Phil Walsh’s mark on the game of Australian football remains as a living tribute with his Crows and Power players
A YEAR on from his inexplicable death, the epitaph is far from written about Phil Walsh, and his marked influence on Australian football is nowhere near its end, writes Michelangelo Rucci.
A YEAR on from his inexplicable death, the epitaph is far from written about Phil Walsh, and his marked influence on Australian football is nowhere near its end.
There is a legacy at the Adelaide Football Club and not just among a group of players who have shown extraordinary resilience to honour the coach who was their leader, guardian and father figure for just nine months.
The club that Walsh wanted to be “authentic” — a beacon of “elite standards” — is admired, as its club song dictates, around the AFL and the nation for its handling of the tragedy on July 3, 2015, that not only emotionally moved Australian football and national sporting circles but people beyond sport.
Club chairman Rob Chapman’s speech at the Brownlow Medal count in Melbourne, three months after Walsh’s death, still resonates. He was to say “thank you” to the Australian football community that found unprecedented unity in memory of Walsh, starting with the bonding circle at the centre of the MCG by the Hawthorn and Collingwood players on the night after the terrible dawn at Walsh’s Somerton Park home.
“This was a significant moment in our club’s history ... we had to do it justice and pay thanks to the AFL community for wrapping their arms around us,” said Chapman.
But, he added, “it also was important to pay tribute to Phil”.
This will happen today when the Crows play Melbourne at the MCG.
It also is important to respect the wishes of Walsh’s widow, Meredith, and her family, who have asked for a low-key approach to the one-year anniversary of his death. The family, sadly, still has sensitivity to the circumstances of Walsh’s death as his son, Cy, awaits trial.
One AFL senior coach,
who asked not to be identified, recently walked away from a TV interview as questions focused on Walsh’s death and the impact it has had on other coaches and their relationships with their sons and their life-work balance.
He — and players who were in the Adelaide system last season and have moved on — remain steadfast on respecting Meredith’s wishes for quiet reflection on Walsh’s life.
His legacy lives well beyond the Crows where he, after
decades of ignoring opportunity to become a senior coach, fulfilled his destiny on October 7, 2014.
There is his imprint at the West Coast Eagles where he was an assistant coach. His indelible mark at Port Adelaide where he is a life member and, as an assistant coach, played a critical part in fulfilling Mark Williams’ dream of a cutting-edge football program at Alberton — and an AFL premiership, the breakthrough flag for the Power in 2004.
The current Port Adelaide squad, who knew Walsh for one season (2014) — from his second stint as an assistant coach — was waking in a hotel in Sydney after a tough loss to the Swans in a Thursday night game at the SCG to either text messages or “breaking news” on TV of a murder in suburban Adelaide.
As the cameras captured the police tape around the rendered archway entry — a doorway they recognised — the Power players had their pain from losing a football game become unbearable agony from losing a mentor.
A year on, midfielder Ollie Wines feels “comfortable talking about Walshy”.
“And Sunday (July 3) is a celebration of his life and what he did for many football clubs (Adelaide, Port Adelaide, Geelong, West Coast, Collingwood, Richmond and Brisbane as a player, fitness coach and coach) and for this league,” he says.
“Phil was an incredible part of our football club. We will always remember him.
“And for a lot of the boys there will be a special moment for them on Sunday. Like the Crows, we are always playing for Walshy — and his memory.”
The AFL fixture allows the Crows, on the anniversary of a tragedy, to do exactly what Walsh wanted them to do week after week — enjoy their love for the game he loved.
In winning 16 games since July 3 last year, including a scintillating elimination final against the Western Bulldogs at the MCG, they have given Walsh’s name and memory its greatest honour.
The emotional triumph at Adelaide is difficult to appreciate or explain, particularly when grief and mourning unfolds differently for different people, from outside a football club that has, as Walsh would have expected, become a model for others to follow in crisis.
Former Port Adelaide football chief Peter Rohde, who is admired for his handling of the death of player John McCarthy during an end-of-season holiday in Las Vegas in 2012, looks at the Crows with “great respect” for their passage through and beyond Walsh’s death.
He does know, for the McCarthy experience, how challenging the tragedy has been for the Adelaide Football Club and others.
“The passage of time does help, a little bit,” Rohde says.
“But, from the J-Mac (McCarthy) experience, you know people handle tragedy in different ways. As a club, you try to be available for the players all the time. You know who is having a hard time.
“The challenge is being there for those who are not showing obvious signs of their grief. Adelaide certainly appears to have done that well.”
Adelaide’s players paid special tribute to their welfare manager, Emma Bahr, during last year’s Malcolm Blight Medal presentations. Her work in the Walsh tragedy
will never end.
“It is not just the one-year anniversary that triggers the thoughts of Walshy,” Rohde says. “With J-Mac, our players felt it the first time they came back to the club for a new pre-season with John not there.
“Then it was the first game. And then it was the next end-of-season, remembering the last moment they saw J-Mac before he went to Las Vegas.
“Every milestone moment in the first year becomes bigger in the players’ minds and in different ways.”
Adelaide called West Coast Eagles premiership coach John Worsfold — Walsh’s mentor — to West Lakes to be the rock on which the Crows built their return to football from the dark hours of July 3.
“They’ve proven,” Worsfold says of the Crows, “to be a very good football club with good leadership that can deal with anything.
“They have lived to one of those Walshy sayings that always comes back to me: ‘Make sure we’re a great football club — not a shit football club’.
“They have done as Walsh would want to that other saying of his: ‘Get the job done’.
“I certainly admire how Adelaide has dealt with the Walsh tragedy and then lost its best player (Patrick Dangerfield, to Geelong) and shown great resilience.
“(New coach) Don Pyke has gained a competitive group living the Walsh ideals of elite standards and strong leadership and that would have made his task easier while being aware of the sensitivities he has had to deal with.”
Rohde admires the Adelaide players for how they dealt with their major emotional test in Perth on June 11. This date was exactly 11 months to the day of their first AFL game after Walsh’s death.
“That game, more so than (today’s) clash with Melbourne on the one-year anniversary of Phil’s death, would have been more significant in the players’ minds,” Rohde says. “Same place, same hotel, same team (West Coast) ... that would have been very emotional.”
Adelaide lost that game last season by 56 points. The Crows won the return match by 29 points with a record-making second-half charge that kept the Eagles scoreless in the last quarter — a feat never before achieved against the Eagles, at Subiaco.
This is the living legacy.
“In terms of culture and standards,” says Crows utility David Mackay, “Phil came in and set up structures and behaviours and values that we want to live by as a footy club.
“All the guys were left with an indelible mark that Phil brought. All those people take it forward in their footy and in their lives — that will be the case for a long time. It was a huge mark.
“And we’re very grateful to have had Phil even for a short time at our club.”
Walsh worked at Adelaide for “only” one pre-season and 12 AFL premiership matches but the measure of his “indelible mark”, as Mackay put it, is the living legacy.
His story in Australian football — and the Adelaide Football Club, in particular — is far from written.