PREPARATIONS for Shanghai version 4.0 - and the experiences and lessons gained in three trips to China - are priceless today as Port Adelaide prepares to be put in an isolation bubble, both at Alberton and interstate.
No AFL club has the wealth of knowledge Port Adelaide has built up in playing three AFL premiership games in China - and preparing for a fourth this year. These will translate perfectly for the impending challenges to be posed with "hubs" in the AFL's resumption of Season 2020, either in late June or in July.
In the next fortnight, the AFL executive is expected to detail how it will reboot the premiership season - that was halted after the opening round was played from March 19-22 - with expectation rising for one super hub in Melbourne. There also will be the need for hub-style isolation when AFL teams return to training in May.
For Port Adelaide, the hub system should be a close replica of all that has been established in three trips to China - and was to have been repeated for the clash with St Kilda at Jiangwan Stadium on May 31, in what would have been round 11.
And for all the external fuss and concern that was made about food, water and air quality in Shanghai - and the concern for player safety, that was never an issue during the three games played from 2017-2019 - there is greater need to be safe in an Australian hub while the COVID-19 pandemic continues.
Port Adelaide football chief Chris Davies has a significant data bank from Shanghai to convert to Australia for an extraordinary second chapter to AFL Season 2020.
"Our experiences in Shanghai give us greater understanding of what might unfold in an AFL hub system," Davies said.
"We have already prepared - and adjusted from the lessons after each trip to China - for taking a squad away for an extended period. Clearly, going into a hub could be a seven-week exercise compared to a one-week, long-haul trip to China.
"But we know what is required - equipment, medical, food ... and entertainment. The entertainment will be a significant challenge when a group will be locked in for a long period of time.
"We gave the players a free reign in Shanghai, but we still needed to know where they were if they left the team hotel. A lockdown hub is certainly more challenging for everyone ... the risk of going stir crazy is real."
Port Adelaide midfielder Tom Rockliff, who entertained the masses on social media with his daily shows while in self-isolation on return from the Gold Coast after the season-opener against the Suns, might have that encore performance after all.
Port Adelaide's success in dealing with moving "lock, stock and barrel" to Shanghai is measured in the strong on-field performances at Jiangwan Stadium - 72 and 40-point wins against Gold Coast in 2017 and 2018 and 70 points against St Kilda last season.
"Clubs do pre-season camps that take the club to a far-away location for a long period of time," noted Davies, "but it is very different when you are working towards winning a game for premiership points.
"We have done it three times; we understand the logistics are significant. But we have managed them with success on the field in Shanghai. So we should be well placed if we are asked to enter a hub, particularly a hub outside of Adelaide."
The process - and debate - on the hubs has underlined how some arguments in Australian football change dramatically by geography. When Adelaide Oval was put forward as an ideal hub location, particularly while South Australia has a low count of corona virus cases, there was the call to move Port Adelaide interstate - "too much of a home-field advantage" for Port Adelaide at Adelaide Oval, even an empty Adelaide Oval.
But the same concerns for a significant home-field advantage is not universally expressed with the 10 Victorian-based teams, particularly those that are tenants at the MCG, if all 18 AFL clubs are placed in a Melbourne hub.
AFL premiership coach and Hall of Famer Michael Malthouse, who has successfully crossed the Victorian/non-Victorian divide, did fume last week saying: “I’m filthy on the Victorian-centric (ways of the AFL); (and how) this has all got to be about Victoria. It’s a national competition; (put the hubs) where it best fits Australia, not necessarily Melbourne. I am born and bred in Victoria, and I love Victoria, but we’ve got to grow up.”
This will not be the first time in Port Adelaide's 150-year story that the club has prepared for a long, demanding stint in Victoria with quickfire games. That first grand expedition - with the club's first game at the MCG - was in 1883, the club's 14th season.
It all began with a letter from Henry C. Swift, the entrepreneur who in 1882 organised VFA powerhouse South Melbourne to tour Adelaide the year before. He proposed a series of matches against South Melbourne, Melbourne and Carlton - and Port Adelaide took on much more.
On Monday, June 25, as VFA team Essendon was ending its intercolonial trip to Adelaide, a 22-man Port Adelaide team led by prized Victorian recruit and eventual premiership captain Richard Turpenny left Alberton.
They arrived in Melbourne on Wednesday, June 27 - and endured eight games in 17 days (with some matches revealing the heavy toll on the players with repetitive two and three-day breaks, a concept that is likely to be repeated with the fixture planning for the 2020 hub system).
The scorecard of the Victorian tour - played at the end of June while Port Adelaide took a three-week break from the SAFA premiership race - reads:
Saturday, June 30: South Melbourne 5.10 d Port Adelaide 2.6 at South Melbourne Cricket Ground
Monday, July 2: Melbourne 2.9 d Port Adelaide 1.2 at (rain-soaked) MCG
Wednesday, July 4: Port Adelaide 9.17 d Sale 2.4 at Sale
Saturday, July 7: Geelong 7.11 d Port Adelaide 1.6 at Corio Cricket Ground (with the Geelong Pivotonians organised the Artillery Band to be present, as was a tradition at Port Adelaide's games in the foundation decade of the 1870s).
