Crows, Eagles fly as one for lost Phil Walsh

PHIL Walsh’s legacy lives. The Adelaide Football Club last night returned to its work of fulfilling Walsh’s dream of being the AFL’s best – working against the most emotional backdrop the Crows have known in 25 seasons.

Patrick Dangerfield wipes tears from his eyes after what was a truly challenging game. Picture: Colleen Petch.

• Crows drained as emotions run high
• Analysis: Returning to field a small step forward for Crows

PHIL Walsh’s legacy lives.

PHIL Walsh’s legacy lives. Adelaide Football Club last night returned to its work of fulfilling the late coach’s dream of being the AFL’s best – working against the most emotional backdrop the Crows have known in 25 seasons.

The result – a 56-point loss to the West Coast Eagles in Perth – is for the AFL record books. But the record books can’t record with justice what really happened at the ground.

Just nine days after Walsh died at his Somerton Park home, his hand-picked captain, Taylor Walker, led the grieving Crows to Subiaco Oval to play an AFL game he and none of his teammates will ever forget – even if they don’t want to remember how they lost their “head honcho”.

Walker looked straight ahead while some of his team-mates dropped their heads as the Crows, the nine umpires and the Eagles locked arms on one edge of the centre square while Walsh’s image was behind them on the venue’s large video screen.

Phil Walsh. 1960-2015.

Almost three hours later the same image wiped away a tough scoreline as Walker, his Crows teammates and their West Coast rivals formed a ring of closure around the centre circle that has come to symbolise Walsh in this tragedy.

Gun midfielder Patrick Dangerfield and lead ruckman Sam Jacobs openly cried. But they weren’t the only Crows to shed a tear. The silence among the 38,133 fans in a stadium used to celebrations and song after a final siren was a touching mark of respect to Walsh, and an indication of how the Australian football community has started to heal from its pain. Walker and his men left the field to a standing ovation.

The game was for the history books. The emotional story is one to be told by those who lived it – or watched it, hoping for a miracle.

Interim coach Scott Camporeale sent his first Adelaide team to work 15 minutes before the first bounce, with the emphasis on this special game highlighted by Eagles fans cheering an opposition team.

New Crows coaching head John Worsfold, an Eagles prem-iership captain and coach, sat in the opposition coach’s box for the first time in 14 years – and was cheered as a hero as he walked the boundary. This was a night like no other.

No run-through banners. No club songs. Every flag at half mast across Subiaco Oval where, surprisingly, he never played a VFL-AFL game. All his three games in Perth, as a Brisbane Bear, were at the WACA Ground.

Walsh believed fans would always find their own fun in the game itself – and as he would have liked, there were no gimmicks yesterday.

Of the pre-game routine, only “Auzzie” the eagle appeared as usual 18 minutes before the first bounce. Then all the 22 Crows players chosen by Walsh a week ago, and re-confirmed by Camporeale on Thursday night, went on for Adelaide Football Club’s 558th official premiership match.

Walsh’s memory rippled through the Adelaide rooms – described as “calm” by assistant coach David Teague – as injured midfielder and former captain Rory Sloane presented the No.39 jumper to first-game midfielder Riley Knight. Sloane revived the “Walsh-isms”, the late coach’s quirky quotes, as he introduced 20-year-old Knight to the AFL – but a week later than Walsh had planned for in the cancelled game against Geelong at Adelaide Oval.

Adelaide’s on-field bench and elevated coach’s box were fitted as the gates opened at Subiaco two hours before the opening bounce at 5.40pm Perth time. As much as the theme of the Crows’ match-day staff was to maintain the “normal routine”, the reality dictated this game would be anything but normal.

Adelaide head trainer Vince Del Bono was seen shaking his head, as have so many club staffers since last Friday as they searched for an answer they will never find.

It was no different in the terraces. Of the 600 Crows fans who had travelled from across the nation to be at Sub-iaco last night, Glengowrie couple Sue and Bill Jesser were the first to enter the stadium and found that their seats were directly under the Adelaide coaches’ box. Despite sitting among Eagles members, they entered the arena with an embrace never before offered to opposition fans.

“One of their fans just hugged me, kissed me . . . and said, ‘This is one time we can wish you luck’,” Sue Jesser said as she took her seat just to the right of the box.

On their first trip to Perth, the devoted Crows fans paid $110 each for tickets sent back by Eagles members unable to attend last night’s game.

“Even if it was $200, we still would’ve come,” said Mr Jesser, who took time from work managing a security business to be at the Crows’ first game since Walsh’s tragic death. “We had to be here . . . for the boys.”

In the official functions – where the AFL was represented by commissioner Richard Goyder and executive team member Peter Campbell – West Coast chairman Alan Cransberg led the tributes of Walsh who had worked as an Eagles assistant coach from 2009-13 alongside Worsfold.

Eagles chief executive Trevor Nisbett noted the game was not for celebrating a result, but for reflecting on Walsh’s work across seven clubs – Adelaide, Port Adelaide, Geelong and West Coast as a coach and Collingwood, Richmond and Brisbane as a player — in 32 seasons.

“At our club, that (work by Walsh) still runs very deep,” he said. “Phil never went to a club thinking he was not going to make a difference.”

When footy’s true believers stood tall

By Michelangelo Rucci

THIS was to be a year of celebration and reflection on the moments that defined Adelaide Football Club in its first 25 seasons.

Across the AFL, it was to be the year the fans found fun being put back into their game.

And on this score, first-year Crows coach Phil Walsh was at the forefront. Like a master winemaker, he was blending some of football’s newest tactics with its oldest principles that made star players stand out for their exquisite skills.

Interim Crows coach Scott Camporeale at Adelaide’s training in Perth.

After all, Walsh would say, that is what they pay for at the turnstiles. Walsh’s vintage is incomplete at Adelaide.

But his legacy – for a game in which he wanted the fans to cheer rather than groan – lives on well beyond the Crows.

From now, his AFL coaching colleagues, including those who were cynical of Walsh’s “love of the game” mantra, have to carry his complete vision – one that made the game as important as the winning.

No one ever expected an evening like that at Subiaco Oval in Perth last night, when fans from both sides were brought to tears – and where the result, the four premiership points, would be cast away as a bonus rather than the only meaning of the match. It must have been so hard for the Crows, particularly at the end.

For the first time this year, captain Taylor Walker and his men did not have Walsh standing before them with his eyes sparkling in anticipation of how all his meticulous planning would lead them to a win.

They would have missed that sharp message he occasionally gave at the end of his rev-up in the on-field huddle: “You would not want to lose this . . . ”

And their toughest moment, as Port Adelaide players found on Thursday night at Adelaide Oval and the West Coast players a week earlier in Darwin, was in the 60 seconds after the final siren. Until then, as was so obvious with the Crows at training on Friday and as they relaxed with a walk along the Swan River yesterday morning, they had this eagerness to play.

The final siren at Subiaco Oval last night has never sounded colder. As Power players know, it is hard to celebrate a victory – even a dramatic three-point win – when the man you most want to be there in the huddle singing the club song is gone.

We have seen the human face of footy this week. The game and the Crows move on, just as Walsh hoped, knowing they are both challenged. But their hearts beat much stronger.

Originally published as Crows, Eagles fly as one for lost Phil Walsh