Collingwood insulted Port’s proud history with a stroke of texta | David Penberthy

Port should wear their original prison bars next Saturday just to see what happens, writes Crows tragic David Penberthy.

You would think Collingwood Football Club would have other things on its mind than branching out into the world of fashion design.

But this week the Collingwood brains trust got their textas out and came up with a reworked teal-coloured version of Port’s iconic prison-bars jumper. What was meant to be an olive branch had more the effect of being a lifted middle finger raised aloft in the direction of Port’s 150-year history. The fact that anyone at Collingwood thought this would be well received, and that Victorian journalists reported it with a straight face as some kind of conciliatory gesture, should remind us South Australians of an immutable truth. Namely, the capacity for Victorians to be self-absorbed drongos when it comes to matters involving football.

Nothing underscores the improperness of the “A” in AFL like a story as silly as this one. The match in question, our Showdown, is not even being held in Victoria and does not involve any Victorian teams.

The fact that Collingwood regards this piece of cloth as sacrosanct, like some footy version of the Shroud of Turin, in a match they’re not involved in 725km away suggests a significant degree of mental fragility on their part.

Is this what Port Adelaide’s teal prison bars jumper could look like?

The fact that they would casually get out their felt pens and redesign another club’s jumper, as if they have a God-given ownership over a pair of colours, is both impertinent and hilarious. Funnier still is the fact that no one in Victoria is prepared to recognise this as a perfect form of silliness and pillory the Pies accordingly.

My workmate Tim Ginever put it best in his new role co-hosting the FIVEaa Drive Show this week, the seven-time premiership player saying he initially thought the teal prison bar jumper was a prank.

“It’s almost a joke,” Ginever said. “It’s about the history and the heritage. We never wore that.”

Indeed Port didn’t, and surely never will. It is a matter of proud record that I don’t barrack for Port and I must admit to having a cracking time at Unley last weekend where just before half time the scores read “Sturt 9.6 60 Port 0.3 3”. The reason numbers like that warm the cockles of my warped heart is that for years I have seen great Port sides torment and destroy so many other teams in the SANFL.

Whether you like them or not, Port have an extraordinary team history and a culture of self-belief, all of which was insulted with the stroke of a texta by the people at the Pies in defence of an item of clothing which they think belongs to them.

The seemingly endless jumper story is not the silliest thing the “A”FL has done in recent years. I doubt it will ever do better than the mad scramble to ensure that a patch of “sacred” MCG turf was present at the Gabba for the Covid-19 grand final in 2020, solemnly shipped up to Queensland on a flatbed truck and carefully placed near the boundary line so there would at least be some spiritual connection to the apparent holy temple of Australian rules.

The fact that no one behind this idea realised the rest of the country would just laugh out loud goes again to the lack of self-awareness that infects AFL House and its supplicants in the Victorian press.

Similarly, the decision to extend the MCG’s “right” to host the grand final until some time in the next millennium was seen in Victoria as a massive win for football, so much so that their Premier Dan Andrews announced it as a major vote-winning pre-election commitment.

It was a win for football all right, for football in Victoria. It was the opposite of a clever marketing idea, unlike the NFL where the Super Bowl goes on the road each year, generating new revenue and new audiences through bidding rights and all the associated tourism, marketing and hospitality for the host city.

But here, the AFL denies itself any such opportunities, and denies them to the rest of the country too. It proves one thing. Deep down, they don’t really regard Aussie rules as the national game or the AFL as a national competition. Rather, they see it as a Victorian game which they kindly deign to let some of the other states play, too.

Izak Rankine of the Suns. Picture: Getty Images

The manner in which these people think was best evidenced this week in a conversation between Gerard Healy and my old chum, award-winning newshound Sam McClure. The pair of them were in earnest discussion on air about the fact that Izak Rankine is reportedly considering leaving the Gold Coast Suns and transferring to the Adelaide Crows.

Healy and McClure described this development on air as “totally baffling”. Baffling? Should Rankine return, the headline could accurately read: “Footballer returns to his birthplace to earn heaps more money.”

The bloke is from here, and the Crows are prepared to pay him a good 150k more than he earns on the Gold Coast. If you’re baffled by that, you’re in trouble.

Port should wear the original jumper next Saturday just to see what happens. If they did, and the AFL came down on them at Collingwood’s behest, it would simply confirm what the rest of the country has long suspected about this faux national, Victorian-centric operation.

And a big cheerio to my other work mate Caro. Here’s a few hundred more words she can use for her next instalment of South Australians are very well balanced, they’ve got a chip on both shoulders.

You can hear her every week on FIVEaa making the same point, as if on a loop.