1900 VFL premiership season
Melbourne Football Club, premiers
Teams	8
Premiers	Melbourne 1st premiership
Minor premiers	Fitzroy 2nd minor premiership
Leading Goalkicker Medallist	Albert Thurgood (Essendon) Teddy Lockwood (Geelong)
Matches played	70
Highest	20,181

The 1900 VFL season was the fourth season of the Victorian Football League (VFL), the highest level senior Australian rules football competition in Victoria. The season featured eight clubs, ran from 5 May until 22 September, and comprised a 14-game home-and-away season followed by a finals series featuring all eight clubs.

The premiership was won by the Melbourne Football Club for the first time, after it defeated Fitzroy by four points in the 1900 VFL Grand Final on 22 September.

Background

In 1900, the VFL competition consisted of eight teams of 18 on-the-field players each, with no "reserves", although any of the 18 players who had left the playing field for any reason could later resume their place on the field at any time during the match.

Each team played each other twice in a home-and-away season of 14 rounds.

Once the 14 round home-and-away season had finished, the 1900 VFL Premiers were determined by the specific format and conventions of the 1898 VFL Premiership System.

Home-and-away season

Ladder

Rules for classification: 1. premiership points; 2. percentage; 3. points for
Average score: 41.0
Source: AFL Tables

Progression by round

Finals series

Win/loss table

The following table can be sorted from biggest winning margin to biggest losing margin for each round. If two or more matches in a round are decided by the same margin, these margins are sorted by percentage (i.e. the lowest-scoring winning team is ranked highest and the lowest-scoring losing team is ranked lowest). Opponents are listed above the margins and home matches are in bold. The rescheduling of round 3 until after round 14, which occurred following the cancellation of the originally scheduled matches due to heavy rain, is also reflected in this table.^[1]

By winning the minor premiership and accruing at least eight premiership points from its three sectional matches, Fitzroy won the right to challenge the semi-final winner for the premiership.^[2]

Source: AFL Tables

Season notes

• The Round 1 match between St Kilda and Melbourne ended in a draw, but the result was changed to a St Kilda victory on protest after it was noted that the umpire did not signal the end of the third quarter in the correct fashion after hearing the bell. This was St Kilda's first-ever VFL win (after 48 losses), their first win since 1896 in the VFA (after 51 losses), and was the first of only two occasions that the score of a game has been changed on protest (the second was the 2006 AFL siren controversy between St Kilda and Fremantle). In yet another game involving St Kilda (1909), St Kilda forfeited a won game on protest due to playing a suspended player, although there were no score changes per se.
• St Kilda footballer Dave Strickland, the father of Shirley Strickland, won the 1900 Stawell Gift in 12 seconds off a handicap of 10 yards.
• Collingwood's highly talented "loose cannon" Dick Condon was given a lifetime suspension for sustained abuse of field umpire Henry "Ivo" Crapp.^[3]
• By the end of the finals round-robin matches, more than 1,000 points had been scored against St Kilda in a single season.^[4]
• Melbourne won the 1900 premiership despite having a 6–8 record after the home-and-away matches and finishing sixth of the eight teams on the ladder. This unsatisfactory situation led to the formation of the Argus Final Four system for 1901, which was modified in 1902 and 1907 and used until 1930 (except for 1924).

Awards

• The 1900 VFL Premiership team was Melbourne.
• The VFL's leading goalkicker was Albert Thurgood of Essendon with 25 goals.

References

• Hogan, P., The Tigers Of Old, The Richmond Football Club, (Richmond), 1996. ISBN 0-646-18748-1
• Rogers, S. & Brown, A., Every Game Ever Played: VFL/AFL Results 1897–1997 (Sixth Edition), Viking Books, (Ringwood), 1998. ISBN 0-670-90809-6
• Ross, J. (ed), 100 Years of Australian Football 1897–1996: The Complete Story of the AFL, All the Big Stories, All the Great Pictures, All the Champions, Every AFL Season Reported, Viking, (Ringwood), 1996. ISBN 0-670-86814-0

Sources

• 1900 VFL season at AFL Tables
• 1900 VFL season at Australian Football