Sherrin Sharpshooters, Bill Pearson

Nick Armistead

With the conclusion of the home and away season coming hand-in-hand with Victoria’s latest lockdown extension, and the slightest shred of excitement a requirement for every one of us, we can officially stop to recognise the individual brilliance of our men’s and women’s leading goal kickers – our Sherrin Sharpshooters.

The reason for doing so in this write-up is two-fold: 1) the goal kicking tallies aren’t changing so our winners are our winners and 2) the latest ‘Club in Focus’ Podcast uncovered the greatest injustice to perhaps the most dominant goal kicker in the history of our game. More on that in a moment.

Congratulations to Will Lewis (Old Brighton), James Mangoni (SBMT), Christian Hatzis (Old Geelong), Aaron Cloke (Oakleigh), Ashan Wijayakumara (MHSOB), Jack Bilson (Richmond Central), Nick Lowrie (Elsternwick), Cecilia Baldassarre (Marcellin), Asha Price (MUWFC), Madeline Hince (UHSVU), Alex Theodosi (Scotch), Jade Smith-Love (Old Mentonians), Steph Peacock (Hampton Rovers) and Hayley Wurfel (Swinburne) – and of course every other winner from reserves through U19’s.

To kick more goals than any other player is an incredible achievement. Something that Bill Pearson did more than any other player in the early 1930’s. Onto point #2.

While recording this week’s VAFA ‘Club in Focus’ Podcast on Old Scotch, we uncovered the story of Bill Pearson – a man who kicked more than 1000 A Section goals – and the most overzealous piece of officiating perhaps in VAFA history. Pearson was unstoppable in the early ‘30’s and spearheaded a Scotch team that won four consecutive flags from 1931-34. Teammates kicked backwards 30m further out from goal just to get the ball in his hands.

However, the VAFA deprived Bill of his amateur status in 1938 after accepting – wait for it – a train fare to Sydney to play Sheffield Shield cricket. During the off-season. I’m not across the price of long-haul train travel in the late 1930’s but I can’t imagine it was a whole heap. This is a guy who kicked 220 goals in one season. He kicked 30 in one game. He averaged 7.3 goals per game – and all by the age of 24. Imagine if he had time to mature. Imagine if he had another few years to grow into the role of a key forward. We could be talking John Coleman areas. Maybe. You can hear more on that story plus plenty of others in this week’s podcast.