Adelaide Crows’ 1997 premiership triumph had something for everyone

ADELAIDE won the 1997 AFL premiership to deliver a statement for SA football writes Chief Football Writer Michelangelo Rucci

UNLIKE ANY OTHER. Adelaide’s 1997 AFL premiership triumph was like no other win for SA football.

IT was a flag like no other - and there will never be another triumph to match it. The Adelaide Football Club could win this year’s AFL premiership and there would be no comparison with what the Crows achieved in 1997.

The story of Adelaide’s breakthrough premiership is a South Australian triumph of decades in the making - and not of seven years in the Crows’ infancy. It was a tribute to a State’s football ambitions being completed in a national club competition.

For the “messiah”, Crows coach Malcolm Blight, it was just that - a statement for South Australia. He was lured back to Adelaide during 1996, after being unfulfilled with three grand finals at Geelong, by his want to coach the SA State team.

“I’d missed that chance,” Blight told The Advertiser of how his Geelong commitments had denied him a State team job in the 1990s. “Coaching the Crows was almost like coaching the SA State team. It substituted something I wanted to do.”

The 1997 flag is the crowning moment of 15 years of drama and uncertainty in SA football. In 1982, the SANFL asked to field a team in the VFL as that league sent a bankrupt South Melbourne to Sydney in the first step towards finally putting Australia’s own game on a national stage. The VFL said no in fear of having to contend with an SA “state team”.

In 1987, SA was blindsided by WA’s entry to the expanding VFL. And in 1990, SA football was in turmoil by Port Adelaide wanting to be SA’s team in the VFL.

So 1997 is about a state, its football culture and South Australians making a statement after fighting for decades to have a meaningful say in the future of Australian football. And there was that long-standing drive to score one against the Victorians. This can never be repeated, not by today’s Crows nor the current Port Adelaide AFL team.

Blight became fulfilled as a premiership coach after having so many honours, such as the Magarey, Brownlow and Coleman Medals, as a player. He was the messiah who delivered South Australians to the promised land. SA football and the state found a moment of sporting pride it had known at the MCG since 1963 when Fos Williams’ state team beat the “greatest-ever” Big V squad.

Tonight’s celebrations at Adelaide Oval should remind all that there will never be a flag like 1997 ever again.

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