The AFL premiership cup is the only holy grail in Australian Rules football.
First presented in 1959, weighing about 6 kilograms and big enough to see from anywhere at the MCG, the cup is the superlative prize for nearly every AFL player.
However, if you’re in the right team at the right time, footy has a slew of secondary prizes.
Seldom was this more apparent than last weekend, which witnessed old and new rivalries.
The Showdown Trophy, Sydney Derby Cup and Q-Clash Trophy were all up for grabs, and Collingwood beat Carlton to claim the Peter Mac Cup.
Then there were the individual awards. While the most coveted individual prize in footy is the Brownlow Medal, a wide range of individual prizes are on offer for being the best in battles between two particular teams.
The Brett Kirk Medal went home with Errol Gulden again, while Nick Daicos now holds a Richard Pratt medal.
In Adelaide, Jake Soligo got the Showdown Medal and Dayne Zorko won his first Marcus Ashcroft Medal in his record 23rd Queensland derby start.
Making up new prizes
The history of these interclub battles for prizes is long and storied.
They actually predate the premiership cup itself, and indeed the very concept of a fixed premiership.
In mid-19th century football, clubs arranged their own bilateral fixtures and a number of challenge cups existed which were up for grabs when one team met the holder of a cup.
As more permanent fixtures were arranged from 1877 via the VFA, the primary contest shifted away from specific cups towards a season-long chase for the flag. That flag was a literal one — a pennant that was hoisted high for everyone to be reminded of the success.
The early VFL was obsessed with the chase for that piece of cloth. In 1899 Geelong were so confident in winning the title that they were said to be “painting their flagstaff” in preparation for the title.
It was only a few decades before the enthusiasm for bilateral contests crept back into league football. In 1938, The Age newspaper reported: “South Melbourne’s president, Mr. J. Dickson, has presented a pennant, valued at £5, to be competed for annually by South Melbourne and St Kilda.”
This Lake Premiership pennant was to be held by the winner of each match between the two rivals, flying from a flag pole during their matches.
The concept of challenge pennants has similarities to battles in college football and rugby, and likely shares some history with other individual sports ranging from tennis to racing.
Other less well-documented pennants and other awards emerged in the same era, though largely lost to history.
Right from the beginning, there were many of the features we see today. It was recognition of an organic rivalry with an official award. It gave certain often-struggling teams something inspiring to play for.
And of course, the club boss hoped it would get publicity, and in the South president’s words, “‘assist in interest in the code”.
The middle of the 20th century saw a smattering of perpetual trophies, the first one recorded being in 1949, awarded by the media mogul Sir Keith Murdoch to the winner of Geelong and North Melbourne. In 1965 the R.D. Barassi Trophy was inaugurated after the man himself crossed to Carlton, awarded while he was still playing.
However, the big proliferation of awards came more recently.
The trophy boom
When St Kilda and Hawthorn hit the field in Launceston this Saturday, they will be following through on their own version of the tradition, when in addition to four premiership points they play for the Blue Ribbon Cup.
This was established in 1999 as a memorial to two murdered police officers, Gary Silk and Rodney Miller, and now serves as a tribute to Victorian police more generally.
The Blue Ribbon Cup emerged in what turns out to have been the golden era for new trophies.
The modern bilateral trophy era kicked into high gear around 1995, the year Fremantle joined the AFL.
The Dockers brought new derby awards, as well as a Dockland Trophy with Port Adelaide (initially the SANFL team) and an Albert Thurgood Challenge Trophy with Essendon.
The peak of this flurry came in 2000 when seven new awards were introduced, including five by Collingwood. Those awards give a good cross-section of the different inspirations involved.
The Pies honoured former greats with the Lockett-Coventry, Robert Rose and Kennedy-McHale Cups for matches with Sydney, the Bulldogs, and Hawthorn respectively.
Most notable that year was the beginning of the trophy and medal for their Anzac game.
The year 2000 also saw a sponsored cup between Geelong and the Bulldogs.
Charity, event games, and past greats are all popular reasons to set up a bilateral award, sometimes it’s driven by sponsorship.
The peak decade from 1995 to 2004 saw nearly 40 fresh awards. The following decade, however, saw a significant decline. The years from 2005 to 2014 had only about 20 new trophies. That freefall has continued, with only about 10 awards and themed games introduced since 2015.
Some recent awards centred around new locations, like Shanghai, Wellington or Hobart, and sometimes causes without specific trophies to mark the occasion, such as Maddie’s Match or the Pride Game. Several new Indigenous Round awards have also emerged.
The orange trophy kings
In the trophy cabinet at GWS headquarters, a shining trophy takes pride of place. That’s the 2016 NEAFL premiership cup — arguably GWS’s biggest football prize to date.
Off to one side are two more smaller prizes that demonstrate the limits to which the trophy hunt can take.
GWS instituted one of these when they joined the league in 2012 — namely the Prime Minister’s Cup for select Canberra games. The Giants’ media manager Allison Zell told ABC Sport this seemed especially relevant against the Bulldogs when the Dogs’ former number one ticket holder Julia Gillard was prime minister.
It has, for now, ceased to be awarded, sitting dormant in the cabinet at Homebush.
The Giants also established a shield against Port Adelaide that had almost a different name every year it was awarded. It seems to have been most recently won by Port, and has never been heard from again.
Shelf life is not eternal
While many awards do not stand the test of time, those established purely for commercial reasons seem least likely to last.
But many more grounded and potentially serious trophies also don’t make it into the canon.
While last week saw a lot of trophies in play, notably not up for grabs between Melbourne and Geelong on Saturday night was the Wills-Harrison Trophy.
A creation for the V/AFL centenary in 1996, it harkened back to the very earliest days of the sport, with these two clubs considered the sport’s oldest.
That trophy had a distinctive “chunk of wood” design and clear historical reference, being rooted in the very foundation myths of the Australian code, but disappeared quietly in the early 2000s.
It’s a common fate for these awards to end. The Lake Premiership pennant lasted longer than most – until sometime in the 1960s. Nobody seems to know where the physical banner actually ended up. The Saints reported in 2018 that attempts to find it have proven fruitless.
After that 2000-era peak, as the number of new awards and trophies introduced has dropped, many have fallen by the wayside with perhaps about half of the AFL-era awards and themed events confirmed to still exist.
Accompanying these awards was always some sense that they’re a bit trivial, a side show compared to the serious business of winning premierships.
Lesser trophies proliferated so much that the satirical backlash has fully set in. The format of naming awards for past players has become a popular joke format — think West Coast vs Richmond for the Mitch Morton Cup — even for clubs themselves.
Indeed, in the early days, unkind jokesters already jumped on the humour in unsuccessful teams awarding themselves low-stakes side prizes. After the inaugural Lake Premiership match, even the stuffy old Age wryly observed that the flag ceremony for St Kilda would be “a unique experience as far as the seasiders are concerned, for this flag is the first to be won by the club since it was formed in 1873, a period of 65 years”.
The cruel accuracy of these kinds of jokes aside, taking a moment during the season to observe a novel trophy or best on ground presentation can be serious or fun, can honour a past great or support important charity work, or it can be commercially driven.
But in the end there’s only one holy grail and it is the final trophy lifted at the end of the season.
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