THE 1954 third eighteen Grand Final between the Blues and the team then known as Footscray is a game remembered only by its surviving combatants (of which there are few) - and yet its controversial finish would prompt the then VFL to launch an immediate investigation, the result of which would forever change the way the great Australian game was adjudicated.

Held at Princes Park, the Grand Final took place on the afternoon of Saturday, September 4, 1954 – less than three weeks before Charlie Sutton led the Dogs to the club’s famous first senior Premiership on the MCG.
 
History records the Blues as having lost the third eighteen Grand Final by three points – 7.9 (51) to 7.6 (48) – to an opposition which had lost the second semi-final. A subsequent review tabled in Carlton’s 1954 Annual Report offers some insight into the depth of feeling that prevailed after the match. 
 

To quote the review, Carlton “missed the pennant in circumstances which, to say the least, were very unfortunate”.
 
Graeme Walker, now 88 and a member of the Carlton team which took to the field on that fateful afternoon, recalled the dramatic final moments.
 
“It was late in the final quarter and the Blues were three points up just before the final siren. Play had crossed to the wing on the Gardiner Stand side when the ball went marginally out of bounds,” Walker said.
 
“Leon Berner, Carlton’s wingman, had stopped, thinking the ball was out of bounds, and it was during these very tense moments that a Footscray player (Brian Neylon) kicked a goal that was given the all-clear by the field umpire Frank Schwab, who headed back to the centre.
 
“At this moment the boundary umpire (the late John McNiff) who saw the out of bounds occur, raised his arm to display the white band (handkerchief) on his wrist (as boundaries didn’t carry whistles back then), and ran to Schwab to advise him that the ball had gone out of bounds. However, Schwab told the boundary to return to his position as  he had already given the “all clear” for the goal.  He then bounced the ball in the centre as per normal procedure and just seconds later the siren sounded with Footscray three points ahead.”
 
The final bell, not surprisingly, signalled bedlam at Bluesville. A correspondent for The Herald reported that angry spectators jumped the fence and attacked two boundary umpires – prompting one of the goal umpires Wally Dern rush to the boundaries “and hit several men over the head with his goal flags”.

 
One onlooker, the 25-game Carlton senior player George Stafford (younger brother of Fred) jumped the fence and assaulted both McNiff and the other officiating boundary umpire Des Fitzgerald – which in turned warranted charges laid by the Victoria Police and the VFL Tribunal.
 
Three weeks after the match, Stafford was found guilty in Carlton Court after pleading not guilty to assaulting the pair, and duly fined £5 on each charge, with £4/15/- costs (in default 10 days jail for both). Earlier the court had heard from McNiff in evidence that Stafford had vaulted the fence and ran towards him shouting “You b_____, you’ve waved that out of bounds two or three times”.
 
“I didn’t answer him and he struck me on the shoulder with his fist,” McNiff said. “I broke away from Stafford, and when I turned around I saw that he had a headlock on the other umpire.”

 
In November, Stafford was suspended by the League’s investigation committee for the first four matches of the 1955 VFL season.
 
According to a court reporter for The Argus, Stafford shook hands with both umpires at the conclusion of the hearing and said: “As long as you don’t hold it against a bloke, that’s the main thing”.
 
The umpires told him: “It’s all over now”. But Stafford never played for Carlton again.
 
Walker said that when he and his demoralized teammates (amongst them the League’s first American footballer Colin Ridgway) returned to the rooms, they sought out their coach Harvey Dunn for an opinion on  whether the outcome should be appealed, “but it was felt this would not have achieved any change in the result”.
 
Nevertheless, the VFL subsequently established its own enquiry and questioned Schwab about the incident. Schwab’s defence was that he had “paid a free kick “ to the Footscray player who had sped forward with the ball and kicked the goal
 
“From this sad incident the league then called for the introduction of whistles for boundary umpires which is still in force to this day,” Walker said.
 
Walker has maintained his love for Carlton from his childhood years. A photograph of him decked out in the Blues’ playing kit is a treasured family heirloom, and accompanies a wonderful kindred story.

 
The tale relates to Walker’s father Arch, the secretary for Carlton’s second eighteen through a ten-year period from 1938 (and later press secretary for the late Queen’s Australian tours of 1954 and ’64). In his days with the Blues twos, Arch used to return to the family home carrying the players’ muddied guernseys, which his wife Muriel would duly wash and hang out on the Hills hoist. On one occasion Muriel returned to the clothes line to unpeg the dried garments, only to discover that the famed CFC monogram had been removed from the centre of one of them with a pair of scissors.
 
Not long after, Muriel was approached by young Graeme – armed with the missing letters – with a request for her to stitch them onto his own dark Navy Blue guernsey.  “Mum stitched the monogram on too . . . what else was she going to do?,” said Graeme.
 
As a kid, Graeme chased the leather for the highly-successful Preston Technical School football team, whose members included Fitzroy’s 125-game utility Brian Pert (father of Gary) and the future Carlton Captain-Coach Ronald Dale Barassi. He then joined Carlton’s thirds, progressed to the seconds under the watch of coach Albert ‘Mick’ Price and played off a forward flank for two seasons.
 
Lacking a yard in pace and a foot in height, Graeme was unable to break through at senior level for the Blues, so pursued his career with Victorian football Association outfit Northcote – and chased the leather there until a sever hamstring injury brought on his retirement.
 
Not lost to the game, Graeme pursued a career as a man in white, officiating as a central umpire at junior level in the Preston District Junior Football Association – and he reliably informs that he never once suffered a communications breakdown in his dealings with the boundaries.