SAYING goodbye is never easy. For more than three decades, the Port Adelaide Football Club has been trying to move on … from the SANFL, where it is a founding member since 1877, to the national stage where it has been an AFL club since 1997.

No storyline has created more headlines in South Australia since 1990.

No theme invokes more emotional responses, often at extremes that only cloud reality and fact. 

No on-going issue in South Australian football is wrapped as often into other debates on the future look of the game, locally and nationally.

As the AFL deals with a long list of concerns from the 18 national league clubs on “competitive balance issues” – including the concept of a national reserves competition as the new second tier of Australian football – there is the need to reflect. And set the record straight.

At Alberton in 1994, when Port Adelaide lodged its successful bid to be on the national stage after more than a century of unrivalled success in suburbia, two men were absorbed in the passage from SANFL club to AFL club. Off the field, it was chief executive Brian Cunningham, a premiership captain and Hall of Fame hero. On the field, it was skipper Tim Ginever who ultimately became the image of maintaining Port Adelaide’s presence in the SANFL when the exit path was blocked by the SA Football Commission – in a 180-degree turn on the bidding terms for an AFL licence.

Both men have time-relevant stories to tell.

Today, Cunningham recalls the political game that kept Port Adelaide in the SANFL – and reveals the plans the club had in 1994 for a reserves team outside the SANFL system.

APRIL 6, 1994. The photograph of Port Adelaide president Greg Boulton, fellow board member and former player Barry Wilson and Cunningham wheeling suitcases through the car park at SANFL headquarters at West Lakes is a telling and lasting image of Port Adelaide’s bid for an AFL licence.

Those suitcases carried the successful business plan to become the first non-Victorian club to advance from suburbia to the national AFL competition. No other contender built a more detailed or compelling case for leaving the SANFL to chase national glory.

Port Adelaide delivered – as the SA Football Commission had demanded in its bidding guidelines – the concept of final separation from the SANFL after more than a century of being a powerhouse in the competition it had entered as a founding club in 1877.

“Absolutely,” recalls Cunningham, 30 years after the most absorbing off-field saga in South Australian football that ultimately involved all nine SANFL clubs in four bids for AFL promotion – Port Adelaide as the only stand-alone option. Norwood-Sturt and Glenelg-South Adelaide were prepared to merge; the rest, the so-called “Cartel” of Central District, North Adelaide, West Adelaide and Woodville-West Torrens followed suit.

The SANFL initially had hoped the AFL licence debate would settle its own problem of trimming a nine-team competition – with the awkward bye – back to eight as was the case until 1964 before expansion with Woodville and Central District.

“Our bid,” adds Cunningham, “was built on that premise of leaving the SANFL, as demanded by the SANFL. We had that understanding of the SANFL’s wishes – the winning bidder was out of the SANFL that would return to an even, eight-team competition. The AFL question in 1994 was tied to the SANFL’s plans for its own league.

“And if you look back at the debate in 1994, there were SANFL clubs – particularly in the ‘Cartel’ – that certainly wanted Port Adelaide out of the SANFL. Central District more than any other club wanted us to not to be in the SANFL if we won the AFL licence.” Twenty years later, Central District stood firm by voting – with South Adelaide – for Port Adelaide to not be in the SANFL with its full contingent of AFL-listed players not selected for a game in the national league.

DECEMBER 9, 1994. Port Adelaide president Greg Boulton took the phone call he had been long waiting for … the SA Football Commission, on multiple recommendations, awarded the AFL sub-licence to the Port Adelaide Football Club.

“And the commission went 180 on what this meant to the SANFL competition – they told us we had to keep a ‘Port Adelaide Magpies’ team in the SANFL,” Cunningham said.

“We had won the AFL licence fair and square. And if we wanted it, we had to take the SANFL’s conditions – we had to have a Port Adelaide Magpies team in the SANFL and the SANFL wanted that Magpies group to have no relationship with the Port Adelaide that was in the AFL.

“It was going to be pretty hard to go back to the members to say, ‘We don’t want that’. How do you think the members would have reacted that night at Alberton had we come back from West Lakes saying, ‘We have turned down the AFL licence because we don’t want to keep the Magpies in the SANFL’?

“We were not going to pass up an AFL licence.

“Ten minutes later (after agreeing to accept the AFL licence), we were working on a business plan for an SANFL club that we started up with $1 million from our own coffers in the Magpies bank account. We presented it publicly to the members that we would have the best of both worlds – Port Adelaide in the AFL and SANFL. But deep down we knew it would become a nightmare – the question would be, ‘Who is going to be seen as the ‘real’ Port Adelaide?’

“It did not work out well, particularly when the SANFL clubs – that seemed to know more about Port Adelaide than we did – were setting up conditions to keep us apart. 

