1876 The Junior Challenge Cup
	Not to be outdone by the Second Twenties of the senior clubs, seven of the leading clubs banded together to create their own Cup competition.    The ultimate result was the first of many trophies earned by the Williamstown Football Club, along with Melbourne, Geelong and Carlton, the oldest of today's surviving clubs that took home the trophy  ...

Not to be outdone by the Second Twenties, seven of the leading junior clubs in 1876 contributed a guinea each and a cup was purchased for competition of a round-robin basis, clubs to play each other twice with two points being allocated for a win and one for a draw.

Windsor didn’t get great value for their money, disbanding late in June, but the remaining six clubs, Williamstown, South-Park, South Melbourne, Fawkner Park, St. Kilda Alma and Sandridge Alma continued.

Williamstown and South-Park dominated the cup, each winning one of their return matches, but the Park's two draws against their neighbours, South Melbourne were to prove costly.

Williamstown beat South Melbourne by two goals to one at Albert Park to take out the trophy by just one point from South-Park. 

Despite Williamstown's Cup victory, Peter Pindar, the football writer for the authorative weekly The Australasian and whose rankings of teams in the 1870s and 188os are today mistakenly taken as "final four" placings, rated both Essendon and West Melbourne ahead of the cup victors, noting Essendon had a win to their credit over the supposedly "senior" St. Kilda and a draw with East Melbourne, and the latter victories over the Geelong Imperials "and a draw with 23 against Melbourne".

Pindar also rated the original Hawthorn club highly (no relationship to the twentieth century club despite some disgraceful attempts by club historians over the years).  Of Williamstown, Pindar suggested "Williamstown won the juniors cup but I would have liked to have seen them against a senior team.  Their narrow ground is difficult for visiting teams of any level".   The Australasian, October 7, 1876

The Final Placings :    

*  St. Kilda Alma's solitary win was a walkover from Windsor.  They were due to play Windsor again in the last round, but by then, they had already given up the ghost for the season themselvesand no points were awarded.   Williamstown's draw was against Fawkner.

The Clubs

Williamstown

The oldest of today's Victorian Football League clubs, Williamstown was formed in 1865 (although there was an earlier Williamstown club that disbanded in 1862. 

The club originally played on the Market Reserve (an odd v-shaped wedged between Parker, Cecil, Cote and Hanmer Streets and was set aside as the site for a never-built major market in 1856) and as well as their comprehensive win in the Junior Cup, 1876 was also significant in that it was the first season that the football club played on the Gardens Reserve near Williamstown Beach Station and alongside the Botanical Gardens.

Williamstown’s captain in the trophy win and over the next two or three seasons was R. Waycott, vice-captain P. Conroy, and other leading players during the season included Wood, Monteith, Sutton, Kilgour, Wauchope and two sets of brothers by the name of Murray and Haslen.

The reserve was to remain home to the Williamstown club until 1888.     Prior to the 1886 season, a dispute between officials at Williamstown saw a splinter group form the South Williamstown club, and to the surprise of many, the new team was granted senior status by the V.F.A. leaving the "village" with two senior teams based just a half a mile apart.

Allegiances across the district were split in two, as were the playing strengths of the pair, and wiser heads prevailed prior to the 1888 season and the two clubs agree to reunite under the Williamstown name, adopting Williamstown's colours and the South's home ground at the current day Point Gellibrand Oval.

South Park

South Park started life in 1871 and were originally known as Defiance.

"Home-park" and "South-park" were the original names for what in the 1850s became known as Albert Park, Home-park referring to the northern section.

The original club only seems to have played locally, but prior to the 1873 season assumed their new name and played a range of opponents across the Melbourne area.    The Defiance name was resurrected fleetingly by a couple of other clubs in later years.

They were regularly amongst the leading junior club in the latter half of the decade and the early 1880s.  South Park "claimed" the 1882 premiership, but a challenge match against South Yarra produced a scoreless draw, and the two clubs along with Star Of Carlton probably had equal claims.

A Queens Birthday trip during that year saw a couple of players in strife with the police and a few clubs refused to play against them.    This seems to have been the beginning of a steady slide and although they survived to compete in the first organized fixture of 1889, they finished third last and disbanded early in the following season.

They played in the Albert Park Reserve alongside the St. Kilda Railway Station and there was an historical link between the club's name and their home base.    Their colours at the time they renamed the club were listed as red, white and blue.

South Melbourne

The fore-runner (in part) of today's Sydney Swans, the South Melbourne club originated from a meeting  in June 1874 at the Temperance Hall in Napier Street (the building still stands and has been known as recents years as the Beehive Theatre).. 

The meeting adopted the name of the Cecil Football Club after the nearby street, but some three weeks later, they decided to change their name to South Melbourne, and the team that around a hundred years later took to the field for the first time.    The name change according to popular history was decided “at Mr. Evers house” on July 5, 1874, but this was a Sunday and it is extremely doubtful whether any sort of formal gathering to discuss football would have been acceptable in those times).

