Australian Football

SANFL 1969 1st Semi Final Replay: West Adelaide vs. West Torrens Nirvana lost and regained - Part 1

Nirvana Lost

Adelaide Oval (pictured left) which, like many cricket grounds throughout Australia, borrows part of its name from the home of Surrey County Cricket Club in south London, was first used as a cricket venue in November 1872, with football being played there from 1877. Eventually it became the South Australian headquarters of both sports, as well as arguably the most visually pleasing of all major international sports grounds. From a football perspective, its perfect oval shape and lush grass playing surface made it - indeed, still make it - one of the code's premier venues, although it ceased to be the headquarters of the SANFL in 1974.

Between 1965 and 1969 I made many trips to the Adelaide Oval, usually to watch football, but also, on occasion, cricket. My first visit to the ground was in 1965, when I was part of a record crowd of 62,543 for the SANFL grand final between Port Adelaide and Sturt. Perched on my father's shoulders, I can dimly recall seeing Port champion and 1964 Magarey Medallist Geof Motley battling for the ball near the scoreboard boundary - Port's left back pocket - before gaining possession and clearing with a low, raking drop kick. Then a raucous cacophony of abuse from the spectators behind us, whose view of the game was being interrupted by my skinny nine year old frame, forced my father to deposit me back on the ground, where I remained for the rest of the afternoon. Port duly won the grand final by three points, after holding off a determined finish by the Blues, but my pleasure in the achievement was somewhat sullied by my failure to observe more than about fifteen seconds of the action.

Most of my subsequent visits to the ground during the footy season were for minor round matches, when a clear view of the action was assured. These trips were always in the company of friends, with the exception of the 1967 interstate match (covered elsewhere), and the 1969 1st semi final replay between West Torrens and West Adelaide. I travelled to the '67 state match on my own, owing to circumstances largely outside my control, and as is explained in the article on that game, this enabled me to concentrate on the on field action as never before, transforming my affection for the game into a full blown love affair in the process.

In September 1969 I knew that I would be returning to England early in the new year and, because of athletics commitments, the last Saturday on which I would be free to attend a football match was the Saturday originally earmarked for the 2nd semi final meeting of minor premiers Glenelg and Sturt. However, a draw in the 1st semi final between Westies and Torrens meant that it was those two teams, and not the Bays and the Blues, who would be fronting up at the 'home of football' on the afternoon of Saturday 13 September. My experiences at the interstate clash of two years previously was, needless to say, still fresh in my mind, and acutely conscious that this would in all probability be the last occasion for some time that I would be able to witness top level football at first hand, I resolved to try to replicate those experiences by attending the match on my own.

Determined to drink deeply of every aspect of the day, I set off for Adelaide at first light (of which there was very little, with the dismal, grey, omnipresent gloom of the weather both matching and reinforcing my mood), and was one of the first spectators to be admitted to the ground prior to the start of the Thirds 2nd semi final between West Torrens and Glenelg which, painfully aware as I was that my aspiration to be playing in just such a game in 3 or 4 years time was no longer feasible, I scrutinised every bit as avidly as the League game. It proved to be a close, hard fought affair until the closing stages, with the Eagles steadying during the run in to win by 17 points. Future League players in Neville Caldwell (Glenelg) and Milan Faletic (Torrens) featured in the game.

Was West Torrens' win an omen for the League game? It remained to be seen, but first I had the Seconds 2nd semi final to look forward to, and my only opportunity of the day to see my beloved 'mighty Magpies' in action. Alas, in 1969 the Magpies were anything but mighty: the League side had failed to qualify for the finals for the first time since the Dark Ages, while the Seconds, despite securing the minor premiership with some comfort, appeared on this particular occasion to have inherited the seniors' malaise. It wasn't until just before half time that they even managed to score a goal, and opponents and arch rivals Norwood won with ease.

Although I supported neither of the protagonists in the League game, I found - and still find - it virtually impossible to derive maximum enjoyment from watching a sporting contest without going through the formality of 'choosing sides'. I therefore decided to barrack for Westies, for the simple - and, to my teenage mind of the time, wholly persuasive - reason that my best friend was a West Torrens supporter. Besides, whilst it might be hard for those whose only experience of the West Torrens Football Club was of its two decades of decline prior to the merger with Woodville to imagine, in 1969 almost everyone seemed to be jumping on the Torrens bandwagon. In part, this was attributable to boredom over the longevity of Sturt's premiership reign, but there were ostensibly sound and logical reasons to jump aboard as well. The Eagles' last defeat had been on 21 June, twelve weeks ago. Since then, they had beaten every team in the competition, including the all powerful Double Blues, at least once, whilst playing "a premiership brand of football"¹ characterised by pace, determination and, most noticeably, a superb team system that enabled them to 'tough things out' and stifle the opposition even when things did not appear to be going their way.