“We had division in Port Adelaide. People did not see us as one club. They saw two Port Adelaides. And they argued as to which was the real Port Adelaide. They both were. They were just playing in different leagues.”

This was not just in Adelaide, but also nationally as recalled by the opportunity repeatedly taken by Collingwood president Eddie McGuire while hosting the top-rating television show, The Footy Show.

“Even Eddie used the division to his advantage – casting doubt on which was the real Port Adelaide; it was par for the course as Eddie was appealing to his members on that jumper question,” said Cunningham referencing another saga, Port Adelaide’s right to wear its traditional black-and-white bars in the AFL. “He has nothing to lose … we had nothing to gain by getting involved in that (side show).”

History records the division of the Port Adelaide name and image along AFL-SANFL lines – that inspired the Never Tear Us Apart theme – remained until the “One Club” strategy was finally accepted by the SA Football Commission and Port Adelaide members on November 16, 2010.

Before this, Port Adelaide – as dictated by its SANFL rivals – could not have its SANFL team train at Alberton, forcing the move to facilities at Ethelton. The official club shop and merchandise caravan could not sell “Magpies” and “Power” memorabilia at the same time. This was football’s version of that infamous wall that split a nation and families in Berlin.

“We simply could not have any role in supporting the SANFL team once we were playing in the AFL,” Cunningham recalled. “Eventually, we did manage to successfully argue for the SANFL team to train at Alberton – where they were playing their home games – once a week. We wanted to support them. But the agreement with the SANFL, as dictated by the SANFL clubs, demanded there be no advantage to the Port Adelaide SANFL group by association with the Port Adelaide AFL team.”

In 2014, the release of the Port Adelaide AFL sub-licence from SANFL hands – the so-called independence move – allowed all of Port Adelaide’s AFL-listed players to stay in the same program at Alberton. Those not selected for AFL duty could now play in the same reserves team, the Port Adelaide league team in the SANFL. They would work to one game plan – the one designed in the search of success in the AFL competition. 

In 2018, Port Adelaide was reduced to just one team in the SANFL, ending a more than a century of having a presence in the “minor grades” of the State league it had enhanced since inception in 1877. Not only did the junior teams go, so did the traditional recruiting zones on the LeFevre and Eyre peninsula.

Today, all of this is being challenged by the need to have Port Adelaide’s development programs on an equal footing with AFL rivals, particularly the eastern seaboard clubs that work to more advantageous recruiting rules for top-up players to its VFL reserves units.

But what was the plan in 1994 when Port Adelaide was expecting total separation from the SANFL on making its AFL entry in 1997?

“We were in preliminary discussions with Port Districts (in amateur ranks),” reveals Cunningham.

This was a throwback to Port Adelaide having its alignment to Semaphore Centrals early in the 20th century.

“We wanted Port Districts to take our excess AFL players, probably 10-11 players not selected for AFL games each week. We had an in-principle agreement to talk more … and Port Districts was quite happy to have our players have a run with them when not playing AFL.

“Of course, those talks never progressed once the SANFL demanded we keep a presence in their competition as the Port Adelaide Magpies.”

Thirty years on, Cunningham notes “it has all come to a head now”.

“The perfect model is a national reserves competition – and that was not on the agenda in 1994,” Cunningham said. “Today, it is clear that a national reserves competition for all 18 AFL clubs is the solution. That was not possible – nor even discussed – in 1994.

“The ‘One Club’ vote in 2010 settled the identity issue as to which club – the one in the AFL or the one in the SANFL – was the real Port Adelaide. It should never have come to that,” added Cunningham.

But even that move to finally reunite a club divided on SANFL-AFL lines took two attempts before there was just one Port Adelaide. The SANFL clubs rejected the first “One Club” proposal on February 9, 2010.

Cunningham resigned from the SA Football Commission amid frustration at the wedge being kept between one football family being split across two competitions, creating significant strain on both the AFL and SANFL operations. Remarkably, the SANFL clubs argued there was no certainty of a united Port Adelaide being financially sounder – a judgment proven wrong by the stronger fiscal position Port Adelaide has today.

“I was as upset as I have ever been during that farce,” Cunningham said. “I remember a piece of paper – a five-second exercise – rather than a full report was presented to us at the commission when Port Adelaide first put forward the proposal to have one club, one identity. I was ropable with the dismissive attitude towards such a serious issue. It marked the end of my time the commission.”

While Cunningham lived the off-field saga of Port Adelaide’s passage from suburbia to the national stage – while being stuck with a foot in the SANFL – the on-field challenges remained with Tim Ginever. They followed him into retirement as a player to the responsibilities as a coach and then a club legend. His reflections will be told next week.