Why the SANFL will gain greater attention for its grand final from 19th man debacle
CONTROVERSY will give the SANFL grand final greater attention than first expected but the 19th man debacle should not destroy the state league’s reputation.
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IF there is no such thing as bad publicity, the SANFL has had a good week.
Or has it?
At 4.55pm on Sunday there would not have been many outside of Adelaide taking interest in the SANFL grand final on a weekend when Australian football’s focus was on the first Richmond-Collingwood preliminary final since 1980 and the prospect of Melbourne creating another drought-ending script in next week’s AFL grand final.
But an hour later — as the 19th man debacle was leaving in question just which of the errant North Adelaide or angered Woodville-West Torrens would play Norwood in Sunday’s grand final — the SANFL had attention across Australian football’s national bulletin board.
Not a bad thing it would seem for such widespread publicity for an SANFL grand final that is free of that repetitive “AFL reserves” debate for the first time since the Sturt-Eagles playoff in 2016?
Or is it?
Certainly we know that on Sunday there will be a larger audience — and well beyond Adelaide — wanting to know the result of the grand final. That debate on whether the Roosters will carry an asterisk for a “tarnished” or “tainted” flag will rage if North Adelaide wins its first State league title since 1991.
But the suggestion that a series of mistakes across three minutes and 38 seconds of the last quarter of Sunday’s preliminary final — when North Adelaide started the final term with 19 on the field — reflects the quality of the SANFL or its status as a major football competition is as farcical as the events that unfolded at the Oval at the weekend.
In a year when the billion-dollar AFL — with all its professional staff — has had serious questions posed by its uncertain score review, fixture backflips, drugs and pre-season camps, the SANFL is hardly rising to the top of the list of embarrassing moments and headlines in Season 2018.
Inevitably there will be the jokes, the endless debate on how North Adelaide was allowed to progress to the grand final, raised eyebrows about the handpass from the independent SA Football Commission to an independent tribunal with a former Supreme Court justice and that asterisk should North Adelaide win on Sunday.
But the status of the SANFL — as a competent sporting competition — will not be torn down by an error by a North Adelaide player, Aidan Tropiano, coupled with the failure of an interchange steward and fourth umpire to act as required by the game’s Law 7.
Even the AFL has thrived siren-gate at Launceston in 2006 and the black-out at Waverley Park in 1996.
The SANFL has been here before, albeit a long, long time ago. It settled the result of a match — between Norwood and Port Adelaide in 1882 — in a board room. It settled a grand final match-up — after Port Adelaide refused to take the field in the 1902 semi-finals to protest against an umpire — in a meeting room in a city hotel.
And the game has survived those moments of bad publicity to be SA’s No. 1 winter sport. The 19th man debacle will not change this.
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