1) Fitzroy thump Melbourne by 190 points
Is it sadistic to revel in sporting annihilation? Maybe, but it doesn’t make you a bad person if you enjoy the spoils that come with an epic drubbing. The flipside of the phenomenon is that your own team is never immune so you have to enjoy the thrashings while you can and before your own ignominy arrive.
Beltings aren’t all bad for the fans of the teams receiving them either, at least not in on a philosophical level. A thrashing is a war story; it’s what bonds the true-blue supporters of beleaguered teams together - “We’ve been through worse than this, remember?” Also, as Bill Veeck once said, “Without losers, where would the winners be?” It doesn’t just happen in the upper echelons either; spare a thought for the beleaguered players of Kilburn Football club in division three of the SAAFL. After seven games this season they’re winless with a percentage of 2.49, losing five of those encounters by more than 300 points. Pembroke OS gave them a 436-point hiding, kicking 67.35 to 0.1.
Though it’s never been quite that bad for Dees fans, they know a little bit about being on the end of a hiding, being the undisputed league leaders in that unfortunate statistical category for some time. The worst of their defeats in a purely statistical sense was the time that Fitzroy brought up a cricket score in 1979, in which the Roys triumphed by 190 points in front of a paltry crowd of 12,149 at VFL Park. If anyone tells you they witnessed this one, they’re probably lying.
By this point, Melbourne had gone 15 years without a finals berth and were dire, but nothing could prepare the scoreboard operators for the flood of goals poured in by the Roys; 36 of them in all. Bob Beecroft kicked 10 but it was the unerring regularity of the goals that was so remarkable. Seven came in the first quarter, the same in the second, a remarkable 12.3 in the third and then a lazy 10.5 in the final term. For the Roys, Warwick Irwin gathered 36 possessions and kicked 5.5 in a dominant display. Garry Wilson had 42 touches and kicked three goals too. Unfortunately for Dees fans, footage of the massacre has survived.
2) The Socceroos unleash on American Samoa
For lovers of beltings and committed statistical fetishists, there is nothing in Australian sport quite like the Socceroos’ 31-0 World Cup qualifier demolition of American Samoa in 2001. Most of us have played on a really bad indoor five-a-side team but not a 31-0 bad team. It could have been worse too; scorers at the ground actually had it 32-0 as the final whistle blew but they’d lost track amid the carnage.
Archie Thompson was an unstoppable 13-goal tornado and wrote himself and his team into the record books. David Zdrilic is probably the forgotten man of the famous rout but then, he slacked off and only put eight goals past Samoan keeper Nicky Salapu, so he’s only got himself to blame. Four days earlier Salapu and his defence had let in 13 against Fiji. The Aussie bench could only look on at Thompson with envy; days earlier the rested Damien Mori and John Aloisi had shared 10 goals up front in Australia’s 22-0 humbling of Tonga.
Wikipedia suggests that Salapu possibly still plays professionally in Indonesia, which is more than you can say for another one of Australia’s hat-trick scorers that night, Con Boutsianis. Salapu did, however, get his moment in the sun in 2011 when he took part in his nation’s first international victory: a 2-1 triumph over Tonga.
In a sporting quote for the ages Tony Langkilde, the man who followed in the managerial steps of Lui for American Samoa’s 2006 World Cup qualifying campaign, said: “Football is a game of three possibilities: win, tie and loss. For us it is only a game of one possibility: loss. We have not had the other two possibilities yet.”
3) Geelong crush Melbourne in a Kardinia Park hiding
Melbourne fans don’t refer to their 2011 Kardinia Park loss to the Cats as “that time we got thumped by Geelong,” they actually call it “186”. No other information is needed to conjure up images of the calamity. That’s the margin by which they lost, precipitating the sacking of their coach, the late Dean Bailey and an utterly shambolic period in the club’s history. As far as symbolic losses go it was also an absolute doozy, encapsulating everything bad about Melbourne in that era and also highlighting the gulf between that great Geelong team and the league strugglers.
As with the Fitzroy mauling 32 years prior, the bullies in this instance spread the goal-scoring load. Steve Johnson kicked seven (and assisted in a quite astonishing nine more) and Cameron Mooney and Tom Hawkins dobbed five apiece. After Jimmy Bartel goaled early in the second minute the Cats did not let up in a ruthless, remorseless display. There weren’t vast numbers of Dees supporters in the 22,716-strong crowd but those who were there got a dose of reality the likes of which is rarely seen in league football.
By half-time the Cats led by 114 points. Dees skipper Brad Green had one possession until then and midfielder Brent Moloney went statless before he was subbed off at the main break, remarkable even given the fact that he’d succumbed to flu symptoms. Melbourne fans on the other hand had no such escape from the horror.
''A loss like today's certainly doesn't forego very well for anyone who's in the last year of their contract,” concluded Bailey. Soon enough he was gone and so too are a dozen Dees players who took the field that day. Geelong marched on to the flag but they never again feasted on goals the way they did that remarkable Saturday afternoon in July.
