Rare AFL Preliminary Finals

[mianfei]

Those who have looked around BigFooty will be aware that there is quite a bit of discussion of the absence of the 1962 to 1964 Grand Finals (see here and here) and even about the lack of footage of the 1956 to 1960 Grand Finals that were never fully televised.

Having studied the Name A Game master library over recent weeks, I have decided I should turn my attention to Preliminary Finals. People unfamiliar with Name A Game will have never seen old Preliminary Finals for sale, but Name A Game has all the MCG, Docklands and interstate Preliminary Finals since 1987.

It also has Preliminary Finals of:

1. 1970
2. 1971
3. 1972
4. 1976

This still leaves as many as thirteen preliminary finals between 1970 and 1986 that are not available. The 1991 one between West Coast and Geelong is lost from Name A Game.

The situation is further complicated because Channel Seven holds full footage of the 1984 and 1985 Preliminary Finals (both shown on 7TWO), but for some reason does not want them publicly available on DVD. I have seen footage of the 1973 Preliminary Final where Richmond came back to beat Collingwood on YouTube, and the 1980 game where the Magpies beat Geelong narrowly also has footage. I wonder if the full 1973 game is available somewhere on video?

That leaves nine Preliminary Finals since 1971 with no or very little surviving footage outside of private collections (1974, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983 and 1986).

The real prize here would be the 1977 game, where David Dench produced perhaps the best display by any full back and gave Hudson an inglorious ending to his VFL career. Like the 1934 and 1992 Grand Finals and Carlton’s amazing thrashing of Sydney in Round 19 of 1987, it shows how being an incomparable scoring team will not win a premiership (except in wet weather when the value of skilled backmen disappears). I wonder why Seven when it kept the 1976 game did not try to release this one as well: it must be one of the best performances by a North team ever to keep such an attack to five goals and one in the second half. One wonders why North fans did not appeal to Seven to keep the game?

 

[Firewalker]

It's most likely that all games are actually in the Seven volt, but due to being poorly kept by them many of the games have deteriorated and become to fragile to be released to Name A Game let alone transfered onto DVD. Many games from 1968-1986 are in this situation thats why only 16 titles are available from this time through Name A Game.

'68 (2), '70 (1), '71 (1), '72 (2), '76 (1), '79 (1), '80 (1), '81 (1), '82 (1), '84 (1), '85 (2), '86 (2), '87 (45), '88 (5), '89 (6)

Note
- no games from '69, '70, '74, '75 or '83
- In 1987, 45 titles are available due to the ABC having the rights not Seven.
- Name A Game had alot more titles when it started up in the early '90s but due to age/deterioration, change to digtal media (DVD), and popularity they have been taken off of their catalogue.


Seven themselves though have started re-mastering some older finals games that they themselves have which is good, including that '91 prelim and some finals from the 80s that aren't on Name A Game either

 

[mianfei]

Seven themselves though have started re-mastering some older finals games that they themselves have which is good, including that '91 prelim and some finals from the 80s that aren't on Name A Game either

That would be good if there was hope of their being publicly available for sale. I was never thinking the 1991 preliminary would ever be lost

Would these finals that Seven are remastering include games from 1983 and earlier? The real prizes, as I said, would be to have the 1977 and 1980 Preliminary Finals available for public sale on DVD, but any more games so available would be wonderful.

It's most likely that all games are actually in the Seven vault, but due to being poorly kept by them many of the games have deteriorated and become to fragile to be released to Name A Game let alone transfered onto DVD. Many games from 1968-1986 are in this situation...

That is not what I have heard from Christian Ganaban, the public representative at Name A Game. He said to me a few weeks ago that most of the missing Preliminary Finals were simply not kept by Channel Seven. I myself have more hope for a few extremely valuable home-and-away games from 1991 (West Coast v Melbourne, Footscray v Carlton) than I do for most unavailable 1980s finals.

 

[Firewalker]

That is not what I have heard from Christian Ganaban, the public representative at Name A Game. He said to me a few weeks ago that most of the missing Preliminary Finals were simply not kept by Channel Seven. I myself have more hope for a few extremely valuable home-and-away games from 1991 (West Coast v Melbourne, Footscray v Carlton) than I do for most unavailable 1980s finals.

news to me, definitely thought Seven had whatever they filmed archived and put into their film library, must be lazier then i thought... wait a minute it is Seven we're talking about

 

[mianfei]

news to me, definitely thought Seven had whatever they filmed archived and put into their film library, must be lazier then i thought... wait a minute it is Seven we're talking about

Name A Game was started in late 1990 (one can tell the exact date because I think the first titles it made available were eight late 1990 home-and-away games). I think it was precisely when Name A Game started that Seven threw out most of its archives - all of its archives of home-and-away games except Hawthorn v Geelong of Round 6, 1989, which it knew would be in too much demand to throw out.

