Tragedy that united football world in grief

Ten years after Adelaide football coach Phil Walsh’s brutal death, his legacy is again being hailed. But a grim truth remains where the criminal justice and health systems routinely intersect.

Phil Walsh at the start of his senior coaching career with Adelaide. Picture: Sarah Reed

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles.

The calls started coming at 3am. At first Scott Camporeale thought it was a pocket dial from a fellow coach at the Adelaide Football Club and ignored it and went back to sleep.

When the calls continued Camporeale picked up. It was the Adelaide Crows head of football David Noble. Camporeale couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Ten years on he still struggles to believe it today.

Adelaide Football Club coach Phil Walsh had been stabbed to death in his bed in the early hours of Friday July 3, 2015.

His assailant was his own son, Cy, then aged 26, who for several years had been fighting a deteriorating battle with undiagnosed and untreated schizophrenia.

Walsh was in his first year as an AFL senior coach and at the half way mark of the 2015 season had a 7-5 win loss record with the team eyeing the finals. After July 3, 2015, it was unclear when the Crows would play again, with the enormity of what happened to the Walsh family, Walsh’s club and the national AFL community shunting sport to one side.

“We were navigating something that hadn’t happened anywhere in the world,” former Carlton premiership player and then Adelaide assistant coach Camporeale told The Australian.

With police and ambulances attending the horrific scene at Phil and Meredith Walsh’s Somerton Park home, the AFC leadership spent the small hours putting a plan in place to deal with this unprecedented set of circumstances.

Brisbane and Fremantle players pay their respects before a game after Phil Walsh died. Picture: Getty Images

Led by then club chairman and banking executive Rob Chapman, chief executive Andrew Fagan, club welfare manager Emma Bahr and the assistant coaching team including Camporeale and Noble, the club’s leaders resolved to summon the players to the Crows’ West Lakes headquarters first thing as the story started breaking just before 7am on the news.

“The story was heading into the public arena and names were being bandied around,” Camporeale said.

“We had to have that ­conversation with the players which was very difficult. There were guys coming in who didn’t know what was going on, who had been listening to music on the way into the club. There was no text book for this stuff. We were a pretty tight group but it doesn’t really matter how tight you are. It was all pretty raw.”

The impact of Walsh’s death was intensified by the huge affection and respect he quickly gained at Adelaide and his national standing in the AFL world.

Quixotic style

Born in Hamilton in country Victoria, Walsh played for three clubs, Collingwood, Richmond and Brisbane, and began his coaching career with Geelong where he became great friends with current Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley.

He spent 10 seasons as an assistant coach at Port Adelaide where he developed a unique bond with his former Brisbane Bears teammate Mark Williams, who as senior coach led Port to its first AFL flag in 2004.

As a coach, Walsh demanded elite standards but loved his team and would routinely arrive at the club at 4am so he could think and plan in isolation before having one-on-one chats with the players as they arrived for their day. He loved surfing, he taught himself fluent Japanese, he loved alternative music, he loved red wine, but swore off alcohol after a near-death experience in a South American bus accident.

He would use the movie Spartacus to teach his charges about unity. In a touching end to his superb eulogy at Walsh’s memorial service, Mark Williams held back tears and said “I am Spartacus” to farewell his friend.

Walsh’s quixotic style was on full display in one of his final press conferences as Adelaide coach where he drew on the torment of van Gogh to contextualise a frustrating Crows defeat. “I’ll sound again a bit like a weirdo but great art comes out of a level of frustration,” he said.

“When I was in Amsterdam I did go to the van Gogh Museum. I’m not an art critic but there’s a man with great frustration. “I looked at that painting Sunflowers and for a bogan from Hamilton like myself I could actually see the beauty in that frustration. So although our fans are frustrated, we’re frustrated, we like to think there’s some masterpieces still to be painted this year.”

Life must go on

Three days after Phil Walsh died the Crows were scheduled to play Geelong at home at the Adelaide Oval. For the only time in AFL history the match was cancelled with both teams receiving two points, a gesture on Geelong’s part which Camporeale describes as “amazingly generous”.

Camporeale found himself thrust into a role he never coveted under circumstances he never imagined – interim coach of the Adelaide Football Club. The following weekend, in one of the most extraordinary games ever played, the Crows flew to Perth to play West Coast, the shattered team playing its first match without Walsh in a courageous demonstration that life had to go on.

“With the Geelong game there was no way anyone in the playing group or beyond were ready to play,” Camporeale said.

“Even 10 days later against West Coast it was still pretty raw. It was more about getting the group not to a position where we wanted to move on, but we actually wanted to get back to work and be in that sort of safe environment. Footy clubs are the best places to be when things aren’t going well on the outside. It’s a bit of a sanctuary.

“Each day was different. Everyone grieves in different ways. That was the hard part, how ... to manage 40 players, and staff, not just the players, around how we move forward and get back on track.”

Phil Walsh tackles while playing for Brisbane in 1990. Picture: Drew Ryan

Adelaide put up a stoic performance against West Coast and led at the first change but the game fell away in the second quarter and they went down by 56 points.

As the players left the field the emotion became too much to bear, with every member of the team including future Geelong premiership player Patrick Dangerfield and Crows/Carlton legend Eddie Betts hanging their heads and wiping away tears as they returned to the rooms.

“In the rooms there was a level of relief that we were able to get out there and play and get over that first hurdle,” Camporeale said. “It’s like anything in life when you’ve lost someone you love, the need to get back out there.

“We just had to get back to playing footy again and doing what we love. That was the message I gave to the players. Let’s not waste the season. We are in really good shape.

“Yes, Phil’s no longer with us physically, but he is up there and he would be pretty disappointed if we just let the season go. Let’s not waste the season. Let’s make him proud with what we achieve.”

Continuing scandal

Amid all this, Adelaide did make the finals that year, bowing out to eventual premiers Hawthorn.

Camporeale was an obvious choice to coach the club into 2016. He did not apply. “There were a few reasons. I did six months in the job and knew I could do it and it gave me good validation that I could do it. But I wasn’t totally convinced. My boys were eight, my daughter was six, and part of having seen what Phil had gone through was to think about what was my balance. Part of it though was that this was Phil’s team.”

The circumstances of the Phil Walsh story make it remarkable. The grim truth is it is a completely unremarkable story in Australia, where the criminal justice and health systems routinely intersect over our failure to provide proper care to people with the most acute mental health conditions.

Son Cy Walsh. Picture: supplied

It is a scandal which is played out each month with stories that often fail to attract national attention. It occurred in the same state where the two biggest crime stories this past fortnight involve the stabbing murder of a public housing tenant in the suburb of Gilberton by a woman now on remand in mental health detention, and the dismemberment and decapitation of a Port Lincoln man whose alleged killer is also being detained on mental health grounds.

Cy Walsh is now 36. He was found not guilty of murder by reason of mental incompetence. He was granted permission for unsupervised release from the Ashton House mental health unit in 2021 but has reportedly required further treatment since.

Walsh’s widow Meredith has never spoken publicly about what happened. It is expected she never will. Her only comments were made through her victim impact statement at the trial where she showed herself to be a mother of extraordinary love and a person of immense character.

“My heart remains broken. My daughter is also shattered. I will continue to love and support my son as his father has always done.”