Allen Jakovich

Allen Jakovich (born 21 March 1968) is an Australian rules football player. Jakovich was a prolific full forward and football journeyman. He is most notable for his 54 games and 208 goals for the Melbourne Demons in the Australian Football League, a controversial short-lived stint with the Western Bulldogs and being the brother of West Australian great Glen Jakovich.

Early career

Allen spent some of his earlier career in Western Australia, Northern Territory and South Australia chasing a professional football career. He spent two years in the Northern Territory Football League and in the 1988/1989 season he kicked 104 goals for the Southern Districts Football Club.

Jakovich later moved to South Australia and played in the South Australian National Football League (SANFL). In one season, he kicked 101 goals for Woodville. It was this performance that drew the attention of Melbourne Football Club talent scouts.

VFL/AFL Career

He began with the Melbourne reserves and dominated the reserves competition in the first half of the 1991 season but failed to make the crucial breakthrough at senior level.

In the second half, though, he burst out convincingly and big hauls came on an almost weekly basis for the rest of the season making a big impression in the league with his confident playing style. A high point was a near single handed defeat of North Melbourne where he kicked 11 goals (including a miraculous scissor kick out of mid-air from twenty metres out, a certain goal of the year candidate), 7 behinds and one out on the full. This effort also earned Jakovich the distinction of being the fastest player to score his first fifty goals, taking only nine games to do so [http://stats.rleague.com/afl/stats/alltime/misc.html] . He finished with 71 goals for his debut season; becoming one of a handful of players in VFL/AFL history to kick 50 goals in both the senior competition and now defunct 'reserves' league within the same season.

Over the next three years at Melbourne he balanced some mercurial performances with fitness problems and indifferent form. He was let go at the end of the 1994 season, due to persistent hamstring injuries. He spent the next year out of the game before being drafted by the Footscray Football Club for an ill-fated comeback that lasted barely half a season.

Post football career

He has largely been out of the public eye since the late 1990s, except for a one-off appearance on "The Footy Show". Jakovich's brother Glen said in a 2003 that interview that Allen now co-owns a fishing charter company on Australia's east coast. Allen has since been reported to be working as a miner in central SA.