Alf Quill: The 868-Goal Man Australian Football Forgot

Between 1927 and 1949, a small bloke from Ultimo scored an estimated 868 goals in senior football. It is the largest number in the history of the Australian game. It belongs to a man most of us cannot name. And the ground where most of it happened is now a shopping centre.

Every football culture keeps a number it can't quite believe. England has Dixie Dean's sixty in a season and the way old men said it — sixty — like a rumour. Brazil has Pelé's thousandth. We have one too, and it's bigger than both, and almost nobody can put a face to it.

Eight hundred and sixty-eight.

I first came across that number on Twitter, and to my shame I had never heard of Alf Quill. I assumed it was a typo. Then I assumed it was one of those junior-park tallies that gets inflated by a bloke's grandson over the years. It isn't. It's the accepted figure for Alfred Louis Quill, born Ultimo 1910, died New Lambton 1997, a centre forward barely 173 cm and under seventy kilos who spent most of his career kicking the stuffing out of the Newcastle coalfields on behalf of a club called Wallsend.

What follows is the story of the biggest number we've got, and of the odd, very Australian reasons nobody made a fuss about it.

OneA kid from Ultimo who could already run

He was born on 9 July 1910, in Ultimo, back when Ultimo was wharves and terraces rather than media buildings and university car parks. He showed up first at Globe Public School, and by twelve he was playing for New South Wales as a schoolboy against Victoria, South Australia and Queensland — which tells you two things. One, he was extraordinary. Two, this country was already organising interstate schoolboy football before most of us think football existed here at all.

Three seasons with Wentworth Juniors, then Pyrmont's senior side at seventeen in 1927. Four goals in his first handful of senior games. Two years at Pyrmont, two at Leichhardt-Annandale, and by 1930 he was scoring at a clip — thirty-six league goals that season alone — which is when the outside world briefly noticed.

In April 1931, Bolton Wanderers wanted him. First Division Bolton, of Burnden Park, in an England that produced footballers the way Newcastle produced coal. The offer was knocked back.

The modern instinct is to mourn a knockback like that. Imagine what he might have become at Burnden Park. I find the other question more interesting: who actually made the call? Nothing in the record suggests Quill turned England down out of sentiment, and in 1931 a decision like that was rarely a player's to make on his own.

Later that year he went north instead. Not to Bolton. To Wallsend. His own explanation, given years afterwards, was "just to get a job in the depression years."

Bolton offered him the First Division. Wallsend offered him a job. In 1931, that was not a difficult choice.

The 1931 decision

TwoCrystal Palace, which used to be a swamp

Wallsend Football Club had been going since 1887, formed in the parlour of the Metropolitan Hotel by miners who'd learnt the game in England. Their original plan was a red-and-gold sash, in tribute to Blackburn Rovers; they settled on red and white and have worn it ever since. There were, at one point, thirty-three hotels in Wallsend, which is either a lot of pubs or exactly the right number for a coal town.

In 1921 the club leased a boggy paddock from the Newcastle-Wallsend Coal Company — Johnson's Paddock, a swamp — and filled it in, load by load, until it was a football ground. They called it Crystal Palace. Nobody is entirely certain why: the club's own history offers two possibilities, either a travelling Crystal Palace Circus that once performed on the site, or a nod to a ground back in Britain. I find the uncertainty perfect. We built one of the great grounds of Australian football on a filled-in swamp and then forgot how it got its name.

Everything about the place was self-built. The players and supporters put up the grandstand in 1932, with the timber sold cheap and the roof money borrowed. From 1929 the club paid its players a pound a match. By 1935 the final payment was made to the coal company and Wallsend owned its own ground outright — believed to be one of the first clubs in the country to do so.

So when Quill arrived, he wasn't joining a football club so much as a co-operative with a fixture list. And the football, by his own account, was not his kind of football.

ThreeKick and rush, meet the little bloke

The style at Wallsend was described, generously, as kick and rush. Less generously, the game of that era involved kicking, gouging, shoving and the occasional bite; goalkeepers took a hiding every week and broken limbs weren't remarkable. Into this walked a man under seventy kilos who wanted the ball on the deck.

