George Goninon (born 18 April 1927) is a former Australian rules footballer in the Tasmanian

North West Football Union The North West Football Union (NWFU) was an Australian rules football competition which ran from 1910 to 1986. In its time it was one of the three main leagues in Tasmania, with the Tasmanian Football League and Northern Tasmanian Football As ...

(NWFU) and

Victorian Football League The Victorian Football League (VFL) is an Australian rules football league in Australia serving as one of the second-tier regional semi-professional competitions which sit underneath the fully professional Australian Football League (AFL). It ...

(VFL). Goninon was Geelong's champion goalkicker at full-forward in the

1951 Events January * January 4 – Korean War: Third Battle of Seoul – Chinese and North Korean forces capture Seoul for the second time (having lost the Second Battle of Seoul in September 1950). * January 9 – The Government of the United ...

and

1952 Events January–February * January 26 – Black Saturday in Egypt: Rioters burn Cairo's central business district, targeting British and upper-class Egyptian businesses. * February 6 ** Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, becomes m ...

Grand Final Primarily in Australian sports, a grand final (sometimes colloquially abbreviated to "grannie") is a game that decides a sports league's premiership (or championship) winning team, i.e. the conclusive game of a finals (or play-off) series. S ...

wins, including kicking 11 goals in the 1951 Semi-Final, the equal-most goals scored in a VFL/AFL final, and the last player to get a double-digit goal tally in a final for 43 years (when

Garry Lyon Garry Peter Lyon (born 13 September 1967) is a former professional Australian rules football player and was captain of the Melbourne Football Club in the Australian Football League (AFL). Since his retirement from football, he has been mainly ...

kicked 10 goals in a semi-final in

1994 File:1994 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 1994 Winter Olympics are held in Lillehammer, Norway; The Kaiser Permanente building after the 1994 Northridge earthquake; A model of the MS Estonia, which sank in the Baltic Sea; Nelson ...

). He was going strong in

1953 Events January * January 6 – The Asian Socialist Conference opens in Rangoon, Burma. * January 12 – Estonian émigrés found a government-in-exile in Oslo. * January 14 ** Marshal Josip Broz Tito is chosen President of Yug ...

, with the Cats being hot favourites to make it three in a row. However, he was dropped from the team that would go on to lose the flag to Collingwood by two goals as a consequence of his marital infidelity. In 2007, then 80 and living on the

Gold Coast Gold Coast may refer to: Places Africa * Gold Coast (region), in West Africa, which was made up of the following colonies, before being established as the independent nation of Ghana: ** Portuguese Gold Coast (Portuguese, 1482–1642) ** Dutch G ...

, the twice-married Goninon claimed he was a "victim of the times", a strict "church-on-Sundays age" when, being married, he had an affair and was found out (thus causing his potentially crucial omission). Geelong, with 90% churchgoers at the time, frowned on him and coerced the club to drop him out of the team in the midst of the final series despite kicking 65 goals from 18 games in 1953 and being Geelong's leading goalkicker for the fourth successive year.

References

*
Piesse, Ken, "Stray Cat lifts lid on Grand Final dumping", ''Sunday Herald Sun'', (Sunday, 23 September 2007).

External links

* 1927 births Essendon Football Club players Geelong Football Club players Geelong Football Club premiership players Burnie Football Club players Living people Australian rules footballers from Tasmania VFL/AFL premiership players {{AFL-bio-1920s-stub