Port Adelaide can’t be blinded by the bars

Port Adelaide will dress up for its 150th anniversary party in its famous ‘prison bar’ jumper — and fans are eager to see it beyond 2020. But the Power must also recognise its AFL story and its rise from the ashes.

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Port Adelaide could – actually should – wear its now decade-old black “V” jumper for the last time in a Showdown on Saturday night.

But the Power should not abandon the guernsey that defines its revival through its darkest hours in the AFL.

The Port Adelaide Football Club does not mind looking in the rear-view mirror. The image is quite grand considering its phenomenal on-field success in the SANFL that ensured its presence in the national AFL, even after the disastrous 1990 bid to enter the expanding national competition.

Brad Ebert wearing Port Adelaide’s ‘prison bar’ jumper at Alberton. Picture SARAH REED

And in 2020 it will be impossible for Port Adelaide not to soak up its glorious past as the club celebrates its 150th anniversary season.

This celebration is now heavily loaded with the expectation of how the Power will dress up for the party – and beyond 2020.

There is the growing demand from the fan base, charged by the “Bring Back The Bars” campaign that has the endorsement of club Hall of Fame premiership defender George Fiacchi, for Port Adelaide to wear its “traditional black-and-white prison bars” guernsey for every home game next year and every AFL season after the 150th.

The so-called “prison bars” - designed in 1902 – fit perfectly for just one AFL game: Showdowns with the Adelaide Football Club. It is the symbolic marker of all that Port Adelaide stands for, all that Port Adelaide has endured locally and all that Port Adelaide brings to the derby match that divides SA along lines that are as clear as the bars on the guernsey.

And to be worn solely in Showdowns elevates the significance of the jumper that football’s grandest voice Dennis Cometti describes as “the best in the game”.

The guernsey belongs on Adelaide Oval where it defined Port Adelaide in the SANFL, particularly in grand finals in the early 1900s, the 1950s when Bob McLean re-instated the “prison bars” after the Magpies had played and won the 1951 flag under Fos Williams in black-and-white stripes and the 1960s before the move to Football Park.

The distinctive guernsey belongs in an AFL game that tells the story of SA football in the pre-national days.

And this throwback – and the passion to hold on to this historic part of the Port Adelaide story from 1902-1996 – should not cloud the need to focus on the future with a jumper that tells so much of the Power’s rise from the ashes.

Lucy Burford was seven in 2009 when she submitted, as part of a club competition, the solid black jumper with the white and teal blue “V”. Remarkably, her entry had to be taken out of a bin at Alberton after first being dismissed by those who felt Port Adelaide needed to get away from the black base of its Magpie past to focus on the teal blue that could define its future as the Power.

Jumper designer Lucy Burford leads Port Adelaide Power footballers Travis Boak and Domenic Cassisi wearing new team home strip, with footballer Jacob Surjan wearing away guernsey, in 2010.

This black jumper is the reminder of all Port Adelaide had to overcome to stay in the AFL – a dark chapter in the club’s 149-year story that must never be dismissed because it carries a strong message of defiance noted in the Never Tear Us Apart anthem.

Today, the Burford design remains on the front of Port Adelaide’s home jumper – to signal the Power’s future. The back of the jumper is an exact copy of the prison-bar jumper of the 1970s-1980s – and is a tribute to the past.

This jumper suits everything Port Adelaide needs in the AFL – a tribute to the past; a focus on the future.

The “prison bar” guernsey certainly does not need to be consigned to a museum, as is most likely when the Magpies are cast from the SANFL to be the Power Bs in the inevitable AFL national reserves competition.

The perfect place for the “prison bars” is in the Showdowns with the Crows at Adelaide Oval from next season onwards.

But somehow this concept might be harder to sell to the Port Adelaide traditionalists than it would be to Collingwood president Eddie McGuire, who continues to take issue with the Power in black-and-white.