The Sport Australia Hall of Fame's citation is the best short description of him I've read: barely 5 ft 8 in and under eleven stone, he substituted speed for size and cunning for weight, and he was at his best when the players around him kept it low and slipped him quick short passes between the opposing full-backs. He'd been a serious sprinter — good enough to have considered running instead — and over thirty metres nobody caught him.

The first look at him reassured defenders. Ninety minutes later they were trying to work out how they'd been done so often.

The club's history records one exchange that tells you more about the era than any statistic does. Before a game at Weston, Jack "Dingy" O'Brien warned Quill not to let a defender called Pincher Harris catch him in possession. Harris caught him all day — knocked him over, then helped him up, then did it again. At full time Harris suggested Quill "make an appointment to see an optometrist", since he'd spent the afternoon bumping into him.

That's the whole culture in one exchange. Brutal, then courteous, then funny about it in the bar. If you've ever played men's football in this country you have met Pincher Harris. He is usually a plumber.

Four1937, and seventy-eight goals

Depression economics kept moving him. From 1934 to 1936 he played for Goodyear in Sydney — the rubber men — because Goodyear Tyre and Rubber gave him a job. Part-time professional, full-time employee. He came back to Wallsend on a three-year contract signed in January 1937 and immediately had the season of his life.

Seventy-eight goals across the northern first division and cup football. A state record for a season. Wallsend won the State Cup, the Robinson Cup and the Peters Cup, taking the State knockout for the first time in the club's fifty years. It was, by any reading, the year Newcastle became the centre of Australian football.

He was the leading scorer in New South Wales eight times — 1932, 1933, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1943 and 1945 — and won seven State League titles with Wallsend. Under him, premiership pennants went up over Crystal Palace with a regularity that would embarrass a modern dynasty.

FiveThe best partnership we've had

In 1937 a sixteen-year-old made his senior debut for Wallsend. His name was Reg Date, and historian Sid Grant credits him with 664 senior goals of his own.

Sit with that for a second. For the better part of a decade, one club in one coal town in one corner of New South Wales fielded the two most prolific goalscorers this country has ever produced, at the same time, in the same forward line. They were teammates across roughly nine seasons. The club's history describes their understanding as superb and simply a joy to watch: Quill knitting the move together with short passes, Date arriving behind him with a shot like a dropped anvil.

Quill, in the club's own affectionate phrasing, was the brains of it.

If you want the other half of this story properly told, we've written it: Reg Date, Australia's greatest goalscorer. Read them side by side and you start to feel genuinely aggrieved on Newcastle's behalf.

SixTwo caps, and a filing problem

Here is where the story gets Australian in the way that makes you want to lie down.

Officially, Alf Quill played twice for Australia. Both games were against India, in September 1938. He debuted on 3 September at the Royal Agricultural Showground in Sydney and scored twice in a 5–3 win, which is a fairly emphatic way of introducing yourself. Later that month, India visited Newcastle and played Northern Districts barefoot, because that is what touring Indian sides did, and the local record-keepers noted it as a curiosity rather than an outrage.

Two caps. For the greatest goalscorer in the country's history.

Part of that was selection politics. The Hall of Fame is blunt about it: his representative chances were curtailed by selectors who preferred the size and robustness of George Smith. He played for New South Wales in 1930, then spent six years shunted into Metropolitan and Northern Districts sides before getting another state jersey in 1937 against the touring England Amateurs. He was quiet that day; Smith took his place for the Test series. Three days later, Quill scored twice and hit the crossbar for Northern Districts against the same tourists. Which is the football equivalent of being cut from the team and then doing your best work in front of the selectors' front window.

The rest of it was administrative. Australia spent long stretches of this era at odds with FIFA, and a large number of Quill's international appearances — roughly twenty, against touring national and representative sides — fell outside official recognition as a result. There's also a 1933 Australian XI against New Zealand that fielded five Wallsend players, drew the match, and had Quill scoring both Australian goals. It doesn't appear in his cap tally either.

