Annandale

League history

Final ladder position each season on record (1910–1920) — 1st at the top. Hover a point for the exact position and field size that season.

Club history

Annandale joined the NSWRFL premiership in 1910, one of the Sydney inner-west clubs that filled the gap left when the short-lived original 1908-1909 Newcastle club withdrew from the competition. Playing out of Annandale Oval, the club spent eleven consecutive seasons (1910-1920) in the top grade, making it one of the competition's longer-serving foundation-era clubs despite never winning a premiership. Its best finish came in 1911, when it placed fifth of eight teams; for most of its history it sat in the bottom half of the ladder, and it endured a fully winless 1918 season, the first winless campaign in the competition's history.

A notable feature of the club's early years was that Annandale fielded four brothers from the Norman family in the same side in 1910, one of the first instances of four siblings playing together in a single NSWRFL match. By 1920 Annandale's results had deteriorated further — the club won none of its thirteen matches that season — and at the close of 1920 it withdrew from the premiership, being replaced for 1921 by the newly formed St George club. Annandale never returned to first-grade competition.

Across its eleven seasons the club won just over a quarter of its matches, and its win total climbed only briefly above the competition's mid-table before settling into a longer decline through the back half of the 1910s. Like several of the competition's other short-lived early clubs — the original 1908-1909 Newcastle side and the one-season Cumberland club among them — Annandale's story illustrates how unstable club membership was in the NSWRFL's first two decades, before the competition settled into the more familiar, longer-lived roster of clubs that carried it through the mid-20th century.

Sources

• 1910 NSWRFL season — Wikipedia
• 1920 NSWRFL season — Wikipedia