On Sunday Essendon attempted to do a four-player swap while Matthew Lloyd was taking his shot at goal, but Adam McPhee ran onto the field while Brent Stanton was still inside the playing arena.
The ball was taken from Lloyd and a free kick awarded to North in what could have been a turning point, as the Bomber veteran could have put his side within striking distance of the Roos.
The incident at Windy Hill in 1958 occurred under a different set of rules. On that occasion North was holding a commanding lead after 22 minutes in the final term when Essendon skipper Jack Clarke called for a count of the North players.
Twentieth man John Waddington had raced on when North’s Brian Martyn was felled in the centre of the ground. As Martyn had not left the field, Essendon believed that North had 19 on the ground, but they hadn’t seen North’s Albert Mantello leaving the field a moment earlier.
Mantello had gone straight up the race, and at first was unaware of the furore breaking out behind him.
The players were duly lined up for the count and North was found to have the right number of men. Under the rules in force at the time they would have lost their entire score if found to have 19 men.
Mantello recently told Inside Football magazine: “I was near the boundary and ran off the ground with an injured leg. They saw the bloke come onto the ground, but nobody had seen me go off. We won the game, which was even better. I was up the race, and I sort of half saw that the game had stopped for some reason.”
It was a vital match just two weeks before the finals and the two teams were locked on the same number of points in a battle for a finals berth. Essendon was fourth and North just outside the four behind them on percentage.
North’s win earned them a place in the 1958 finals and Essendon missed out. If the Roos had been found to have an extra man on the ground and lost the game they would have missed the finals and Essendon would have been in.
