Tex 250: Adelaide Crows star Taylor Walker reflects footy, family and life ahead of his milestone game against West Coast
Taylor Walker plays his 250th AFL game today – but it wasn’t long ago he walked into the club as a massive fan. He reflects on the early days and his family’s influence.
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Taylor Walker is at the top of the Crows’ players’ race at Adelaide Oval talking to his son Hugo as he carries him under his right arm.
Hugo’s younger brother, Louis, is asleep, cradled in Walker’s left.
Alongside them are great mate Rory Sloane, who is holding his two boys, Sonny and Bodhi.
It is March 20, 2021, a day Walker later describes on Instagram as the best of his life.
Six months after his family and friends are not allowed to attend Walker’s 200th game due to Covid restrictions, he gets ready to run out with his boys before facing Geelong.
On Saturday, “Tex” will have a sequel to that favourite moment.
The 33-year-old and his children will head onto Adelaide Oval together again at the start of his 250th match.
This time with a new member in tow, Walker’s seven-month-old daughter Hattie, while Hugo, now 3, and Louis, 2, will be walking.
“The thing I’m probably most looking forward to on Saturday is being able to run out with my kids,” Walker tells The Advertiser ahead of his milestone game against West Coast.
“We’ve been practising up the hallway and watching videos on how to run out.
“I’m sure it won’t go to plan.
“Hugo and Louis have got favourites in Lairdy (Rory Laird), Fog (Darcy Fogarty) and Sloaney, so I said to those boys they’re going to have to run out next to me just in case my boys get a little bit scared or upset.
“It’s going to be something special again.”
Saturday is the latest milestone in a decorated, 16-year career for Walker.
He is Adelaide’s all-time leading goalkicker with 564 majors, a dual winner of the AFL Players’ Association award for best captain in 2016-17, the last man to skipper the Crows into a grand final and sits ninth for most games played at the club.
For all his accolades, the thing that makes him proudest is becoming a dad.
“My kids are beautiful little human beings and being able to see them grow over the last three-and-a-half years has been amazing,” he says.
“As a sportsperson you become very selfish and tunnelled into ‘everything’s about me’, but it’s given me great understanding and perspective that you can still perform when there’s change and you’ve got to be adaptable to what’s thrown at you.”
Walker’s wife, Ellie, and their children came into Adelaide’s headquarters at West Lakes on Wednesday as the whole club paid tribute, showing videos from family and friends, including some from his hometown of Broken Hill.
“It brought a tear to my eye,” he says.
Whether it has been in media interviews, at the club, at home or in quiet moments, such as driving up Port Rd to and from training, Walker has this week had a chance to reflect on how he has reached 250 games and those who have played significant roles along the way.
He thinks about his former coach, Phil Walsh, “quite often”.
It was Walsh who put enormous faith in Walker by appointing him captain in January 2015, seeing something in the larrikin that others had not.
Initially a surprise to even “Tex” himself, the decision gave the key forward a lot of belief, confidence and helped him “grow as a human”.
“It would’ve been nice to have him here Saturday but I know he’d be looking down watching and probably be quite proud of what I’ve been able to achieve,” he says of Walsh, who died in July 2015.
Captaining the Crows and reaching milestones did not cross Walker’s mind when he joined the club from Broken Hill as a 17-year-old New South Wales scholarship player.
Of more concern was not coming across to teammates like a diehard Adelaide fan, even though he was.
“I came down and trained October, November, December, then we had Christmas break and I had to go home and rip all my posters off my walls of all the players that I was with, that’s my earliest memory,” Walker recalls.
“It was everyone – (Simon) Goodwin, (Andrew) McLeod, (Mark) Ricciuto – and I was sitting across the room from them (at the club).
“I was like ‘I’m a bit of a stalker here’”.
Ask Walker to name his favourite Crow growing up and he says: “Probably (Tony) Modra, Goodwin, McLeod, Ricciuto – all of them, I never really had one”.
“I used to have a whiteboard at home which I’d pick my team on every single week.”
Walker did not use his star teammates’ nicknames at the start of his Crows career until he felt he had earnt their respect.
“So I’d be calling Roo (Ricciuto) ‘Mark’ and Bunji (McLeod) ‘Andrew’, and they were like ‘just f***ing call me by nickname’,” he says.
“But I just couldn’t, it felt a bit rude and disrespectful.”
Walker’s early days as a Crow taught him about patience.
