And the new inductees certainly cover a fair spread of football history with the names of Doug Hawkins and Rowan Sawers instantly recognised by current-day football fans while Carl Ditterich was the most feared player in the VFL in the 1970’s.
The classy Denis Marshall was one of the pin-up boys of the 1960’s while Jack Moriarty and Western Australia’s answer to Jock McHale – Phil Matson – were stars of the 1920’s.
Sawers, who still has a prominent role in the game today as the AFL Umpires Coach – becomes only the 11th umpire to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
He was the longest serving umpire in AFL history with 410 games - including 31 finals, four grand finals and eight origin games.
Like Sawers, Hawkins is also a games record holder - with his beloved Footscray where he played 329 games from 1978-94 – beating the club games record of his boyhood hero, the immortal Ted Whitten in his final season with the Bulldogs.
And like Whitten, Hawkins was also a local boy having been born in Braybrook, just a drop punt from the Bulldogs’ traditional home ground where Hawkins became so popular that the ground’s outer wing eventually became officially known as ‘The Doug Hawkins Wing.’
It was on that stretch of turf at the Whitten Oval that Hawkins most often produced the dazzling array of skills that made him arguably the best wingman of the 1980’s
If Hawkins was the idol of Bulldogs fans in the 1980’s, then Denis Marshall held a similar place in the hearts of Geelong fans in the 1960’s.
With Hollywood looks and possessing every skill a footballer would want, Marshall was a huge hit when he arrived at Geelong in 1964 from his native Western Australia.
His coach at that time – the legendary Bob Davis – always rated him as the best player he ever saw but unfortunately for Cats’ fans, Marshall’s stay in Victoria would be brief.
He would play just 85 games from 1964 to 1968 but won the Cats' best-and-fairest in 1966 and was second in the Brownlow Medal in 1968 before returning to Perth at the age of 27.
Just one year before Marshall burst onto league football, another player had made a similar impact the previous year and would continue to do so for nearly two decades.
Carl Ditterich, the star attraction of such infamous football videos over the years as “Biffs, Bumps and Brawlers”, appeared before the AFL Tribunal a then record 19 times during a 285 game career with St Kilda and Melbourne from 1963-80.
But while Ditterich was one of the most feared players in the history of the AFL, he was far more than just a player who loved to dish out physical punishment to opponents.
Ditterich debuted as a 17-year-old with St Kilda in 1963 and was good enough to still be playing as captain and coach with Melbourne as a 34-year-old in 1980 and was a star from his very first game when he dominated for the Saints against the Demons.
He was one of the league’s first ever mobile ruckman and was renowned for his brilliant marking but his brilliant career was off-set by continual suspensions – which cost him a total of 30 matches or more than an entire season.
One suspension cost him a place in the Saints’ 1966 premiership side but he was a hero to Saints and later Demons’ fans and widely respected, if not always booed, by opposition fans.
The two new inductees that may not be as well-known to modern-day football fans are Jack Moriarty and Phil Matson.
But Moriarty still stands 18th on the list of the game’s all-time great goalkickers with 662 goals from 170 games – the bulk of them coming with Fitzroy from 1924-33 after his career almost ended before it began following just one season with Essendon in 1922.
The Bombers certainly came to regret letting Moriarty go as he went to become Fitzroy’s leading goalkicker a record nine times – despite weighing at the jockey size of just 59 kilos.
His career tally of 626 goals for the Lions was never beaten and his effort to kick 83 goals in a season in 1927 stood as Fitzroy’s best in a season for more than 50 years until Bob Beecroft kicked 87 goals in 1979.
The other inductee from the game’s bygone era is Phil Matson, who is revered in Western Australia as one of that state’s greatest ever coaches in much the same way Collingwood’s Jock McHale is revered in Victoria.
Matson was also a great player, playing in three premierships with Subiaco in 1912, 1913 and 1915 before joining East Perth where he was player and coach in a further five premierships in 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922 and 1923.
And just to cap off a remarkable career he coached East Perth to two more flags in 1926-27 as non-playing coach.
Originally from South Australia, whom he represented at state level as a player on four occasions, Matson also played for WA on 10 occasions and later coached the state team in 1923, 26 and 27.
