The glorious post script to HSV Seven’s footage of the Carlton-Collingwood Grand Final of 1970 is not so much visible, but audible – that moment where the siren goes off like a firecracker to forever consign the most famous comeback in football history to the record books.
You can blame the late Ralph Madge for that. Madge, officiating as Carlton timekeeper the day the black and whites blew a 44-point lead on football’s grandest stage, got caught up in the delirium.
“I once asked Dad why he kept sounding the siren to end the 1970 Grand Final and he said to me ‘I had to celebrate – we came back from nowhere’,” Ralph’s son Greg Madge said.
“A few months after the game, it might have been the following March, they replayed the game at the club. Dad was there to listen to the siren ring out again and again, having savoured the chance to watch the entire replay because as gameday timekeeper he was always too busy focussing on the umpire.”
That mad Madge moment, when Ralph Madge sounded Collingwood’s death knell, came at 5.04pm on the evening of Saturday, September 26, 1970. We know this because the time is recorded on the VFL Timekeepers Report lodged with the League.
The timekeepers' report from Carlton's 1970 Grand Final triumph. (Photo: Supplied)
It’s one of six Grand Final Reports submitted by Ralph for each of the six Carlton Grand Final victories at which he officiated – 1968, ’70, ’72, 81, ’82 and ’87. The obvious exception is the Grand Final of ’79, as Ralph, a Life Member of the club, was on long service leave at the time Carlton knocked Collingwood over again.
“Dad told me he came back from long service before the ’79 Grand Final, but they’d replaced him with a temporary timekeeper,” Greg recalled. “He told me ‘I would have felt like a bit of a p…k to have taken over from him for the finals’.”
Some years ago, Ralph framed duplicates of each of his Grand Final reports – all signed by the Carlton captains and coaches of the day – in a montage to his quarter of a century as Carlton timekeeper.
Ralph, who served as Carlton’s timekeeper through arguably its greatest era of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, died the day before the good guys thumped Essendon in the 2011 Elimination Final. Yesterday, his boy handed the montage over to the club for the purposes of its archive.
“The framed montage came to grief over time and a couple of items fixed there have gone askew,” Greg said.
“My wife’s not overly keen on football anyway and thinking it through my Dad would have loved the montage to be here.”
A Fitzroy supporter in his early years, Ralph Theodore Madge’s connection with Carlton was first forged through the club’s reserve grade team manager Bert Thomas, a next door neighbour.
The story goes that Thomas invited Madge to Princes Park to officiate as property steward after the sudden death of Norm Cataract in 1966. In that first year, Madge leant his support to reserves coach Jack Carney.
In an earlier interview, Greg said his father gave timekeeping “a bash for a year”, and then assumed duties from George Smith as Senior Timekeeper in 1967. It was a position Madge held until 1990 when Max Harvey took over.
“I must admit that I rode on Dad’s coat tails in those early days at Carlton,” Greg fondly recalled. “I got to sit in the old wooden press box by the Gardiner Stand where the timekeeper was, and I got to see the new faces like Alex Jesaulenko and Brian Kekovich.”