Their first match was against a team called Alma and described at the St. Kilda Cricket Ground on July 18.   The location of the match suggests that is was St. Kilda Alma rather than the neighbouring Sandridge Alma and it known F. Lightfoot was captain and C. Evers vice-captain, both gentlemen having been prominent in the formation of the club.

The district had been represented since the 1860s at a senior level by Albert Park (see Buck Wheatley's Remembers), but consistently struggled despite a couple of mergers, firstly with North Melbourne, a "marriage" that lasted just one year, and another with South Park (below).

Albert Park representatives attended the South Melbourne annual meeting in 1877 with a proposal for amalgamation, this request being defeated by 28 votes to 2.    In 1880, a move by South Melbourne, by now the stronger club numerically and even keener to see the name represented in senior ranks was put to Albert Park.   The subsequent amalgamation saw South Melbourne name emerge as the senior entity and the Albert Park colours retained.

The club derived its name from the park in South Yarra rather than the outer north-western suburb.

Fawkner Park in its earliest days stretched from St. Kilda Road to Punt Road and supported several teams. 

The club is known to have existed in 1872 and a few years later had gained some notoriety for regularly producing some very biased umpires for their home matches. More than one report has opposition teams walking off the ground in protest at the home umpire and one secretary went so far as to suggest in a letter to the Richmond Advertiser that he "would prefer to allow them the 25 players normally on handicap than have them supply their own umpire".

Sandridge Alma

The Footballer of 1876 suggests the club was formed in 1874, but is noted in South Melbourne’s local newspaper, The Record as playing in 1872, and later reports of the Sandridge United club suggest it may have in fact been 1870.

The club was more often than not referred to simply as Alma, a somewhat confusing name with the St. Kilda Alma club also in the Cupp copetition.

The Record consistently refers to home games as being at North Sandridge with The Footballer suggesting more specifically The Esplanade.   The actual site may well have been the original Port Melbourne Cricket Ground in the Lagoon Reserve between Cruickshank and Pickles Streets.

The Alma were successful enough to play in the 1876 Junior Cup, but met with little success.   They didn’t complete their cup engagements and they appear to have merged with another club called simply Sandridge to become Sandridge United prior to the 1877 season.    The United club later became simple Sandridge and the named changed in 1884 to Port Melbourne when the area was declared the a Borough.

St. Kilda Alma

The St. Kilda Alma appear to have been the first opponent of the new South Melbourne club of 1874, the match being noted as against “Alma” but at the St. Kilda Cricket Ground.    The club later identified itself as playing at the St. Kilda end of Albert Park, with this being described in a couple of match reports as “between the carriageway (roughly the path of today’s Queens Road) and the railway station.

They wore blue knickerbockers and jersey and cap and hose specifically described as dark blue and white.

The club seems to have been behind a plan to re-build the St. Kilda team back into a senior club before the 1885 season with plans to recruit players from the South Yarra club which had temporarily disbanded.   Just what happened isn’t clear, but South Yarra continued and the St. Kilda Alma disappeared.

Windsor

The Windsor club was formed in 1874 and were regularly shown as playing in the Albert Park Reserve.

The 1876 edition of The Footballer included Windsor with an asterisk next to its name, indicating that they had received no return for the season and had repeated the previous year’s entry, but a check of the Cup results show they had disbanded.  Another club carrying the name appeared  in 1884

Despite forfeiting several games in the previous two seasons,  the club paid up for the Junior Challenge Cup, but disappeared after just one game, all scheduled games being regarded as victories for the opposing club.    When they did show up, it was in blue knickerbockers a scarlet and red jersey and hose, and a quartered cap in the same colours.

The Footballer suggests they played in Captain Paterson’s Paddock in Windsor rather than Albert Park, but the Paddock could well have been of the western side of St. Kilda Road and thus regarded as part of the Park reserve.

How They Stacked Up

With both a Second Twenty and a Junior Cup on offer, just how did the two levels stack up?

In the following year, 1877, the V.F.A. competition started with just five senior teams and any concept of a cup competition was well and truly abandoned.

Hotham didn’t field a second twenty, and Albert Park’s either by design or coincidence played only other seconds teams, but an analysis of the results of the remaining three clubs shows that the leading junior teams were probably just a shade in front.

An analysis of the season shows second twenties and juniors playing 19 matches, with the juniors winning seven, losing seven and with five drawn, but these figures in summary probably give the second twenties a little more credit than perhaps they deserve.

Four of the seven wins came from St. Kilda’s second twenty, who tended to play fairly weak local clubs who were not regarded as amongst the leading junior teams.

They lost to two of the better juniors in Toorak and the Richmond-based Warwick, lost to a seconds team from Essendon (then a junior club) and could only draw with another from Hawthorn.   

In reality, analysis of their senior team’s results over the season suggests they claim to that status was shaky to say the least; they played only four games against senior clubs, managing a draw with Albert Park, but were comprehensively beaten by Carlton twice, Melbourne and Geelong (in fact not managing a goal in the four games with 17 registered against them).  Their record against the junior clubs was equally unimpressive - they shared a win and a loss against Williamstown, lost nil-three to the South Melbourne, and drew twice with Essendon.