Aldinga Football Club ex-player and fan Ross Harvey reflects on a lifelong love affair with the Sharks

ROSS Harvey’s memories of Aldinga Football Club are not of thrashings or wooden spoons, but of lining the picket fence during the club’s golden era.

ROSS Harvey’s memories of Aldinga Football Club are not of thrashings or wooden spoons.

They include lining the picket fence at Aldinga Oval during the club’s golden era and playing alongside some of its premiership heroes a few decades later.

Harvey, 92, is one of Aldinga’s oldest surviving fans and possibly its oldest living player.

Almost a century before the Sharks made national headlines for three consecutive hidings to start the Southern Football League season, Harvey made his way to the football club.

After growing up on a local farm, he went to Aldinga games during the 1920s and ’30s — when the club won seven flags in eight years — and played for the club from 1946-52 in a cotton, black and white guernsey he still cherishes today.

“Aldinga was only a little farming community when I went to school,” Harvey recalls.

“In the winter time, dad would be busy with the farm work and we’d go to the odd games when he could get time away.

“We used to line up around the pickets in the car (and) sit in the car when the game was on.”

Before joining the club, Harvey’s football experience was limited to the odd lunchtime kick while he was still at Aldinga Primary School.

But when Aldinga was scrambling for players after World War II he pulled on the boots.

“They had to get enough to make a team up and get everybody they could muster.

“I remember playing on Myponga Oval in one game and it was so wet, water was oozing out of your bootlaces.”

Unlike those before the war, Aldinga’s teams during Harvey’s playing days were “mediocre”.

“We didn’t win any premierships, we didn’t look like winning any.

“We would’ve been about the middle of the group, I suppose.”

That was not to say his teammates were second-rate.

Horace Leaker, a centre half-back, was a club legend, having captained its 1932 premiership and played on for years despite slicing off one of his hands in a chaff cutting accident.

The dairy farmer would take to the field with a sock or bandage over the injury.

“Horry was still a good player, even with just one hand.

“He couldn’t take an overhead mark but by heck, he’d fly in and take it on his chest.”

When Aldinga disbanded for 25 years in 1952, Harvey played a season or two for McLaren Vale before retiring.

Harvey, who now lives in Whites Valley, a “stone’s throw” from where he grew up, has tried to follow the footy club’s results since hanging up the boots and played cricket for Aldinga until the 1970s.

“You have a look at the paper and see what the Sharks have done and haven’t done.

“Thinking back, there’s quite a few great memories of my time with Aldinga.”