How West Adelaide changed Australian football

[Dogwatcher]

Contributed by Forum Member "Dogwatcher"

How West Adelaide changed football

By ROB McLEAN

I’m currently reading the book Pound for Pound (The Incredible Journey of Ken Eustice) by Peter Cornwall and Ken Eustice (from which some of the words in this story have been borrowed) and came across the fact that the West Adelaide Football Club actually looked at the possibility of entering the Victorian Football League. The thought set my mind wandering, wondering about what could have been….

IN 1975 the West Adelaide Football Club changed the face of Australian football by becoming the first Adelaide based team to play in the VFL.
It was a move derided by many within the football establishment at the time, particularly the Port Adelaide Football Club, which felt it deserved to be the first team into the big league.
However, it opened up the floodgates, with clubs from across Australia realising the Victorian league did not have to have the supreme hold over football supremacy and ultimately the financial coffers and players.
Today, we see a truly national football competition featuring two divisions with six South Australian sides playing in an Australian Football League that also involves nine Victorian teams, four clubs from WA, a team from each of Queensland and Tasmania, as well as teams from New South Wales, the ACT and just last year New Zealand.
But how did all of this happen? The Victorians were reluctant to see change and wanted to hold the balance of financial power in their hands, while the Western Australians thought the distance too great to deal with at the time.
The man behind it all is Ken Eustice, the former South Australian football powerhouse and now head of the multi-billion dollar monolith that is the modern day AFL, a name developed in 1979 when the second division was created by the involvement (finally) of Port Adelaide, Norwood, Sturt, Glenelg and Central District.
The first three named clubs were powers of the SANFL and were always likely entrants on the national stage.
However, it was Eustice’s power and involvement in the fledgling national competition that saw his former clubs Glenelg and Central District (where he was the inaugural captain/coach) also join.
The results were immediate, bringing more advertising dollars into a game which all of a sudden had a much larger audience.
A by product of this financial success was the survival of five Victorian clubs, including Richmond, North Melbourne, Footscray and Hawthorn.
Carlton and Fitzroy were lost to the annals of history, while South Melbourne became the Sydney based AFL side.
Eustice first dreamed of the idea following the completion of his playing career.
His last game, a SANFL grand final loss to Sturt, was for Glenelg but his heart had always remained with West Adelaide.
The Blood and Tars being the club where he had made his big league debut, won a Magarey Medal and a premiership.
When his career finished, West Adelaide was struggling with the club winning the wooden spoon in 1972, the club’s first since 1936, which was followed by again claiming the dubious honour in the next two seasons.
The Blood and Tars were a club split in two, with the West Adelaide Footballers Club (a social club which had long time club supporter Harry Sarah in charge) at war with the club’s administration, headed by Bob Lee.
“I need this job like a hole in the head. But it is a challenge. I would like to put West Adelaide back in business,” Eustice said at the time.
After a caustic election, Eustice fought to bring the two factions together in a battle of wills that ultimately saw the creation of the VFL entry plan.
It was a plan borne out of desperation.
The club was on the right path but Eustice found it hard because it lacked a business infrastructure.
“It didn’t suit me and there was still that infighting,” Eustice said of the time.
“Football clubs, you try to run them like a business but you can’t. There are just too many emotions with the people, it’s all run by emotion.
“I often seemed to get involved in a slanging match.”
However, the slanging matches were nothing compared to those he would ultimately face with the SANFL and its most prominent official Max Basheer, who had originally thought it was a good idea to have a former champion like Eustice involved in the SANFL club.
Then the league vice-president, Basheer attended a meeting with Eustice at the Adelaide Oval, not expecting any great surprises.
It turned out to be a meeting with SA Premier Don Dunstan, a good friend of Eustice’s, who told Basheer that West wanted to sell its premises to the Hellas Soccer Club (now a four time A League premiership club) and play in the VFL at Adelaide Oval.
The discussion turned heated and Basheer stormed out. It was a move that turned SAFooty inside out.
Now, Basheer reflects that Eustice “was always thinking ahead and thinking positively as well”.
At the time though, Basheer and the rest of the South Australian football public looked on the West Adelaide Football Club as a pariah.
It had done the unthinkable and turned the game in this state inside out, especially the Port Adelaide Football Club which considered the first VFL position something that should have belonged to the Magpies.
Further wounding the pride of the Magpies was that Eustice’s firm relationship with Fos Williams (who had once famously described the Magarey Medal winner as the best footballer in Australia “pound for pound”) saw the Port Adelaide mentor become the club’s first coach.
It was a partnership that yielded rewards, with the club establishing a firm foothold in the VFL and proving the worth of SA football, as well as the value of a truly national competition.
Williams’ retirement from the lead post saw another of Eustice’s strong admirers taking on the post as coach, Neil Kerley, leading to the club’s first AFL premiership in 1983.
Williams’ son Mark Williams played in that premiership and is now the coach of the club.
Since then the club has produced All Australian ruckman Shaun Rehn, Brownlow Medal winners Grantley Fielke, Mark Ricciuto and Adam Cooney, Coleman Medal winner Tony Modra and back to back premierships in 1997/98.
Looking back on the first 35 years of the club’s involvement in the big league, Eustice can clearly look behind and say “I did the right thing”.

[Barto]

I love alternate history stories. Tell me the one about Peter Motley's Norm Smith in the 1987 Grand Final and his Brownlow triumph the following year.

[Dogwatcher]

Maybe you could write that one Barto