Port Adelaide SANFL premiership captain Tim Ginever expects ‘prison bar’ jumper to find special place in AFL

PORT Adelaide club great Tim Ginever accepts the Magpies’ days in the SANFL might be numbered, but he wants the team’s famous jumper to live on in the AFL

CAMPAIGNERS. Port Adelaide Magpies premiership players team-mates Tim Ginever and George Fiacchi led the “One Club” campaign in 2011-12 to keep the Magpies alive.

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PORT Adelaide football great Tim Ginever would mark the end of the Magpies in the SANFL as a “sad day”.

But the seven-time premiership winner would expect the Port Adelaide Football Club to keep the Magpies’ famous prison bar jumper for special AFL matches, in particular the twice-a-year Showdowns with the Adelaide Crows.

“It is our weapon of mass destruction,” Ginever told The Advertiser today as plans for an AFL national reserves competition advanced in Melbourne to threaten the Magpies’ future.

“It is the jumper that draws a lot of emotion — for and against — when Port Adelaide wear it,” added Ginever.

“That jumper still has a place in the AFL.”

Ginever was at the forefront — with premiership team-mate and club board member George Fiacchi — in the “One Club” campaign in 2011-12 that ended the SANFL edict forbidding the Magpies and Power to exist under one Port Adelaide banner.

The prospect of the Magpies being taken out of the SANFL — and becoming the Power reserves in the AFL national reserves competition — is a bitter-sweet pill for Ginever.

“That would be a sad day,” Ginever said. “But what does not change is the fact the Port Adelaide Football Club continues at the highest level — the AFL. That was the club’s objective, as stipulated in the club constitution, to play in the best competition possible.

“The club remains relevant in the AFL — and as Port Adelaide.

“We already have seen so much change with the Magpies with the loss of the junior zones, the pathway for a local 13-year-old lad who goes to the AFL draft and, hopefully, returns to Port Adelaide as Brad Ebert did after being drafted by West Coast.

“It would be a sad day without the Magpies in the SANFL. But there is Port Adelaide in the AFL.”

Port Adelaide last wore the prison bars in the AFL during the 2014 elimination final triumph against Richmond at Adelaide Oval.

“The sales of those jumpers was phenomenal and highlights what that jumper means to Port Adelaide fans,’ Ginever said. “The club can still wear that jumper in the AFL at appropriate times.”

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