He could not crack into the AFL team during his first season in 2008 despite kicking 56 goals in the SANFL for Norwood, as Adelaide coach Neil Craig resisted a wave of calls from media and supporters to blood the young spearhead.
“My defensive side of my game was not at the level,” he says.
“Craigy helped me be a really resilient, hardworking forward.
“(Developing with Norwood) was probably in hindsight it’s got me to where I am now.”
It took until round 1, 2009 for Walker to make his Crows debut – against Collingwood at the MCG.
The famous ground was also the site of two of Walker’s biggest disappointments.
He ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament there versus Carlton in 2013 and captained the club to a 48-point grand final loss in 2017.
Walker had been widely lauded for his leadership in the wake of Walsh’s death and for helping steer the club to its first premiership decider in 19 years, only to be criticised externally again for his performance in defeat to Richmond.
Whenever there has been a massive high in his career, a significant low seems to follow or vice-versa.
In 2020, Walker became Adelaide’s all-time leading goalkicker, breaking Modra’s record of 440, but also had his worst-performing season, booting just 15 majors from 14 games, and the club claimed its first wooden spoon.
Of Modra’s record, Walker says: “It’s nice to have and he certainly reminds me every single time I see him. It’s something I’ll look back on post-career, but I’d rather win a flag.”
As for whether he thought 2020 may have been his last season, he is candid.
“Shit yeah,” Walker says.
“I thought I was done.
“I had one more year on my contract, which I was pretty lucky to have because it would’ve been interesting to see what would’ve happened if I didn’t.
“I’d be lying if I didn’t think about retiring (then) and what it might look like post-footy.
“But I was able to go away and get my body fresh, get my knee right, get healthy and have a good off-season, which I always believe sets you up for a good pre-season and gives you a great opportunity to perform throughout the year.”
Walker began a late career renaissance on that special day against Geelong in round 1, 2021.
The Crows, coming off a bottom-placed finish, shocked the Cats, who had been in the previous season’s grand final, and “Tex” booted 5.2.
“Sloaney and I played our 200th in the Covid year and we couldn’t have any family or friends there,” Walker says.
“I remember getting a phone call from Kel (football manager Adam Kelly) asking if I’d like to run out with the kids and I couldn’t answer him because I got a little emotional about it.”
Walker surpassed his previous year’s goals tally three rounds into 2021 and was an All-Australian contender by mid-season.
Then his campaign ended early after a six-match ban for racially vilifying North Adelaide’s Robbie Young at a SANFL game.
Two years on, Walker says he is still growing and learning from the incident.
His career in general has been a rollercoaster.
“It makes your character, creates challenges, makes you very resilient,” he says of his ups and downs in the AFL.
Although he is approaching Saturday’s milestone as if it may be his last, Walker remains a crucial cog in the Crows’ push to end a six-year finals drought.
Adelaide has a 6-6 win-loss record this season, coming off three consecutive bottom-five finishes.
“We’ve been struggling the last few years and haven’t really been around the mark to play finals so to be able to give ourselves an opportunity to get around the finals mix again would be great for our young group,” he says.
“It’ll make them even hungrier.”
Walker loves being a mentor for his younger teammates, leading on and off the field despite not having had the captaincy title since 2019.
But it will be two veterans, Sloane and Matt Crouch, who will carry him from Adelaide Oval on Saturday.
“I played for North Broken Hill Bulldogs and I got to see some of the greats play 200 and 300 games, and I thought ‘how good would that be?’” Walker says.
“I’ve been able to do it at the highest level just through hard work, being resilient and not taking no for an answer.”
From thinking he is “done” in 2020, Walker is now eyeing a 16th campaign in 2024.
He is out of contract at season’s end and extension talks are expected to start after Adelaide’s round 14 bye.
Once his AFL career finishes, “Tex” would love to line up again in Broken Hill.
“We’ll see if all my mates are still playing there,” he says.
“They’re hanging on by a thread.”
Seeing former Crows teammates back at West Lakes as part of their academy father-son program has made Walker wonder what is to come for his children.
“It’d be pretty cool to bring my kids back to the footy club post-footy and they can be a part of that, but we’ll see,” he says.
“It doesn’t bother me if they play footy, soccer, if they go into medicine.
“Whatever makes our kids happy, Ellie and I will be happy.”
You will not be able to wipe the smile off Walker’s face when they join him on Adelaide Oval on Saturday.
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Originally published as Tex 250: Adelaide Crows star Taylor Walker reflects footy, family and life ahead of his milestone game against West Coast
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