Crosstown rivals emerge from lockdown with hate safely intact

We’re all in this together but try telling that to the two Adelaide clubs ahead of Saturday’s Showdown.

Port Adelaide fans Alannah, 12, and her dad Brenton Coad won the Golden tickets to the Showdown by different means Picture: Roy Van Der Vegt

We’re all in this together but try telling that to the two Adelaide clubs.

In an entirely precedented development, they’ve emerged on the other side as hateful as ever. Not even a global pandemic has cooled the enmity between Adelaide and Port. If anything, it’s been worse in the lead-up to Showdown 48 (the Roman numerals are gone but the cap S lives on).

It all started on Tuesday when FiveAA presenter Jarrod Walsh pondered if the AFL would admit people to replace the Crows fans who leave at three quarter time? (Which Crows fans have been known to do.)

Crows forward Taylor Walker was having none of that, firing back a barb about Port’s infamous tarps. (Which covered bays of seats because the Power couldn’t fill the stadium.)

Then, instead of being proud about being the first clubs to welcome crowds back to the AFL, they bickered about who would be allowed into Adelaide Oval on Saturday night.

As a notional Port home game, 1475 of the 2240 patrons will be Power members. The Crows get 475 tickets, with the balance going to 240 corporate types and 50 Adelaide Oval members.

Why not make it 50/50, some Crows supporters asked, pleading with Port to compromise given the unusual circumstances.

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Unsurprisingly, Port declined, and, ever the showman, president David Koch instead tossed Port board members’ tickets into the hat for the members “golden ticket” ballot.

The Crows said they’d do the same. As the smaller fish in the Adelaide pond, Port has always been more proactive with publicity. So it was again in these hard times.

And it’s been especially hard for Adelaide, in a week when favourite son Andrew McLeod tripled down on his calls for the club to be more open to criticism and to “stop deflecting”.

Adelaide board member and former Crows captain Mark Ricciuto said he was saddened by his former teammate’s comments.

“It’s been a very annoying couple of weeks for me,” Ricciuto told his Triple M listeners on Friday.

Yes, Ricciuto’s had it tough, but spare a thought for the Crows media handlers when news broke on Monday of a fight at Adelaide training. Picture the public relations team when told that Billy Frampton and Kyle Hartigan had a stand-up fist fight in a scratch match. Oh, and did we mention that a TV station caught it all on film?

It was all the club needed after the McLeod saga fed the ‘club without a culture’ narrative that’s been running hard since that pre-season camp.

Never mind, Frampton crossed from Port in the off-season so he’s probably a fifth columnist. Some of the most ardent Port fans hatched a conspiracy theory of their own when Power midfielder Ollie Wines was suspended for breaching COVID-19 protocols.

The violation occurred when Channel 7 reporter Theo Doropoulos interviewed Wines at his house. It was all the Crows’ fault, you see, because Doropoulos is the Crows matchday ground ­announcer.

The Wines suspension was especially hurtful as it meant the Port people could no longer mock the Crows people about Adelaide’s quarantine cock-up at a Barossa resort last month.

Meanwhile, at Adelaide Oval those ground staff not in the dole queues or on semi-permanent furlough were brushing cobwebs and shooing pigeons before the big night. The first AFL fixture with spectators means there might be no need for the polarising canned crowd noise — the telecasters are planning to surround the lucky 2240 with microphones and pump up the volume.

That might help make Saturday night’s game a better spectacle than the low-scoring Collingwood-Richmond draw on Thursday night, which was a good game “if you like defence”, Crows coach Matthew Nicks said on Friday.

“I thought ‘geez, there was just that tiny missed connection piece’,” Nicks said.

It’s hard to connect in a time of mandated distancing, as it will be again at Adelaide Oval when spectators are ushered into every fourth seat of every second row.

Port might be playing in the contentious prison bar strip, but bars of the beer variety will be boarded up and so will the old scoreboard, according to the scuttlebutt in Adelaide on Friday.

When 1475 scattered partisans stand for Never Tear Us Apart they’ll risk undermining the public safety message while also singing a self-evident lie.

So maybe Port and Adelaide’s discussions about how best to bend a knee extended to playing a different INXS song before the game. Black and White?