SHOWDOWN LIII, 53. How time flies when a battle for football supremacy takes a grip on a city, a State and perhaps even a nation.

Since that first Showdown on April 20, 1997 the city of Adelaide, the State of South Australia and the nation - and the world - have changed significantly.

Australia has had seven Prime Ministers, one twice.

South Australia has had six Premiers - and the State's political leader of the time, John Olsen, has become chairman of the Adelaide Football Club. 

The reversible expressway that was being constructed to Adelaide's southern suburbs during the first Showdown is no longer a one-way road. There are tunnels to the Adelaide Hills, named after Hans Heysen. The unleaded petrol needed to move on either carriageway is much more than the 73.8 cents/litre charged at the bowser in 1997.

At the time, Bill Clinton was the "leader of the free world" sitting at an infamous desk in the White House in Washington DC and John Major was at No.10 Downing Street, answering to a monarch who is no longer with us.

Even the Showdown has moved from Football Park at suburban West Lakes to the real cradle of South Australian football at Adelaide Oval.

And not many of the players who will feature in Showdown LIII at the Oval on Saturday night were born when South Australian football was changed with the first derby.

Port Adelaide's oldest player today, former captain Travis Boak, was just eight years old and learning of football rivalries in the Geelong district around Corio Bay of Victoria. The Showdown was a lot of noise somewhere else. The echo has travelled much further since ...

Four of Port Adelaide's current AFL players - Jason Horne-Francis, Jase Burgoyne, Ryan Burton and Jackson Mead (whose father Darren is still waiting for that retrospective medal as best-afield in Showdown I) - can listen at the family dinner table of first-hand tales from inside the clubhouses as to what the first derby meant to football, a city and a State in 1997.

Hence, the reasoning to Port Adelaide football boss Chris Davies standing before the 40-plus player group early in 2021 to explain what the derby - and the "sporting rivalry" between neighbours in Adelaide's western suburbs - means at Alberton. Some themes need reinforcing between the generations.

And more reason for Port Adelaide to today emphasise how the spirit of the Showdown pre-dates the formation of the rival "up the road" at West Lakes. The donning of the traditional Port Adelaide black-and-white bars - for just the second time in a Showdown (after the 2020 celebration of the club's 150th anniversary - brings to the derby a reminder of how South Australian (SANFL) football was often about the great, enduring divide between the Port Adelaide Football Club and everyone else. No one ever had Port Adelaide as their "second team". As West Adelaide legend Doug Thomas would always say - during the Cold War era with the Soviets and the western allies in the 1960s and 1970s - he would "back the Russians before Port Adelaide".

Port Adelaide is finding the appropriate place to honour its traditional jumper and the story of South Australian football that today has manifested to the Showdown. Collingwood's new leadership gets it. Now it just requires Mr Olsen to put aside his reluctance for the bars to be Port Adelaide's Showdown uniform, just like no AFL club objects to Sydney wearing its South Melbourne jumper in Melbourne when the Swans are the away team ... or Brisbane with its Fitzroy heritage guernsey that the Lions carry without protest against Adelaide as the away team at Adelaide Oval.

Or do the bars now become the saga for a new chapter of Showdown bluster that can make Port Adelaide and Adelaide the worst of friends and best of enemies at the same time? It is an extraordinary rivalry that keeps defying - as is always said - form, the premiership table and basic football logic.

Since Port Adelaide has broken the well-noted five consecutive derby losses between Showdowns 39-43, the old and new Showdown trophy/shield has sat at Alberton six times out of nine. Five of these nine derbies has been decided by less than a goal - by three, five, three, four and four points. As Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley noted after the first derby last season: "You just know what Showdowns do. You think, 'How can they keep delivering and ending up in these epics?'

"There has been a miraculous amount of close games. The stories just keep getting written."

Port Adelaide has found the right place to honour and maintain the black-and-white bars on the field. The 1902 jumper that redefined the Port Adelaide Football Club brings the past of South Australian football to the game's present - and future. 

As much as it inspires the Port Adelaide faithful, it also stirs the opposition. Such emotions are true to the "sporting rivalry" that stoked last year's second derby (remembered for the pre-match admissions from senior Port Adelaide players who declared how they see the rival as "arrogant and entitled").

Where else outside the traditional neighbourhood rivalries of Melbourne does the AFL have such a genuine passion in a derby? The South Australian Showdown benefits by featuring a club that pre-dates the AFL - and has a tradition-soaked jumper that brings that pride and spirit of South Australian football before that turbulent winter of 1990 when the game changed forever.

The jumper brings its own story.

As club great Geof Motley told future Magarey Medallist Peter Woite in 1969 when he handed him the No.17 jumper: "It's not the jumper who makes the player ..."

Rather, 23 Port Adelaide players on Saturday night have to stand up to the demands of a Showdown - and the expectation that comes to every Port Adelaide footballer who has ever been honoured to represent the club in black and white.

Time passes quickly, even to the 53rd Showdown. Much has changed in Adelaide and South Australia since April 1997 when Port Adelaide won the first AFL derby at Football Park.

But nothing has changed in what the traditional black-and-white bars mean to Port Adelaide and South Australian football in total.

ON REVIEW: There was a time when even wise men - including a messiah such as Malcolm Blight - would scoff at tackle numbers on football statistics. Generally, high tackle numbers were associated with teams that were failing to win the ball and were chasing opponents.

Today, tackle figures highlight teams that are prepared to work hard to win back the ball - or to cause turnovers to derail the opposition.

In 2022, the four preliminary finalists - Geelong, Collingwood, Sydney and Brisbane - ranked 1, 2, 4 and 5 on tackle figures for the season. Port Adelaide was ninth.