The 1982 VFL season was the 86th season of the Victorian Football League (VFL), the highest level senior Australian rules football competition in Victoria. The season featured twelve clubs, ran from 20 March until 25 September, and comprised a 22-game home-and-away season followed by a finals series featuring the top five clubs.
The season saw the VFL establish its first permanent interstate presence, as the South Melbourne Football Club (which was known after June just as the Swans, being renamed Sydney the following year) played all of its home games on Sunday afternoons in Sydney, New South Wales.
On the Thursday following Footscray's 58-point loss to North Melbourne, their ninth defeat in ten games, Royce Hart was dismissed as senior coach and demoted to the position of assistant coach. Reserve team coach and Hart's predecessor Don McKenzie returned to stand in as caretaker until a new coach was appointed.[1]
South Melbourne, affected by limited finances and loss of its inner-city support base ever since World War II, relocated to Sydney after experimental matches played by the VFL there since 1979. Early in the season, the team was still formally known as South Melbourne, although it marketed itself as 'Sydney Swans' in Sydney; on 2 June, the team formally became known as 'the Swans' for the remainder of the season,[2] before formally becoming the 'Sydney Swans' in 1983.[3]
The VFL's new headquarters at 120 Jolimont Road, Jolimont was officially opened by the recently appointed Victorian Governor Sir Brian Murray at a special dinner on 17 March in the function room of the building. The dinner, which was attended by over 120 invited guests, also served as the launch of the VFL season.[4]
Looking to build on the previous season's successful first outing for premiership points at The Gabba,[5] the VFL had hoped that the Round 7 match between St Kilda and Richmond, originally scheduled at VFL Park, could be relocated to Brisbane without needing a replacement match played at Waverley. However, League officials were unable to get approval from the clubs to remove the stipulation that required a replacement game at VFL Park if a premiership game was to be played at The Gabba. Essendon, who had played in the previous season's historic first game at the Gabba for premiership points, had been approached about transferring their home game against Collingwood from Windy Hill to Waverley, but refused.[6] Football fans in Brisbane would have to wait until 1991 for the next League game played at the Gabba for premiership points.
Round 3 - the split Easter round - set a number of VFL records on and off the field; the total gate takings for the round was regarded as the highest on record at the time, officially reported as $486,652, paid by 213,199 people.[7]
From 4 May, patrons were banned from bringing alcoholic beverages into VFL matches, and were limited to purchasing at most two pre-opened cans at a time from vendors at the ground.[8]
Owing to the extreme drought and consequent firm grounds, the 1982 season remains the highest-scoring on record. Among the records were:
an average game score of 112 points; the next highest average score in a season was 106 points in 1979 and 1983
St Kilda and Footscray became the only teams ever to concede 3,000 points in one season
66 scores of 20 goals occurred, a record equalled only in 1991
57 matches where both teams scored more than 100 points - no other season had more than fifty such matches
Round 10 is the only round in VFL/AFL history in which every team scored 100 or more points.
In Round 16 against North Melbourne, Hawthorn set record scores of 13.3 (81) for the first quarter and 20.7 (127) for the first half. The former record stood until 2011, and the latter stood until 2004.
After a negative response from the players since its introduction in 1980, the VFL abandoned the practice of presenting runners-up medals to the losing team as part of the grand final post-match presentation.[9]
Early in the season, the VFL arranged for the grand finalists to play a rematch as a demonstration sport at the 1982 Commonwealth Games, held in Brisbane shortly after the season was finished.[10] Carlton and Richmond played the exhibition match at the Gabba on Wednesday, 6 October, and Richmond won the high-scoring match 28.16 (184) to 26.10 (166).[11]
The reserves premiership was won by Geelong for the third consecutive season. Geelong 19.18 (132) defeated St Kilda 12.11 (83) in the grand final, held as a curtain-raiser to the seniors Grand Final on 25 September.[12]
^"Coach sacked by Footscray". The Canberra Times. Vol. 56, no. 17, 051. Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 4 June 1982. p. 18. Retrieved 24 June 2021 – via National Library of Australia.
^Simunovich, Peter (3 June 1982). "The Swans – officially". The Sun News-Pictorial. Melbourne. p. 67.
