Growing up, if I ever heard of the Victorian Football Association (VFA), it was due to some former VFL player extending their career for a few seasons with a VFA club. However, the VFA had a history dating back decades before the VFL and for a glorious moment in the 1930s it looked like the VFA would equal the VFL's support.

Fiddian has written more on the VFA than anyone else so he's best placed to produce a history of the VFA. Sadly, he's let down by the printing, which runs letters together so you spend half your time trying to determine what Fiddian has written. The work itself is acceptable but loses a star due to the atrocious print job.

If you can look past the printing issues, this is probably as a good a history of the VFA you're ever going to find. ( )

There is a great deal of information about the evolution of the VFA and its various member clubs in this comprehensive survey of VFA history. Fiddian’s approach, as in most of his many books, is not to delve too much into the social or economic context of his subject. The strength of this book is the description of the on-field record of the VFA clubs and the many star players the VFA has produced. To some extent Fiddian looks at administrative or demographic factors which have a bearing on the history of the VFA but these are not deeply explored. Most of this book is a club by club survey, about 169 pages, this takes up over half of the book. A statistics section takes up another 87 pages. That leaves about 45 pages to cover the history of the VFA in a more general sense. The absence of an index especially, but also a bibliography, table of contents, or footnotes undermines the usefulness of this book.