The 1970, 1971 and 1972 Preliminary Finals were not made available on Name A Game before 1993 (when it had been going for three years) and possibly not until later than that (I cannot access later Inside Football issues from the State Library of Victoria to see exactly when Name A Game added these ones). I cannot see any reason why these were considered more valuable by the public than those from 1973 to 1983 that are not available - nor does Christian Ganaban.

I will note here that the 1991 Preliminary - which as you say Seven does have and is remastering - will be on 7TWO at 1:30 on Tuesday morning!

 

[FootyJunkie]

Name A Game was started in late 1990 (one can tell the exact date because I think the first titles it made available were eight late 1990 home-and-away games). I think it was precisely when Name A Game started that Seven threw out most of its archives - all of its archives of home-and-away games except Hawthorn v Geelong of Round 6, 1989, which it knew would be in too much demand to throw out.

Why on earth would they have done that?

 

[mianfei]

Why on earth would they have done that?

Most likely, Channel Seven did not have enough space to keep all its old games. That would at least be the official explanation.

Christian Ganaban has told me that both in 1990 and when they lost the AFL rights in 2002 Seven copied over most of its master tapes of old games, including the West Coast v Melbourne one from early 1991 I noted before.

 

[hilly84f1]

Most likely, Channel Seven did not have enough space to keep all its old games. That would at least be the official explanation.

Christian Ganaban has told me that both in 1990 and when they lost the AFL rights in 2002 Seven copied over most of its master tapes of old games, including the West Coast v Melbourne one from early 1991 I noted before.

Well they must have had Rocks in their head musnt they!
Thank goodness there are some great collectors out there with footage of at least some of the missing games

 

[Demonic Ascent]

Most likely, Channel Seven did not have enough space to keep all its old games. That would at least be the official explanation.

Christian Ganaban has told me that both in 1990 and when they lost the AFL rights in 2002 Seven copied over most of its master tapes of old games, including the West Coast v Melbourne one from early 1991 I noted before.

Idiots! Just....Idiots.

I have a fair collection of Melbourne games on VHS going back to 87 (the ones we won anyway.) The ones from 1987 to about 1993-94 are not full games just recorded off the Saturday Night replay and in fact the ones I have from 87 & 88 are near unwatchable due to the deterioration of the tape (these were finals only and the R22 1987 Western Oval game second half only). I also have the last quarter of the 87 Night GF and the entire 89 Night GF.

From 1990 I have quite a few highlights of matches (Saturday Night Replay) including two wins against Essendon and two against WCE. Then from about 1994 on I have a few games each season recorded in full with even more from 2000 onwards which I would guess are most Demons wins for the season. My aim is to one day have enough time to convert these all to my PC and then divx or h264. I tried this with the 87-88 finals games but the quality was no good and would drive you batty trying to watch them. I have hope for the rest though as the tapes are in far better quality. I think the 87-88 tapes were actually converted to VHS from BETA by my old man way back when.

Surely there are others out there as sad as me who have kept old videos going back to the 80's.

With the file sharing capabilities of the internet my hope is that one day we can build up a decent library to at least make up for the foolishness of Channel 7.

 

[desie]

This is something that I've always thought was a terrible shame

Clearly Channel 7 have erased most of their footage from the 70's and 80's, I know that there's basically nothing left of the stuff that 7 had of Rugby League either from the "Seven's Big League" days, so it's obviously not just a Melbourne thing.

Going back a couple of years to the Fox Footy Channel days, they purchased the contents of the ABC library which seemed to have a fair bit of footage from that era, I guess old episodes of "The Winners" made up much of it, but they had whole games as well.

Perhaps there's some hope there?

Hopefully people will continue to take the time to upload stuff to YouTube as they pull out old VHS tapes that they may have had stored away for years.

 

[mianfei]

Going back a couple of years to the Fox Footy Channel days, they purchased the contents of the ABC library which seemed to have a fair bit of footage from that era, I guess old episodes of "The Winners" made up much of it, but they had whole games as well.

Perhaps there's some hope there?

Would there be any possibility Fox Footy might have anything of the 1977 Preliminary Final? There is nothing of it on YouTube, yet it was so remarkable a performance by North Melbourne that one laments how Seven when keeping the 1976 game did not keep this one too! If it did have something one would hope it could one time show highlights of that 1977 Preliminary.

I had not thought the ABC would have kept full games in the 1970s, though.

 

[langers1971]

i can assure you, the ABC have nothing of the 1977 Preliminary final, and apart from the winners episodes from 1982-1986,with a couple from the finals of 1981, and the first 6 rounds of 1983 only, they have very few full games, apart from grand finals.