Tuesday, July 10: Port Adelaide 1.5 d Maryborough 0.3 at Maryborough
Wednesday, July 11: Sandhurst 8.9 d Port Adelaide 1.9 at Sandhurst
Friday, July 13: Ballarat 5.8 d Port Adelaide 1.6 at Western Oval, Ballarat
Saturday, July 14: Carlton 6.17 d Port Adelaide 3.4 at South Melbourne Cricket Ground
Eight games, two wins - and experiences that paid off significantly in 1884 when Turpenny led Port Adelaide to its breakthrough SAFA premiership. Writing in the South Australian Chronicle, the football correspondent "Follower" noted Port Adelaide returned from its Melbourne adventure "in first-class form" that was measured with three consecutive wins on resuming the SAFA home-and-away series after a three-week break from Alberton.
Memorable in the 1883 tour was the first Port Adelaide Football Club appearance on the MCG in a match that almost was not played.
The "telegraphs" to the Melbourne newspapers read: "The football match took place on ... the Melbourne ground under the most disadvantageous circumstances. Throughout the day rain poured down incessantly; consequently the ground was in a soddened condition.
"Few believed the teams would play, but at five minutes to four they made their appearance in a drizzling rain before about 100 spectators ...
"It would be almost impossible to describe the game, which was essentially one of football, the players being unable to hold the ball or show any science in marking and placing (kicking). The tumbling and spills caused great amusement to the spectators, who, owing to the combined circumstances of the players being covered with mud and the fog that encircled the ground, were scarcely able to distinguish the men.
"Both teams appeared to regard the afternoon as one to be devoted solely to fun, hence the play at times was exceedingly comical."
History repeats
"Unprecedented" these times are called, but history does indeed repeat - and reminds everyone the lessons from even more than a century ago are still relevant today.
As the debate continues on the future of Port Adelaide's presence in the SANFL - a league founded with Port Adelaide in 1877 - it is worth recalling a plea for a reserves competition at the club's annual meeting at the Commercial Hotel at Port Adelaide on Thursday, March 8.
Club hero T . G. Smith expressed his concern for the state of SA football saying "the second twenty of the club had been badly treated by the Adelaide clubs (in 1882) as no arrangement had been made for a set of matches for them. The result was that the (Port Adelaide reserves) team was completely broken up.
"(The Port Adelaide reserves) had no opportunity to enjoy any of the privileges of a football club," Smith added.
"The only way to preserve (Port Adelaide's) rising young players was to form a junior club ... it was a mater of great importance that (Port Adelaide's youth) have a junior club ...," concluded Smith, who pointed to Victorian clubs South Melbourne and Melbourne that had "junior branches that acted as feeders" for their league teams.
Those who do not learn from the past ...
TAKE IT TO THE BANK
Five things we have learned in the past week
1) SPORTS administration in Australia is tough. In the past six months, more so with the stressful challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, three of Australia’s four football codes have lost their leaders: David Gallup at Football Federation Australia; Raelene Castle at Australian Rugby Union; and Todd Greenberg at the National Rugby League. At the AFL, chief executive Gillon McLachlan remains firm – and will have his “legacy” to the game of Australian football defined by his leadership through the coronavirus crisis more so than the original prospects of how he advanced the starting date for the AFLW or selling television rights.
2) PREMIERSHIP midfielder – and Port Adelaide’s Showdown specialist – Josh Carr gave a chilling insight to the human cost of the shutdown of Australian football last week when he spoke of his fellow assistant coaches at Fremantle being stood down and working in night-fill shifts at supermarkets in Perth. AFL clubs are certainly being tested – and Port Adelaide is in this group as noted with Friday’s announcements of cuts in the football department that loses premiership defender and physiotherapist Michael Wilson, assistant coach and former Port Adelaide SANFL player Scott Thompson and other staff in the fitness and recruiting departments.
3) ONE of football’s – and life’s – oldest themes that people always have greater empathy with those who plead guilty on making (and owning) a mistake still holds true.
4) TURNING back the clock with no football – either SANFL or AFL – on the Anzac Day weekend for the first time in more than 70 years marks another moment when we can all appreciate all that is being lost for now … and would have been lost for good had many Australians not made their sacrifices in two world conflicts. Lest We Forget.
5) COLLINGWOOD president and media personality Eddie McGuire is never short of a fight.
NEXT
By the original calendar, Port Adelaide was to have played Carlton at Adelaide Oval in a Saturday 4.05pm fixture that was to have marked the prelude to the club's celebration to the 150th anniversary of its foundation date, May 12, 1870.
