Originally posted by Dan24:
PA1870,
You are biased. I am neutral. Take it from a neutral person......you are wrong.
Read Crows.ok post again. It is magnificent. It is all true. No one has abandoned their club. What a load of crap! Absolute crap. When the Crows were formed in 1991, they were representing ADELAIDE. All South Australians were welcome to join them, including Port supporters if they wanted to. Every single Crows supporter would ALSO support a SANFL team. Hell I support Werribee in the VFL and Essendon in the AFL.
Adelaide aren't really a conglomerate. They are just a footy club representing a bigger area (Adelaide) than Port, who just represent a part of Adelaide. The Adelaide Crows are just a bigger version, on a bigger scale.
CrowsOK nailed it on the head, when he said that Port were being selfish. How stupid to think that a one team town, would work if that one team was Port Adelaide. If there was going to be one team, it would be logical, if that one team could be suported by ALL South Australians. South Australians could support their SANFL club (eg Port, Norwood, Glenlelg etc) and they would support the Crows in the AFL.
It would be stupid, arrogant, and moronic to have Port Adelaide as the first AFL team in 1990. From a marketing point of view it makes no sense.
CrowsOk, just ignore this dill. He is the most biased and arrogant piece of Port Adelaide garbage I have ever seen. I don't hate Port, because I have never cared about them. But I'm beginning to hate them now, only because of him. It makes it even more fun when they lose regularly, which they have done since 1997.
Oh, PA1870, apparently, I'm not allowed to have an opinion on this (even though my view is more credible as a neutral observer) because I am a Victorian
[This message has been edited by Dan24 (edited 19 February 2001).]
Dan 24,
Your arrogance is so blindingly overwhelmhing that you cannot see past the blinkers on your head.
It is because of the onesided, opiniated, chauvenistic,biase, such as constantly portrayed by you that a SA versus Victoria rivalry eventuated.
Positions were being made in the then VFL for SA based clubs. The VFL had invited Port and Norwood as early as 1984.
Port ON invitation had harboured that desire for some time. The VFL WANTED PORT.
The SANFL was a strong competition, public polls right up until the formation of the Crows had shown repeatedly that SA did not want a club admitted into the VFL at the expense of the SANFL. The SANFL continued to act on its public opinion and marketing polls.
The only exception to these polls were the Port Adelaide Football club. and that in itself was a major concern to the SANFL.
The football administrations, hierachies and the networks of those entities of Nine clubs, plus the administration of the SANFL, all their football associates, business, corporate and social could easily be usurped by one club....This is the whole background crux to a picture you cannot, will not are not able to see, because in your eyes the Crows are just a club formed to be put in the AFL...they were not.they were a vehicle devised to protect the interest of the above mentioned, well marketed and riding on the public moods hate for Port.
In SA we had an air of non difference to the VFL, talk and negotiations were there, but the public continued to register their disaproval of a SA entry into the VFL.
This has nothing to do with you barracking for werribee, the supporters in SA were following, supporting barracking for the principal clubs in the principal competition in SA as they had for generations the mindset is different to follwing a second tier Vic comp like the VFA/L, their was no need by the SANFL to join a Victorian based state comp or indeed and extended VFL comp.
Slowly, numbers of members and supporters of the other 9 SANFL clubs began to dwindle.
Not Port Adelaide ,however, the members at Port began to increase, Port had to fight harder than ever to maintain its playing lists against pressure from ALL VFL clubs and yet still continued to turn out great players. The pressure was beginning to take its toll though.
Not withstanding the general mood in SA i.e. They werent prepared to Support a SA entry into the VFL.
Port Adelaide, in response to Norwoods clandestine meetings...made its move.
Remembering their was no desire from other SA fans to follow an entity in the VFL as nothing existed, whatever loyalties the SA fans had were left with their own clubs
So there was no empathy to a non existant entity.
Port as the strongest most supported, successful club and required by the VFL...then AFL, had the support of its members and of the VFL then AFL administration.
This was not about a "team for all south Australians", this was about club football
as much as Essendon are not a "team for all Victorians"
Port made its move...A SA footy going public were outraged, all of a sudden , people that had no desire to support a team in the ( now AFL ) according to morgan Gallup and other polls commissioned by the SANFL took an interest in preventing Port from joining the AFL...
The rallying point to draw peoples life time associations to SANFL league football clubs away ,had come, nothing could give the SANFL and indeed the AFL the ability to
make people abandon life time associations..their principal, business, corporate, private and social connections to their football clubs like this....
this is not arrogance..it is what happened , it is reality.
The SANFL was a wasteland overnight...people werent barracking for the Crows, they were barracking for the propaganda machine that united them for the first time in their lives...against Port.....
They had beaten Port, in Numbers, in the Courts, in the unification of SA footy followers and in the entry into the new AFL.
But their life time team associations to SANFL clubs were now gone..
The mounds at Glenelg had between 800 and 2,000 at SANFL games...where once
10,000 to 25,000 would roar for the Tigers.
Norwoods terraces were holding 1.500 to 5,000 people where once capacity 20,000 crowds were the Norm.
Sturt were no longer drawing crowds the average between 1,200 and 3,000
where they could draw 35,000 between Port and themselves or 30,000 between them and Norwood at Footy park or Adelaide oval.
They had been abandoned..
And as you say people still barrack for their SANFL teams Dan..they do, but they dont turn up, there arent the corporate sponsors anymore, the clubs struggle, to a large degree , the size of these clubs was comparable to VFL clubs prior to the AFL, the AFL clubs now are light years from what they were then, they are now slick corporate machines, in those days the VFL were just larger footy clubs than SANFL clubs, but not all....Now SANFL is like the VFA.
That is what it is all about Dan...not bad stuff about the Crows...but the death of a friend.
PA1870