 

[mianfei]

i can assure you, the ABC have nothing of the 1977 Preliminary Final, and apart from the winners episodes from 1982-1986,with a couple from the finals of 1981, and the first 6 rounds of 1983 only, they have very few full games, apart from grand finals.

That’s a real pity!

What games do they have from 1983? If the ABC could give 1987 games to Name A Game, why not those from the first few weeks of 1983? It does miss the “big prize” again (Fitzroy v North Melbourne from Round 13 Seven really should have preserved along with Hawthorn v Geelong of 1989) but anything more would be great.

 

[rbartlett]

Are we aware if anyone has done an indepth audit of what Channel 7 hold in their collection- or is it just an assumption based on hearsay etc?

Because it may be worth down the track, the league asking for public assistance in locating matches now deemed 'lost'.

I mean, clearly a few of us on bigfooty (myself included) have matches from the 70-90's that seem not to be commercially released, or more importantly preserved.

Rhett Bartlett

 

[mianfei]

Are we aware if anyone has done an indepth audit of what Channel 7 hold in their collection- or is it just an assumption based on hearsay etc?

Rhett,

all claims in this respect are assumptions based on hearsay. I have been in effect encouraging Christian Ganaban to do this sort of thing with the Name A Game master library, and though a few games have been lost four - including one very valuable one from 1992 between West Coast and Geelong - have been rediscovered and I have always made promises to Christian to order rediscovered games as soon as I am financially capable.

 

[AcaciaHills]

This is an interesting subject. I will try to stay on track with the purpose of the forum but...
From what I know - ABC made a management decision to tape over footage for a lot of their programs back in 70s, 80s and 90s. I dont know which clown it was but there have been quotes from people like Molly Meldrum about tapes of bands like ACDC when they were doing recordings in the "Countdown" studios - this footage today would be worth a fortune. But unfortuantley they were "aired" and then recorded over. I would assume the same type of moron bean counters existed at 9,7 and 10.

It happened across Australia with footage of SANFL and WAFL games getting taped over. If you ring SANFL they will tell you that ABC still have footage of games from the SANFL stored away just waiting for someone to convert them from the old storage tapes. I dont think so. They are gone.

There was a fire in the channel9(I think?) studio in Adelaide and some of the SANFL footage was lost...the rest that wasnt taped over was thrown in the bins. Some of the staff grabbed as much as they could to try to save some of this footage.

Now with the AFL - if you go to the site:
http://aflfilms.com.au/library.asp

You will see that in 1993 they started compiling all of the footage that they can get hold of.
It would be great to hold of a list of what they have - but I doubt you will ever get raw footage coming out of their library. Which is a shame really. Name-A-Game rarely is allowed to get games from them. And I was told by someone at Name-A-Game that Channel7 is getting more and more difficult to deal with.

Rhett,

all claims in this respect are assumptions based on hearsay. I have been in effect encouraging Christian Ganaban to do this sort of thing with the Name A Game master library, and though a few games have been lost four - including one very valuable one from 1992 between West Coast and Geelong - have been rediscovered and I have always made promises to Christian to order rediscovered games as soon as I am financially capable.

 

[mianfei]

I was told by someone at Name A Game that Channel 7 is getting more and more difficult to deal with.

Who was the person from Name A Game who said this, and why would Channel Seven become harder and harder to deal with?

Is it simply that Channel Seven are desperate to make profits and know that these old games will not sell in numbers sufficient to avoid heavy losses from the initial overhead cost of converting them to DVD. If that is the situation I would certainly say I would pay the full cost of converting West Coast v Melbourne and Footscray v Carlton from 1991 from VHS to DVD (at least if it is not in the thousands of dollars).

 

[AcaciaHills]

I dont want to name anyone at this stage - but they tried hard to get a copy of the missing R14 Hawks V Melb from 1991. They told me that Ch7 has a copy but wouldnt help them - hence the "harder and harder to deal with" quote.
What would be the contact details for Ch7 on this type of item anyway?

Who was the person from Name A Game who said this, and why would Channel Seven become harder and harder to deal with?

Is it simply that Channel Seven are desperate to make profits and know that these old games will not sell in numbers sufficient to avoid heavy losses from the initial overhead cost of converting them to DVD. If that is the situation I would certainly say I would pay the full cost of converting West Coast v Melbourne and Footscray v Carlton from 1991 from VHS to DVD (at least if it is not in the thousands of dollars).

 

[mianfei]

I dont want to name anyone at this stage - but they tried hard to get a copy of the missing R14 Hawks V Melb from 1991. They told me that Ch7 has a copy but wouldnt help them - hence the "harder and harder to deal with" quote.
What would be the contact details for Ch7 on this type of item anyway?

