The Legend of Robert Walls - Know Your History with Shannon Gill (22.05.25)

This starts with the 1972 grand final, a famous grand final between Richmond and Carlton.

Maneuvers around, a left footer going down forward, here's a go, Walls! Oh blimey, how did he get that?

Gallagher hooks the ball back into the centre, all on his own as Womond Walls, the man of the match you might say.

Nicholls from behind knocks the ball on towards Walls, he kicks the ball off the ground and it's right through the centre as Walls kicks his fifth goal.

Described in commentary, Bob Skilton in real time, our modern day language would be the Norm Smith medalist, just best on ground, you might say.

And so there it is, a slice of 1972.

Yeah,

so this grand final, if you don't know about the 1972 grand final, it is one of the most incredible games of footy ever played.

And the fact that Robert Walls was... consensus best on ground and we'll get to why we should be doing something about that in a second.

But just to set this up, 1972 grand final, Carlton and Richmond are the two top teams for the season.

They're well ahead of anyone else.

They go into a second semifinal and it's a draw, a drawn second semifinal in the replay against Richmond win by seven goals.

So they are the red-hot favourites going into this grand final.

And to be fair, Robert Walls' form in the finals, he hasn't kicked a goal during all those three finals before the grand final.

So Richmond are the red-hot favourites.

They go into the grand final.

And as I said before, this is one of the most incredible games of footy.

And it's why we should have a proper footy marathon so people can watch these games ahead of a grand final, learn and reminisce and find out about what actually happened and how footy got to where it gets to.

The game itself, and sometimes I think Robert Walls' performance in this game has been historically overshadowed by John Nicholls, who was the captain coach of Carlton.

John Nicholls kicked six goals, but he also puts in place a heap of changes to the team from the team that had lost two weeks previous.

So it's very much hailed as Nicholls' triumph.

I think clearly if you watch this back, and I would implore people, you can either watch the full game on YouTube or watch someone's cut up like a KO mini of this game.

So you can cheat and watch the 35-minute version of And it's incredible.

So if you don't know, the scores in this game are Carlton 28-9, 177, defeating Richmond 22-18, 150.

A 27-point win where 50 goals are kicked in the game.