1900 VFL premiership season
Melbourne 1900 VFL premiership team
Date	5 May – 22 September 1900
Teams	8
Premiers	Melbourne 1st premiership
Minor premiers	Fitzroy 2nd minor premiership
Leading goalkicker medallist	Teddy Lockwood (Geelong) Albert Thurgood (Essendon) 24 goals
Matches played	70
← 1899 1901 →

The1900 VFL season was the fourth season of theVictorian Football League (VFL), the highest-level seniorAustralian rules football competition in Victoria. The season featured eight clubs and ran from 5 May to 22 September, comprising a 14-round home-and-away season followed by a finals series featuring all eight clubs.

Melbourne won thepremiership, defeatingFitzroy by four points in the1900 VFL grand final; it was Melbourne's first VFL premiership. Fitzroy won its second consecutiveminor premiership by finishing atop the home-and-away ladder with an 11–3 win–loss record.Geelong'sTeddy Lockwood andEssendon'sAlbert Thurgood tied for theleading goalkicker medal as the league's leading goalkickers.

In 1900, the VFL competition consisted of eight teams of 18 on-the-field players each, with no "reserves", although any of the 18 players who had left the playing field for any reason could later resume their place on the field at any time during the match.

Each team played each other twice in a home-and-away season of 14 rounds.

Once the 14 round home-and-away season had finished, the 1900 VFLPremiers were determined by the specific format and conventions of the1898 VFL finals system.

Rules for classification: 1. premiership points; 2. percentage; 3. points for
Average score: 41.0
Source:AFL Tables

Rules for classification: 1. premiership points; 2. percentage; 3. points for
Source:AFL Tables

Rules for classification: 1. premiership points; 2. percentage; 3. points for
Source:AFL Tables

All starting times arelocal time. Source:AFL Tables

The following table can be sorted from biggest winning margin to biggest losing margin for each round. If two or more matches in a round are decided by the same margin, these margins are sorted by percentage (i.e. the lowest-scoring winning team is ranked highest and the lowest-scoring losing team is ranked lowest). Opponents are listed above the margins and home matches are in bold. The rescheduling of round 3 until after round 14, which occurred following the cancellation of the originally scheduled matches due to heavy rain, is also reflected in this table.^[1]

By winning theminor premiership and accruing at least eight premiership points from its three sectional matches, Fitzroy won the right to challenge the semi-final winner for thepremiership.^[2]

Source:AFL Tables

• The Round 1 match between St Kilda and Melbourne ended in a draw, but the result was changed to a St Kilda victory on protest after it was noted that the umpire did not signal the end of the third quarter in the correct fashion after hearing the bell. This was St Kilda's first-everVFL win (after 48 losses), their first win since 1896 in the VFA (after 51 losses), and was the first of only two occasions that the score of a game has been changed on protest (the second was the2006 AFL siren controversy between St Kilda andFremantle).
• St Kilda footballer Dave Strickland, the father ofShirley Strickland, won the 1900Stawell Gift in 12 seconds off a handicap of 10 yards.
• Collingwood's highly talented "loose cannon"Dick Condon was given a lifetime suspension for sustained abuse of field umpire Henry "Ivo" Crapp.^[3]
• By the end of the finals round-robin matches, more than 1,000 points had been scored against St Kilda in a single season.^[4]
• Melbourne won the1900 premiership despite having a 6–8 record after the home-and-away matches and finishing sixth of the eight teams on the ladder. This unsatisfactory situation led to the formation of theArgus Final Four system for 1901, which was modified in 1902 and 1907 and used until 1930 (except for 1924).

• Hogan, P.,The Tigers Of Old, The Richmond Football Club, (Richmond), 1996.ISBN 0-646-18748-1
• Rogers, S. & Brown, A.,Every Game Ever Played: VFL/AFL Results 1897–1997 (Sixth Edition), Viking Books, (Ringwood), 1998.ISBN 0-670-90809-6
• Ross, J. (ed),100 Years of Australian Football 1897–1996: The Complete Story of the AFL, All the Big Stories, All the Great Pictures, All the Champions, Every AFL Season Reported, Viking, (Ringwood), 1996.ISBN 0-670-86814-0

• 1900 VFL season at AFL Tables
• 1900 VFL season at Australian Football

• Australian Football League seasons
• 1900 in Australian rules football

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