The 1st semi final a week earlier had been a case of 'business as usual' for most of the 1st half, with the Eagles seemingly comfortably in control. However, when a Murray Weideman motivated West raised both the tempo and the pressure after half time it was a different story, and in the end only poor kicking for goal by some of their players prevented the Blood 'n Tars from securing what would, at the time, have been regarded as something of an upset win.

1st Quarter

The replay started off in similar vein to the first encounter, with Torrens players first to the ball, and using it more purposefully than their opponents. Peter Phillipou on a half forward flank was particularly prominent, contributing 3 of the Eagles' 5 opening term goals, while the Torrens small men like Birt, Gibson and Barnes were proving too quick and elusive for their opponents. Despite this, a goal to Jonas just before the quarter time siren reduced the margin to just 2 goals when, on the balance of play, it ought perhaps to have been twice that. Despite the heavy ground conditions both teams were handling the greasy ball cleanly, although in this they were undoubtedly helped by the fact that the threatened rain had so far held off. The wind had also dropped considerably since earlier in the day, facilitating the accurate foot passing for which both teams were noted.

QUARTER TIME: West Torrens 5.2 (32); West Adelaide 3.2 (20)

2nd Quarter

The 2nd term saw the temp of the game increase as Westies tried desperately to gain the ascendancy. In this this they were at least partially successful as their 1st ruck combination of Russian, Weideman and Pannenburg began to come more into the game while 2nd rover Wallis chipped in with 2 goals to bring the Blood 'n Tars to within 7 points at the long break. For Torrens, captain-coach John Birt "was playing his heart out attempting to lift his side"², while John Graham, whose form had been a key factor in the team's revival over the second half of the season, was near impassable at centre half back. All of the scoring in this term took place in the opening 13 minutes, with the run up to half time being characterised by hard, slogging, attritional football. I can clearly recall thinking that the drab nature of both the weather and the football acutely and accurately reflected my state of mind.

HALF TIME: West Torrens 6.4 (40); West Adelaide 5.3 (33)

3rd Quarter

After a rare mistake by Torrens full back Gould, Leonard snapped truly for West early in the 3rd term to narrow the margin to just one point. The Eagles replied with minor scores to Phillipou and McSporran, but most of the ensuing 10 minutes was played out in what, in years to come, would be the zone between the respective 50 metre arcs. It was desperate, almost frantic football - most definitely not for the frail of heart. Midway through the term, West took the lead for the first time with the goal of the match to date. Murray Weideman pulled in a strong, one handed mark and immediately played on with a handball to centre half forward Milsom, who so far had scarcely been sighted. Milsom handballed to Pannenburg, received the ball back on the double play, and then hand passed to full forward Jonas. Pannenburg, who had followed the play down field, and was in metres of space, then gleefully accepted Jonas' handball and ran into an open goal to make the score West 7.3 to Torrens 6.6.

The Eagles hit back almost straight away with a long goal from Birt that bounced through, but for the remainder of the term it was all West. Another precise hand passing sequence involving Bertelsmeier, Day and Pannenburg culminated in Fraser goaling brilliantly, and then David Jonas sank his boot into a trademark drop punt that travelled close to 60 metres straight through the centre. Shortly afterwards, Pannenburg accepted a handball from Weideman to bring up the Blood 'n Tars' 10th goal with an adroit snap, and suddenly the only question appeared to be 'how much West?'

The remaining five minutes of the quarter saw Torrens attempting to up the momentum but West, with captain-coach Weideman a steadying influence a kick behind the play, proved equal to it.

THREE QUARTER TIME: West Adelaide 10.7 (67); West Torrens 7.7 (49)

4th Quarter

For the first time in the day, the sun broke through at the start of the final term. Clearly, it was shining on behalf of the Blood 'n Tars, for early in the quarter half forward Robert Day gathered the ball off hands and calmly slotted it home to push the margin out to 4 goals. Once the sun disappeared, however, the Eagles rallied to produce one last desperate push for victory, which saw first McSporran and then Mulvihill goal easily to reduce the difference to just 12 points with at least 20 minutes still to play. Clearly, the next goal would have a crucial bearing on the result of the game, and it was Westies who snatched it courtesy of Pannenburg, who kicked truly after Hewitt had cleverly soccered the ball to him from the middle of a heaving scrimmage of players.

