Like Swallows and Ariells and Kitchens and Sons, Dunlop Tyre Factory had its own industrial football team drawn from its workforce. After regularly fielding teams for one-off games throughout the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, Dunlop took part in forming the Saturday Morning Industrial League in 1927 with a standing team which would play a prominent role in the new league. As a storeman at Dunlop, Tommy Lahiff played for their team in the Saturday Morning Industrial League during the early 1930s, and would then travel around Melbourne to play for Essendon in Saturday afternoon VFL games. He later described Dunlop as one of the key fixtures of Port Melbourne life during the 1930s, and claimed that, despite this gruelling schedule, playing for Dunlop was a joy: “If I hadn’t played for Dunlop I’d have done my job … But I’d have played anyway. I would have played football in the day, morning and night. I loved it that much, I couldn’t get enough of it.” While some employers reportedly insisted that employees play industrial games rather than play for VFL and VFA games during this period, this mainly affected the Wednesday Football League rather than Lahiff’s Saturday play. Dunlop attempted to use the Saturday league to trial rubber footballs to use during wet weather, however the footballs were considered “too lively” by players and so were not adopted. One of the most heavily supported Dunlop games was their “unlucky” defeat in the semi-final against the General Motors-Holden factory team in 1936, which The Age reported as “the industrial football championship of Port Melbourne.”
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