ON THE eve of Sunday’s much-anticipated Carlton-Collingwood match at the MCG, glorious panoramic images have surfaced from 50 years ago of a contest between the two competition heavyweights at Princes Park.

The never-before-seen images, in slide format and since digitised, include the Captain-Coach John Nicholls in total control at a ruck contest and the late Vin Waite booting the Ross Faulkner out of the back pocket. They were captured by lifelong Carlton supporter and photographic enthusiast Paul Brush, who graciously availed the images for the football club’s archive this week.

Brush’s slides were taken from the Sydney Road end of the ground, in the shadows of the Ald. Gardiner Stand, on the afternoon of Saturday 1 July 1972 - the Round 13 match with the black and whites - in what was ultimately a premiership year for the old dark Navy Blues.

“The camera I used was a Kodak Ecktachrome. It was one of those 1950s/’60s cameras that people had instead of an instamatic. There was no auto focus, it was all pot luck and you had to guess, but the lens was amazing,” Brush said.

“Unfortunately the camera’s mechanism for loading the film has since died, but it was a great camera, and in thinking about it now I really admire sports photographers back then because it was all instinct.”

The contest in question attracted a capacity audience of 36,133, and Carlton, by way of a customary second-half comeback, won the match by eight points - 10.10 (70) to 9.8 (62) - with Trevor Keogh booting three goals and adjudged best afield.

For the record, the Carlton team which took to the field in that contest was named as follows:

B:   Paul Hurst             Geoff Southby         Vin Waite
HB: Phil Pinnell            Bruce Doull             Andy Lukas
C:   Bryan Quirk           Alex Jesaulenko       David Dickson
HF: Trevor Keogh         Robert Walls (vc)     Ian Robertson (dvc)
F:   Peter Jones            Brent Crosswell       Garry Crane
R:  John Nicholls (cc)    David McKay           Adrian Gallagher

Res: Syd Jackson          John O’Connell 

Brush took thousands of slides with his trusty Kodak – slides he is still in the process of digitising. But these are the only Carlton-centric slides in his collection.

As he said: “It was never my job to take photos, for the most part I watched the game, so this is it”.

“At the time these photos seemed so innocuous. I just took them,” Brush said. “But I look back at them now and realise how many good players I was able to see, including the Collingwood players. It was such a privilege.”