We Should Know More About...Matt Anthony

The mention of Matt Anthony in the earlier post about the 1947 all-star team added a little emphasis to the breadth of his contributions to the game for me.

In adding game results for the Gee-Gees over the past few months, his name appeared constantly. And so it would, since he was head coach there for 15 years. I continued to come across it when doing the similar research for the Sooners.

His playing career is less celebrated (in my view, anyway), as is his coaching stint for the St Patrick's team, but when those are taken into account, he has impacted the game positively at the high school, junior, university and pro levels as either a coach or player. Very few people can make that claim.

Let's let the also seemingly ever-present Martin Cleary break it all down for us. The article below is in effect Anthony's sports obituary from the Ottawa Citizen following his passing in 2000.  

The article accurately states that Anthony was the Sooners head coach in 1971 but he was also an assistant on the 1970 team.

I've been trying to determine when he coached at St. Patrick but I can't seem to land on that. I'm not questioning whether or not he did, but I would like to see if he had his standard level of success there. This post will be updated if I finally manage to find those results.

The 1947 Eastern All-Star Team

The 1947 Eastern All-Stars included players from both the Ottawa Rough Riders and Ottawa Trojans even though they played in different leagues and, while it is irrelevant to this site, the university of Western Ontario also contributed a few players to the second team.

At the time, players were chosen from all Eastern football-playing unions, whether Interprovincial (or Big Four, meaning the Riders), the Ontario Rugby Football Union (Trojans) and even the university teams.

Interesting approach, though based on this particular year's dominant results, the IRFU was already judged to be the highest level of play even between pro leagues.

I haven't looked at the all-star teams for the 1945 and 1946 season, the other years in which the Trojans and Rough Riders both played but in different unions, to see whether players from both teams were included. The Trojans and Rough Riders would merge in 1948 though, so if this is not the first time it's happened, it's certainly the last.

Here are the IRFU selections in particular, obviously ecstatic at having been chosen. 

Haigh, in particular, looks like he has somewhere to be! 😄