4) Namibia fold under Wallabies' attack
The one-sidedness of early pool games in the Rugby World Cup is an unfortunate by-product of the sport’s stronghold in just a handful of nations, but it has also spawned some undeniably eye-popping statistical feats. None more so than Australia’s 142-0 caning of Namibia in 2003.
In the unlikely surrounds of Adelaide Oval, the home side put on a clinic against their hapless opposition, running in 22 tries and raising half-serious questions as to whether a mercy rule should exist. Chris Latham managed five tries (the first Australian to achieve the feat) in the kind of effort most players would only have dreamed up in the backyard as kids. Lote Tuqiri and Matt Giteau also brought up hat-tricks in what was, remarkably given the final scoreline, a second-string line-up for the defending champions. Latham himself wasn’t even a regular starter by that point. The man keeping him out, league convert Mat Rogers, finished the game with 16 conversions and two tries; 42 points in all.
By half-time the score was 69-0 and Australia brought up the century in the 53rd minute – they didn’t let up from there either. It was quite a tournament for hammerings. New Zealand registered a 91-7 win over Tonga and the Australians had warmed up for the Namibia game with a 90-8 victory over Romania. In that encounter Elton Flatley crossed for the fastest try in World Cup history, a ridiculous 18 seconds into the game. Namibia also lost 67-14 to Argentina and 64-7 to Ireland.
It’s also worth noting that somewhat perversely the Namibia coach, Dave Waterston, didn’t send out a full-strength side for the Wallabies encounter, opting to give some youngsters a go in the game of their lives. “Hindsight might say I made the wrong decision,” he concluded with some understatement at the conclusion of the match. “To get to heaven you have to go through hell first.”
5) Waugh’s Aussies flatten the Proteas
Test cricket drubbings come in many forms. There are innings victories that come from the losers’ batting ineptitude rather than the winners’ total domination in every facet of the game. Australia’s 2002 walloping of Pakistan at Sharjah falls into that category. Posting a healthy but hardly imposing first innings total of 310, the Aussies bowled Pakistan for 59 and 53 either side. Matthew Hayden, who scored 119, had more runs than his opponents could manage across two innings. The Test finished inside two days.
Still, for total and utter domination, it was nothing on Australia’s effort earlier the same year in completely dismantling every element of the South African side in the second Test at Johannesburg. Aussie skipper Steve Waugh won the toss and batted but even at the fall of his wicket, with Australia 293-5, there was nothing that suggested Australia’s largest ever innings victory was on the cards. Enter Adam Gilchrist, who proceeded to club an unbeaten 204 from 213 deliveries in one of the most exhilarating displays of Test batting in that or any other decade.
Combining with Damien Martyn, no slacker with 133 of his own, a 317-run partnership took the game away from the Proteas and vaulted the tourists to 652 declared on day two. The Australian keeper had blasted 19 fours and eight sixes in a truly lethal innings. Australia’s bowlers did the rest and after the home side had crept to a half-decent 108-3 in reply it was carnage. Seven wickets fell for the loss of 58 with the spoils shared evenly between McGrath, Gillespie, Warne and Lee. Eager as ever for a quick kill, Waugh enforced the follow-on. South Africa were even worse second time up, folding for 133 on the third day and slumping to humiliating defeat.
Gilchrist’s innings was not the only incredible thing about the game. South African debutant Ashwell Prince, with none-too-shabby scores of 49 and 27 amid the chaos, contributed almost 40% of his side’s runs in a memorable introduction to Test cricket. Only months before the Proteas had been thought the side most likely to end Australia’s period of global domination. On this occasion it was an understatement to say that they fell short of the task.
6) Parramatta trounce an undermanned Cronulla
There have been bigger wins in NRL history than Cronulla’s 70-point hammering at the hands of Parramatta in 2003 (St George’s 91-6 annihilation of the Bulldogs in May 1935 being the heftiest), but it’s not a game that those who witnessed it will soon forget. It’s was also precipitated by officiating chaos.
In actual fact – and this seems quite bizarre in hindsight – it was Cronulla’s Paul Gallen who scored the opening try of the game in one of the most misleading starts imaginable (in a similar respect, no one ever remembers that before being bowled out for 47 in Cape Town in 2011, Australia’s cricketers had actually dismissed South Africa for 96 and held a 188-run first innings lead). Reduced to 11 men for much of the second half, the Sharks were swamped as Parramatta went on an unanswered 74-point rampage. David Peachey, Dale Newton and Danny Nutly all got their marching orders from referee Shayne Hayne. At one point Cronulla only had 10 players on the park.
Still, even facing a 22-4 deficit at half-time, the Sharks had no idea how badly they were about to be run over by the Eels. “I’ve been involved in football at this level for 30 years and I’ve never seen anything like it,” said a bewildered Cronulla coach Chris Anderson in his post-match press conference. “What we saw out there was a farce. It’s not good for rugby league and I’m very disappointed in what happened.” Abandoning any circumspection in the face of a potential fine from the league, Anderson claimed that Hayne had “just lost control of the whole game”.
