after a Scotch player was pushed in the back: ‘he turned to expostulate and was dropped by a right to the jaw’. When the player’s younger brother, a spectator, came to help his sibling he also ‘received a blow that sent him to the ground … but for the intervention of the field umpire and the police there might have been a brawl.’ Several similar incidents marred the rest of the game.

As might be expected, the report of the game in the Scotch Collegian omits any mention of unseemly incidents. It does however note that ‘It was not an interesting game to watch. There was little of clean open football. Our team…in a strenuous game showed a self-restraint of which the school feels proud.’

(Michael has catalogued these items while working as a volunteer in the Archives.) GS