I have attached the full article.. Found it on an old SD memory card! No idea where or how I got it. Credit to the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education.
The aim of this paper is to ascertain how the Victorian Football
Association (VFA) has coped with the problem of creating and
sustaining a distinct and separate identity as a senior football
body when faced with the pressures imposed upon it by the existence
of the vastly more powerful and popular Victorian Football League
(VFL). From the beginning of the VFA-VFL relationship, the Association
has never viewed itself as in any way subordinate to the
League, but, on the contrary, it has struggled at every opportunity
to project a public image of equality - if not in standards of
play, then at the very least in determining the future of the code
in Victoria. The Association has never retreated from its main
objective of bringing top-line senior football, at the local level,
to the people of Greater Melbourne.1 How that public has viewed
the Association, on the other hand, is a different story. Football
followers have occasionally questioned why the VFA exists at all.
There has been, for the best part of the last ninety years, a continued
questioning as to what type of identity the Association has
possessed. Public attitudes to the VFA as a football body have
frequently been as much a talking point as the fortunes of the
clubs which comprise it,
