Oct 11th, 1947: Ottawa Trojans 21 @ Sarnia Imperials 06

I'm in the middle of adding some game summaries from either the Ottawa Citizen or the Ottawa Journal to the Trojans page, being the ORFU club that played from 1943 to 1947 inclusively. I've added one from 1943 and another from 1947, their most successful (yet final) season.

I'd like to shine a little more of a light on the game below from October 11th, 1947. Why is that, you ask? Was it a particularly impressive team or individual performance? Is there something about it that makes it iconic? Was it a turn-around performance after a winless 1946?

Not really, I just laughed out loud at the chaotic nature of the game and it was made all the funnier to me by the casual way in it which it was reported. Read on.

Very few games include brawls, fan swarms, and a manager having a bucket of water dumped on him after "just retaliation" from having an opposing player get in his face. We go from a mention of that incident right into the description of the success of the off-tackle play.

This may be my favourite game summary in nearly 150 years of Ottawa football history. 😁

Rod Smylie of the Ottawa Trojans

The image below is from the September 29th, 1947, Ottawa Citizen. There are very few images of the Trojans that are of even decent quality so I like to capture all the ones I come across.

That was the fourth game of the 1947 season for the Trojans. They had tied the first and lost the next two so this was their first victory of the season.

The two major papers at the time (Citizen and Journal) speculated that the team had turned the proverbial corner after going winless in 1946 and they turned out to be correct. The team would finish with a 5-4-1 record and win the Ontario Rugby Football Union.

The line-ups for those games often only listed last names but the recap for this one itself was quite detailed so I've begun a list of players who have performed for the Trojans from their 1943 season as the Combines to their final season in 1947. It'll be a slow build, as I'll only add to it when I happen to see a game report which displays full names, but gradually the mighty Trojans will be fully represented.