The days of League football at suburban grounds are long gone, and older fans often bemoan the fact that they aren’t close enough to the action nowadays.
That is an exaggeration of course, and it is still possible to sit right next to the fence just as it was 60 years ago.
When St Kilda met Hawthorn in 1961, I was near the fence at Junction Oval as a seven-year-old and there are clear memories of that particular day.
Saint winger Leo Garlick had copped a bad knock to the head in a clash with Hawthorn star Brendan Edwards.
The sight of Garlick being helped off the ground by a trainer in the final term was not a great advertisement for the game.
His face was covered in blood and the image was captured by Saint fan and photographer Mal Thomson. Even in black and white it is a confronting shot.
The other memory from that day concerns the toilets at the Junction which happened to be directly behind the visitors’ rooms. At half time the toilet inhabitants could hear every thundering word from an angry Hawthorn coach John Kennedy.
Looking at the records we see that the Hawks were actually in front by five points at the interval, but for once the great orator’s words did not inspire a change in the game.
St Kilda’s seven goal to two burst in the third quarter set up the win for the Saints.
Both St Kilda and Hawthorn had high hopes for the 1961 season.
The Hawks had stormed home in late 1960 and just missed out on the finals by percentage.
St Kilda was highly rated under its newly appointed 27-year-old coach Allan Jeans. Coming into this game both clubs had won three of their first five games, and the 32,900 crowd was the biggest at the Junction Oval since 1950.
The Sporting Globe tells us that it was a “vigorous hard-fought affair with little between them, but the Saints ran away in the last half”.
Hawthorn’s commando -type training had been a keynote of the pre-season. They were a tough and uncompromising unit. But St Kilda showed that they could take and handout physical buffeting without letting it interfere with their fast play-on game.
In the final quarter tempers flared and the crowd showed more interest in the running stoushes around the ground.
Instrumental in the victory was champion centreman Lance Oswald who dominated in midfield and was unstoppable.
When Hawk star Brendan Edwards was shifted from a wing in the third quarter to match up on Oswald he immediately “let one fly” at the St Kilda dynamo, but Oswald calmly walked back and sent a booming drop kick through the sticks for his third goal.
Brian McCarthy, a tough customer himself, was on the bench that day and replaced the injured Leo Garlick. He remembers it vividly.
“When I ran onto the field, Edwards ran over to me straight away and said “I didn’t hit him first, he hit me."
"We had been at Assumption College at the same time so we knew each other. Hawthorn played it hard. I remember playing on one of their blokes and he kept his elbow jabbing in my guts, so I gave him a couple of whacks and he didn’t flinch."
"He came right back at me so I gave him one on the jaw and he didn’t budge!”
After the final siren Hawthorn's Edwards and Roy Simmonds who had been in a number of incidents, were jostled by St Kilda fans as they left the field.
ST KILDA 4.3 5.5 12.13 14.16 (100)
HAWTHORN 2.2 6.4 8.4 12.9 (81)
BEST Oswald, Guyatt, N.Roberts, K.Roberts, Stephenson, Morrow
GOALS Oswald 3, Stephenson 3, Hodgkin 3, Young 2, Smith, Coady, K.Roberts