The contact details are:

Seven Network
160 Harbour Esplanade
Docklands
3008

and for Name A Game to investigate the master library:

Christian Ganaban
58-76 Stephenson Street
Cremorne
3121

If you really want to discuss this issue, I would advise that you describe the problem as concisely, as politely, and with as much detail as possible. Discuss what terms you would want and be exceedingly serious about the nature of the problem. I did receive a decent response from the Seven Network about games never shown on 7TWO that I think would be great - but they have not followed it up. I suspect the reason is that they know few Victorians want to see the West Coast Eagles and 7TWO would rather show much less interesting games by popular clubs like Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Geelong and Richmond.

 

[RichoWAPT]

All of this talk about channel 7 "not keeping games and throwing them out". All of this footage from a recently released DVD is from WCE games from 1988 and 1989 which has allegedly been thrown out.
Release these games to the public FFS !!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaPjh9Zwft0&feature=related

 

[harmesy 37]

Those who have looked around BigFooty will be aware that there is quite a bit of discussion of the absence of the 1962 to 1964 Grand Finals (see here and here) and even about the lack of footage of the 1956 to 1960 Grand Finals that were never fully televised.

Having studied the Name A Game master library over recent weeks, I have decided I should turn my attention to Preliminary Finals. People unfamiliar with Name A Game will have never seen old Preliminary Finals for sale, but Name A Game has all the MCG, Docklands and interstate Preliminary Finals since 1987.

It also has Preliminary Finals of:

1. 1970
2. 1971
3. 1972
4. 1976

This still leaves as many as thirteen preliminary finals between 1970 and 1986 that are not available. The 1991 one between West Coast and Geelong is lost from Name A Game.

The situation is further complicated because Channel Seven holds full footage of the 1984 and 1985 Preliminary Finals (both shown on 7TWO), but for some reason does not want them publicly available on DVD. I have seen footage of the 1973 Preliminary Final where Richmond came back to beat Collingwood on [URL="http://www.youtube.com/


That leaves nine Preliminary Finals since 1971 with no or very little surviving footage outside of private collections (1974, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983 and 1986).

The real prize here would be the 1977 game, where David Dench produced perhaps the best display by any full back and gave Hudson an inglorious ending to his VFL career. Like the 1934 and 1992 Grand Finals and Carlton

Some good points here Mianfei.

I think you bring to life the important point that there is some magnificent footage there rotting away. It is important it is preserved before it is too late.

Talking about Richmond from the 1970's - the one match that would be great to see would be the 1972 qualifying final where Hart kicked six goals. I think this is the one that he was on one leg due to injury and yet he orchestrated a remarkable comeback. Even I would be interested in seeing that footage and I can't understand why Richmond people don't think it is important to preserve this footage...if they thought it was important they would be doing something about it. What is the point of recognising people like Hart if you don't have the footage to go with it?

Yet Icons of the game- Picken, Hart, Jesaulenko etc...there is little footage remaining.

Even if they just get access to the highlights of this finals match (and others) and compile it before the videos deteriorate...then that is at least a start.

 

[SA1NTER]

There was actually a fire at the channel 7 building back in 1990 I think. They lost some old movies that they had to get back from Hollywood among other materials, so that's why there is no DVD of the '62 and '63 GFs. They have about 10 or 15 minutes worth of the '64 GF but that's not enough to put on DVDs to sell commercially.

 

[italophile]

Heck, they periodically show eps of Drew Morphett's "The Winners" here in Italy on Sky Sports Italy.

 

[mianfei]

A DVD of the 1983 Preliminary Final??

the one match that would be great to see would be the 1972 qualifying final where Hart kicked six goals. I think this is the one that he was on one leg due to injury and yet he orchestrated a remarkable comeback. Even I would be interested in seeing that footage and I can't understand why Richmond people don't think it is important to preserve this footage...if they thought it was important they would be doing something about it. What is the point of recognising people like Hart if you don't have the footage to go with it?

Yet Icons of the game- Picken, Hart, Jesaulenko etc...there is little footage remaining.

I’ve actually mentioned this 1972 Qualifying Final to Christian when he said they were planning to get the 1969 second semi between Carlton and Collingwood. He said he would try to discuss with Channel Seven last year and I talked about the 1972 Qualifying Final without him saying anything definite.

Yesterday, though, he told me the surprising news that somebody has the 1983 Preliminary Final (North Melbourne versus Essendon) in full and that he would be examining it to see if it could be commercially released. If it could be, that is a true delight, for beforehand I assumed no footage of it existed beyond the YouTube snippets.