Influential Australians had become so obsessed with the First World War and the righteous crusade they deemed it to be, that it infuriated them to see apparently ''eligible'' fit young men lounging around on street corners when they might be in uniform and fighting abroad. Even worse, they massed at sporting events, frittering away their leisure time when they might be learning martial skills.

Sporting organisations recognised the power of these observations (they could hardly be called arguments) and many fell in line with ''their patriotic duty'' and shut down sporting competitions all around Australia. Cricket and rugby succumbed, with cricket announcing that only social games would go ahead.

The Victorian Football Association (the less well-patronised brother of the VFL) closed, and there were even calls for school-boy sport to be stopped. Racing resisted these efforts, arguing that in the breeding and training of thoroughbreds, the entire Australian horse industry benefited and that horses were still vital in the war effort.

When the VFL met to consider what should be done about sport and war, two delegates from each club - there were nine clubs in the VFL then - were required to vote as their clubs had instructed them. Essendon and the four teams south of the Yarra - areas of greater affluence in Melbourne - all voted to abandon the competition. The clubs north of the Yarra - traditionally the working-class areas of Melbourne - voted to continue playing.

The delegates in favour of continuing argued that the 40,000 fans who had turned up to games the previous Saturday had clearly voted for the ongoing game. Because the VFL required a two-thirds majority to make such a significant change to the games' structure, the motion was lost. Supporters breathed a sigh of relief, and some rejoiced in Carlton's relatively easy premiership victory over Collingwood, but the self-named patriotic classes seethed that the match had attracted 39,343 fans to the MCG. Didn't these people know there was a war on?

Meanwhile, the Australians had retreated from Gallipoli (though the withdrawal had been dressed up as a victory of sorts), but the patriotic classes went into overdrive trying to drum up recruits. In early 1916, they began to demand that the government introduce conscription too and that would take care of sport.

Just before the 1916 VFL season began, the five clubs that had voted against playing - Essendon, Geelong, Melbourne, St Kilda and South Melbourne - unilaterally withdrew from the competition. They left the remaining four clubs with a dilemma: should they withdraw too, or continue to play in a much-reduced league? Threatening to expel the terminating clubs from the VFL and clearly very annoyed, the four clubs who had voted for the season determined in private that they would go on. In essence, each club would play the other three throughout the season and, generously, the clubs that would not play could remain in the VFL.

So began what was undoubtedly the worst season the VFL ever played. Carlton, Collingwood, Fitzroy and Richmond played a total of 28 games and must have come to know each other's game plan pretty well by the end. Intriguingly, Fitzroy won both the wooden spoon for coming last in the competition and the premiership by winning all three games in the finals series. The grand final attracted 21,130 fans, significantly lower than the year before but respectable nevertheless.To justify the decision to keep on playing, the League, which still included the five non-playing teams, argued that "despite the distressing times, some degree of harmless and healthful recreation is both necessary and beneficial to everyone".

In 1917, two of the retired teams returned to the competition, so there were now six teams; the original four were joined by Geelong and South Melbourne. There were 15 rounds of football played before the finals series with 28,512 people attending the grand final, won by Collingwood.

Essendon and St Kilda returned in 1918, leaving only Melbourne as the one remaining club to turn its back on sport. There were 14 rounds played and South Melbourne finished the season on top of the ladder. South Melbourne also won the premiership that year before a crowd of 39,168, almost exactly the same number as in 1915.

A final point on patriotism. Over 750 VFL players served in the AIF, of whom 96 were killed on active service. University, a VFL team which withdrew from the competition at the end of the 1914 season, never to return, lost 19 of its former players to the war. Richmond lost three players, Melbourne lost 16, Collingwood eight, South Melbourne nine (including one of my great-uncles) and Carlton 12. Geelong lost eight former players.

What we can say from this, given the fortunes of war, is that there is no apparent patriotic discrepancy between those teams who did not want to play on during the war and those, attacked by the patriotic classes, who chose to continue sport for the worst years of the war.

Gillon McLachlan has the support of all 18 AFL clubs in suspending the game in this crisis, though many of them will do it tough and, we've been told, 80 per cent of club workers have already been stood down. Most Australians would think that the AFL has made the right call, as have all the other sporting bodies. Imagine if there had been a split in the ranks? Could we have seen a competition of six or seven clubs? It seems unthinkable. How the world has changed.