Wally Donald

Who was Wally Donald?

Wally Donald was recruited by Footscray Football Club in the Victorian Football League, now Australian Football League, in 1946 from Braybrook. He played only one senior game that year, but from 1947 to 1957 he was a fixture in the Footscray team, missing only a total of seven games. By 1949, Donald was established as one of the best defenders in the league, and in 1950 he represented Victoria during the Brisbane Carnival. Donald even did fairly well in the Brownlow Medal that year, polling a total of nine votes out of a career total of 27.

His unique understanding with full-back Herb Henderson, made for an almost impassable backline, whose record of conceding only 959 points in the 1953 home-and-away season stands as the best defence by any team since 1920. He was a member of Footscray's 1954 premiership team, and was chosen as a member of the Bulldogs Team of the Century in 2000.

Donald played a total of 205 games for one goal — curiously kicked in the “National Day Round” of the 1952 season, when a depleted Footscray was beaten by St Kilda on a very muddy ground at Yallourn. He is the only player to have two separate sequences of 100 games without a goal: the Yallourn game was his 102nd.