Still Torrens would not concede defeat, however, and Birt replied almost immediately with a clever left foot snap to peg the deficit back to 2 goals. When Lindsay Head hit Brian Mulvihill on the chest with a perfect daisy cutter a few minutes later the big centre half forward had an excellent chance to bring the Eagles to within a single straight kick, but his shot ebbed away for a behind. West promptly took the ball to the other end of the ground and Robert Day, deep in the scoreboard pocket, registered full points with a textbook drop punt. This major finally seemed to knock the stuffing out of the Eagles, and for the remaining 6 minutes the Blood 'n Tars attacked relentlessly, only for Leonard, Verrier and Pope to miss the target with relatively easy shots. A rushed behind to West proved to be the final score in an absorbing and hard fought match in which the victors' greater steadiness under pressure proved decisive.

FINAL SCORE: West Adelaide 13.11 (89); West Torrens 10.8 (68)

Match Summary

ABOVE: My dutifully completed, if slightly less than 100% accurate, scorecard of the match.

BEST
West Adelaide: Pannenburg, Wallis, R.Hooper, Day, Weideman, Russian, Bertelsmeier, Bray
West Torrens: Birt, Pill, Graham, Head, Phillipou, Bills, Wildy

SCORERS
West Adelaide: Pannenburg 3.1; Wallis 3.0; Jonas 2.4; Day 2.0; Verrier 1.2; Fraser 1.1; Leonard 1.0; Pope 0.1; rushed 0.2
West Torrens: Phillipou 3.1; Birt 3.0; Mulvihill 1.3; Barnes, McSporran, Stokes 1.1; rushed 0.1

ATTENDANCE: 26,315 at the Adelaide Oval

Despair, Denial and Departure

Having more than once suffered bereavement since that day, I would have no hesitation in likening the state of mind accompanying the loss of a loved one to the way I felt during my journey home that evening. Although not yet fourteen years of age, I was intensely aware that something precious, important and life affirming had been stripped from me, perhaps not permanently, but almost certainly for a very long time. Nevertheless, fourteen year olds are nothing if not resilient: over the next few months I more or less succeeded in putting the impending disaster to the back of my mind, preferring to focus on the immediate if transient delights of football (for a few weeks more at any rate), cricket and athletics, as well as artfully, if somewhat reticently, exploring a nascent interest in the other sex.

When 'D Day' was three months away, it still seemed hard to believe in.

With two months to go, it was still remote and vaguely nebulous - perhaps it wouldn't happen after all?

Then the final month: I made a conscious, concerted effort to savour every moment, to make things meaningful and stark. According to certain Oriental philosophies, or so I had read, it was possible, by sheer willpower, to slow time down to the merest trickle. I tried.

And failed.

The Wilderness Years

Of all humankind's innumerable achievements, the invention of language is undoubtedly both the most important, and the most impressive. Nevertheless, as I'll explain a little later, it has its limitations.

For most of the 1970s, my experience of Australian football was transmitted almost entirely at second hand, by means of the written word: letters from friends (at least initially); VFL and SANFL annual reports (in response to my all too frequent, in truth rather pathetic 'begging letters'); and copies of 'Football Life', 'Football Record' and the 'SA Football Budget'. The nearest I got to a first hand appreciation of the greatest of games was on those intermittent occasions when ITV screened brief, 15-20 minute highlights of the VFL grand final. I saw snatches of the 1972, 1973 and 1974 grand finals in this way, even managing to record the commentary (audio only, of course) for posterity. Incongruous as it may seem, for years afterwards, the inane drawl of Messrs Williamson, Skilton, Barassi et al was tantamount to aural nectar to me, simply because, ridiculously pitiable as it may sound, it was all I had.

Playing football in a proper sense was out of the question, of course, although I did on occasion don my old Sturt jumper³ and take my battered old Ross Faulkner up to the playing fields at the rear of our house, sometimes with friends for an attempt at 'kick to kick', but usually alone. If all of this seems a little dour and sad, it probably was, but I hope it also helps explain why my passion for the game retained its universalistic bent during a period when, in Australia, the VFL revisionist agenda was proceeding apace (of which more anon). (I should also point out, in case I have conveyed the impression that my passion for football was all embracing to such an unhealthy extent as to exclude all other interests and hobbies, that I was in more or less every other respect - I think! - a perfectly normal, hormonally driven, self obsessed, zit-infested adolescent.)

