This morning, Collingwood clash with the Brisbane Lions for a place in the AFL Grand Final, the highlight of the Australian Rules calendar.
Brisbane won the title last year. Collingwood won the title the year before, defeating Brisbane in a thriller. It promises to be an intriguing battle. It's also a battle between two teams with strong Irish heritage.
In the case of Brisbane, that Irish connection is somewhat hidden. The club has its origins in the Fitzroy area of Melbourne. The Fitzroy club was founded in 1883 and would move from Melbourne in the 1990s to become the Brisbane Lions.
Fitzroy’s inner city neighbour is Collingwood and the two neighbours would become arch rivals. The rivalry continued even after the move to Brisbane.
Back in 1892 when the club was founded, Collingwood was a tough, grimy area of Melbourne. While there were many Irish in Australia, they didn’t tend to live in communal ghettos like in North America. Around this time, it is believed that one in four people in the state of Victoria was Irish born but they were much more spread out.
Saying that, Collingwood was one of the closest examples of a mainly Irish Catholic community in Australia. Fitzroy too had its fair share of Irish and the area of Richmond contained a community called Irish Town.
Before the Collingwood club was formed there was a club called Britannia representing the area. The team's colours were the red, white and blue of the Union Jack flag. It was felt that this club did not fully represent the area.
One key Britannia player involved in the founding of the Collingwood club was Jack Joyce whose parents were Irish. Such was his involvement in the early days that he is dubbed 'The Father of Collingwood'.
The Victorian Football Association had been set up in 1877 to cater for clubs of the new sport of Victorian Rules, a sport that Thomas Smith from Carrickmacross helped create at Melbourne Grammar school.
Most of the clubs were from the Melbourne area and most of these were middle class. Collingwood was a working class team proudly representing their area. Collingwood was perceived as a Catholic and Irish club, at a time when these groups were looked down upon by the rest of Australian society and subjected to a considerable degree of social exclusion.
They were only able to join the Victoria Football Association after they got support from Carlton. They added a game against Collingwood to help them complete the necessary schedule thus starting a rivalry that would evolve in time into one of the biggest rivalries in Australian sport.
Collingwood's first season saw a number of Irish names such as Thomas O’Loughlin, John Hegarty, J Purcell, Eddie Murphy and Jack McInerney.
The key figure in the history of the Collingwood club is Jock McHale who was involved with the club for over 40 years between playing and coaching.
The son of an Irish-born policeman, McHale attended St Bridget’s primary school in North Fitzroy and later in his youth was educated by the Christian Brothers. While McHale is often remembered for his coaching career, he also had a stellar 17-year playing career which lasted from 1903 to 1920.
One of his early coaches was Dick Condon who had been a star player for Collingwood in the late 1890s, early 1900s.
As a Collingwood player McHale won a Premiership in 1910 and was the team captain in 1912 and '13. Dan Minogue would replace him as captain from 1914 to 1916. McHale’s durability was key, never missing a game between 1906 and 1917. In 1917 Collingwood won the Premiership, the first for McHale as a coach.
Among McHale’s team-mates in 1917 was Con McCarthy who went on to be the winning captain of the 1919 Collingwood team. McCarthy would later move to Footscray, an ambitious, wealthy club for much larger wages.
Many footy historians call McCarthy the first big-money player. McHale’s and Collingwood’s greatest achievements came in the second half of the 1920s. Collingwood became the only team to win four Premiers in a row and the 1929 team is the only team to go undefeated in a season.
Collingwood would win two in a row in 1935 and 1936 with the winning team showing many Irish names such as Phonse Kyne, Jack Regan, Vin Doherty, Marcus Whelan, Jack Carmody and Lou Riley. The main stars on the team were the Collier brothers, Albert and Harry, and the Coventry brothers, Sid and Gordon. The 1936 victory would be the last for McHale.
McHale retired in 1949 and left an incredible record that leaves him as possibly the greatest Aussie Rules coach of all time. 'The Prince of Coaches' was admired for his ability to assemble a machine-like team that was focused on fitness and the collective goal of winning.
During McHale’s long reign, Collingwood won eight Premier titles with him as coach. The club reached the final 16 times during his tenure. Each year the coach of the Premiership-winning team is awarded the Jock McHale medal, a recognition of McHale’s legacy in the sport.
McHale died in 1953 after he had suffered a heart attack the day after the 1953 Grand Final which his beloved Magpies won.
The 1953 Collingwood team was coached by Phonse Kyne and featured three sets of brothers, including the Twomey brothers – Michael, Pat, and Bill Jr.
Bill Twomey Sr had played with McHale back in the 1910s. The other sets of brothers were the Richards including team captain that day Lou, and the Roses, of whom Bob is considered one of the greatest Collingwood players of all time.
Another who suffered a heart attack after that final was John Wren. Born in Collingwood, Wren - whose parents were Irish born - had made his money in illegal gambling. Wren was a massive supporter and financial contributor to the Collingwood club. With McHale and Wren involved, the Irish identity at the club was strong.