About that 868

Be honest about the numbers and they get more interesting, not less. The 868 figure comes down to us from Sid Grant's records and is the one Football Australia and the Sport Australia Hall of Fame both use. A separate Australian player database puts him at 802 goals in 477 league and cup matches. Some accounts have claimed he finished with more than a thousand, though those almost certainly fold in friendlies and unofficial games.

Pick whichever you like. All three are absurd. And there is one figure stranger than all of them: the IFFHS has him scoring 271 top-tier goals after his thirtieth birthday, which puts him among the most prolific over-thirty scorers in the history of the sport, anywhere.

SevenTwenty years too early

The Hall of Fame makes an argument about Quill that I think is the real point of him, and it goes well beyond goals.

He was, it says, at least twenty years ahead of his time in Australian football — because it wasn't until the 1950s, under the influence of European migrants, that artistry and finesse were properly valued here. Quill spent his whole career playing a passing, thinking, technical game in a competition that rewarded size and collisions, and he did it so well that he out-scored everyone who ever played the muscular version.

It's a familiar shape, isn't it. We keep producing footballers whose ideas arrive before the country is ready to appreciate them, then congratulating ourselves for having produced them once everyone else has said so. That tension runs through our whole football story — we've dug into it in why football never conquered Australia and in the long, daft history of the word itself in it's not like the sokkah.

EightHe kept not retiring

Quill announced he'd finish at the end of 1945. In April 1946 he was back in the Wallsend side for a home game against Lysaght's-Orb, which is possibly the most beautifully mundane comeback fixture ever recorded. He played on. He was still scoring in 1949, his last season, when at thirty-nine he managed fourteen goals in thirteen games.

He also played ten years of first-grade cricket for Wallsend between 1939 and 1949, presumably because Sunday was going to waste.

Then he coached Wallsend for eight years. He took charge of the Australian team against Hajduk Split in 1949. Decades later, when the National Soccer League came to Newcastle, he was managing the KB United youth side, which means the man who started scoring goals in 1927 was still teaching teenagers how to do it in the era of the Socceroos, television and sponsors' logos. Around Newcastle they called him The Master.

He died on 3 October 1997, at New Lambton, aged eighty-seven. The Newcastle Herald put him on the front page.

NineThey knocked the ground down

Wallsend played their last competitive game at Crystal Palace on 18 August 1985, beating Edgeworth 3–1. They kept training there until 12 May 1987. Then the buildings and the pitch went under the bulldozers and Wallsend Plaza went up in their place.

The details of the ending are almost unbearably human. The huge peppercorn tree that stood at the ground was cut down, and Bob Frame had wooden goblets made from it and handed them to former players. Seeds went to a nursery in the hope of growing another. A supporter is said to have taken a square of the pitch home. And some locals simply refused to do their shopping at the new centre for years afterwards, because of what it was built on.

We filled in a swamp to build it, won the country's premierships on it, and paved it for retail. That is the shortest possible history of Australian football.

Crystal Palace, 1921–1987

I've never been to Crystal Palace, because you can't. Neither can you go to most of the places where this game's Australian past actually happened. That's the peculiar grief of loving football in this country: our history is real, it's documented, it's frankly extraordinary — and it keeps ending up under a car park while we're told the sport has no heritage here.

TenWhy the number matters

The temptation with Quill is to use him as ammunition. See? We had a bloke who scored 868. Put that in your pipe. And the temptation should be resisted, because it makes him into a debating point, and he was better than that.

What Quill actually offers is something rarer than a statistic: proof that the version of football we like best has always been here. Not imported in 1956, not invented by the A-League, not discovered when Ange started winning things in Europe. A small, fast, clever centre forward was demanding the ball on the deck in Wallsend in 1931, in front of miners who'd have preferred it hoofed, and he made it work for twenty-four seasons.

We honoured him eventually. The Sport Australia Hall of Fame inducted him on 6 December 1995, when he was eighty-five. Football Australia keeps his record on file. Newcastle has never forgotten him.

The rest of us should probably catch up. Learn the number. Learn the name. And when someone tells you football has no history in this country, you'll have 868 reasons handy.