It may seem strange that I was able to maintain such a keen and fervent interest in the game despite the comparative lack of any tangible means of reinforcement, but let me assure you that, based on my own experience, obsessions can be nurtured and sustained in many ways. When I began studying towards my degree in 1975, one of our first major assignments involved preparing a 20 minute lecture, on a subject of our own choosing, for delivery to the rest of the year. We then had to field questions for a maximum of another 10 minutes. My chosen subject, (no surprises here) was 'The History and Development of Australian Football', and while I have little doubt that the powers-that-were at VFL House in Jolimont would not have accorded me any plaudits whatsoever (even then I tended to see the game as 'Australian' first and foremost, with parochial state loyalty at best a distraction, and at worst an irrelevance), it certainly attracted a lot of questions from the floor, so many in fact that the presiding lecturer was eventually forced to intervene and forcibly move the proceedings on. Whatever else Australian football did for me in the 1970s, it certainly helped to get my college career off to an interesting and, I like to think, successful start.

As the decade progressed, and hormonal developments that had perhaps been somewhat stymied by my attending a single sex school burst more fully to the fore, other pre-occupations temporarily displaced football from centre stage. Incredible as it may now seem, I did not learn of the inception of state of origin football, or the grand final results in the various state Leagues of 1977-78-79 and '80, until 1981, by which time I had been married a year and was, as the saying goes, 'making my way in the world'.

During the 1980s the effective distance between Australia and Britain began to shrink, year by year, at an almost exponential rate. More to the point, in September and early October 1983 the recently created British independent television station, Channel 4, screened weekly half hour highlights of that year's VFL finals series every Monday night at 8.00pm. Admittedly, it was only half an hour, but the presentation was excellent, and for me it represented something of a re-awakening after hibernation. Over the next few years my passion for the game steadily burgeoned once more, fuelled by books, various magazine and newspaper subscriptions, and, perhaps most excitingly of all, the new, modern 'wonder' of the VHS video cassette. Suddenly, football was 'closer', and my understanding and appreciation of it more immediate, than for many, many years.

But there was a problem. As I intimated above, the written word has its limitations, especially when - and I do not mean this as a slur - those producing that written word are what might be described as artisans rather than artists. Words may well create pictures in the mind, but those pictures can only ever be as good as the ability of the person concocting them allows. In the decade and a half since leaving Australia I had read numberless words and digested endless statistical information about the game, but none of this had managed to provide me with a real awareness of how dramatically perceptions of the sport had altered in its homeland. Let me put it another way. By the middle of the 1980s, my access to information about Australian football was reaching saturation point, whereas previously I was only getting a very limited - hence, inevitably distorted - picture. In a sense, I retained a perception of the game and its history that I like to think was pretty standard for football lovers, particularly non- Victorian football lovers, living in the mid to late 1960s; at the same time, I had almost completely avoided the 're-education process' to which football supporters living in Australia had been continually and, to a very large degree surreptitiously, subject in the intervening 15 or so years.

I would almost venture to suggest that I was the equivalent of the Japanese soldier living alone in the jungles of Borneo who could not be persuaded to believe that the war was over - except that, in my case, the war very definitely was not over. Football had been betrayed, and while I was certainly not so arrogant or egotistical as to believe that I could do much if anything to counter-act the processes of distortion, calumny and re-invention, I was equally certainly eager to try.

As the 1980s wore on, Channel 4's annual coverage of VFL football became more extensive, which, from my point of view, was certainly very good; friends to whom I'd blabbered on for years about 'the greatest game on earth' could now see, at least in microcosm, what all the fuss was about. Conversely, the actual way in which the programme was presented took on a much more overtly polemical bent, and given that the audience was largely comprised of Brits who knew no better than to believe without question what the smart man in suit, tie and freezedried smirk told them, this made me seethe. In 1987, when the VFL, out of the goodness of its heart, expanded its horizons to embrace the hitherto 'untouchable' realms of Brisbane and Perth, we were regularly treated on Channel 4 to statements like "1987 will, in future, be looked back on as a key year in the game's push towards being played, for the first time, right across Australia" and (this one, uttered by Stephen Quartermain, has remained indelibly on my memory ever since) "Prior to 1987, big time football was played in Victoria, and Victoria only". My feelings therefore when it was announced that Carlton and North Melbourne would be playing an exhibition game at the Oval in London a fortnight after the VFL grand final were, initially at any rate, somewhat mixed. However, before very long the quasi-religious fervour which underpins my feelings towards the game, regardless of the sullying effects of any amount of corporatised slander or pseudo-political machination, enveloped and transfixed me.

This was football after all - God's Own Game, which I had not witnessed at first hand for eighteen years.

I would go, I would savour, I would believe, and, if the fates, gods or daemons willed it, I would find salvation.

To read the story of whether or not John Devaney found salvation, click here.