Wren was a figure of contradictions. A religious man, he was close friends with Daniel Mannix, the high-profile Cork-born Archbishop of Melbourne yet had no qualms profiteering from illegal gambling and being involved in many nefarious activities. He was a prominent Irish nationalist but also an Australian patriot and staunch supporter of the Empire’s effort in the Great War.
The Great War was a difficult time for Aussie Rules. For the 1916 season, five of the nine teams in the Victoria Football League withdrew from playing due to Australia’s involvement - Essendon, Geelong, Melbourne, South Melbourne, and St Kilda.
These clubs were regarded as the middle class or more elite clubs. The four that remained were Carlton, Collingwood, Fitzroy, and Richmond. These were inner city, working class clubs where labour unions were strong. These areas also had higher Irish populations.
In a surreal season, Fitzroy won the Premiership in 1916 despite placing last in the standings.
Football reflected the divide happening in the wider Australian society where there was polarisation between the middle class who supported the war and the urban working class who regarded the war as an Imperialist trade war.
After the 1916 Easter Rising, the urban Irish working class community in Australia became more fervently opposed to the war. In 1917, when Mannix became Archbishop of Melbourne, he would become a very vocal voice against the war.
Many Australian Irish did join the war effort and people such as Irish-born Martin O’Meara, John Carroll, and John Ryan won the Victoria Cross for their bravery. The division created by the war lasted long after the war itself with the Irish community often being viewed with suspicion for many years.
Collingwood is today one of Australia’s most popular sports teams, with a fanbase not just in Melbourne but around Australia. The club is a big draw in terms of both attendance and television viewing.
The Collingwood guernsey (jersey) is considered the most valuable in terms of sponsorship. Collingwood are a big team that are either loved or hated. Fitzroy on the other hand was a small club who failed to capitalise on early success.
"Carlow-born Jack Carroll played for Fitzroy between 1885 and '87 before moving to Carlton and later captaining Footscray."
Formed in 1883, the first president of the Fitzroy club was Maynooth-born John McMahon. Having trained to be a priest, McMahon instead became a leading businessman and politician in the area.
He was twice mayor of Fitzroy. The first captain of the team was Patrick McShane who was regarded as one of the leading athletes in Victoria at the time. McShane, whose father was from Co Armagh, played three cricket Tests for Australia. He also trained the British rugby team in 1888, not in rugby but in Victorian rules.
The British team played 18 games in their new code as part of their first tour. The tour evolved over the years into the British and Irish Lions tour we know today. Unfortunately McShane later became mentally ill and he died in Kew Asylum aged just 45 leaving behind a large family.
Carlow-born Jack Carroll played for Fitzroy between 1885 and '87 before moving to Carlton and later captaining Footscray.
Brothers Pat and Con Hickey were two key figures at the club. Con had played for the club but later became an important administrator not just with the club but with the Victorian Football League when that formed in 1897. He was the first president of the Australasian Football Council in 1906 that looked to promote the sport nationally and changed the sports name from Victorian Rules to Australian Rules.
Pat won a VFA premiership in 1895 and VFL premierships in 1898 and 99. He was one of the great players of that era and was regarded as the player of the season in 1899.
The 1899 team featured many players with Irish heritage including Bill McSpeerin, Eddie Drohan, Bill Cleary, Geoff Moriarty whose son Jack would later play for Fitzroy, Bill Dalton, and the Grace brothers Jim and Mick.
Jim was a leading goal-kicker at the time while Mick would later become a leading goal-kicker for Carlton. Gerald Brosnan became captain in 1903. The team lost the 1903 final with Brosnan missing a golden opportunity to win the game in the last moments. The team had their redemption in 1904 and 1905.
Brosnan was joined on the 1905 team by Percy Sheehan and Jack McDonough who was recruited from a club called Celtic. Geoff Moriarty became the team's first official coach in 1911. In the first 30 years of the VFL, Fitzroy won the most titles with seven. Yet the club failed to build on this success.
Fitzroy, a small club was always in the shadows of big clubs like Collingwood and as the sport progressed into the modern era they found it difficult to survive. They were not helped by the local cricket club and council who refused to help modernise the stadium.
The club was plagued with financial difficulties in the 1980s and 1990s. There was much talk of either a merger or moving. In 1996, the Brisbane Bears took over Fitzroy’s AFL licence to become Brisbane Lions.
The deep Irish connections in Aussie Rules would fade with the passage of time but reemerge. Outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground where Collingwood and Brisbane face off, a statue of Dubliner Jim Stynes reminds us of his mark on and off the field.
He was the first Irishman to significantly impact Aussie Rules as part of the 'Irish Experiment' in the 1980s. While the experiment declined for a time it became popular again thanks to the success of Kerry man Tadhg Kennelly in the 2000s.
Kennelly became the first Irishman to win the AFL Premiership. Last year Conor McKenna playing with Brisbane became the fourth Irish man to win an AFL medal.
In the women’s game, Sarah Rowe is a well-known player for Collingwood and Orla O’Dwyer has won two AFL women’s Premiers in 2021 and 2023 with Brisbane. It seems that history has come full circle with the Irish in Australia making their mark on the game once again.
Samuel Kingston is a sports historian from Clonakilty, Co Cork. His ebook, the Irish World of Sport, is out now.
