OPINION: On the Prison Bars: From Destiny by Dr Norman Ashton (2018), p. 153.

From Destiny by Dr Norman Ashton (2018), p. 153:

Given who the opponent was to be in 1997, a letter of 1 September 1995 from Collingwood President, Allan McAlister to Port Adelaide President, Greg Bouton (sic) contained the following surprise offer:

"We at Collingwood are most grateful for Port Adelaide accepting it should enter the AFL with a change from its black-and-white colours and Magpie name which we have held dear to our hearts at Collingwood. I will reiterate to our board that if Port Adelaide Football Club should succeed in ranking higher than the Collingwood Football Club for three consecutive years in the AFL then our objections will be waived"

Port finished higher than Collingwood in its first 5 seasons.

In saying that I'll concede that McAlister's letter most likely came from a position of arrogance, he probably never imagined that Port Adelaide would finish above Collingwood, nor should he have.

As a Port Adelaide supporter, the debate is low on the list of the things I believe the club should be focusing upon, however it will continue to come up so it would be good to find a binding agreement between both clubs and never speak of the matter again.

I'd personally be happy if Port Adelaide were able to wear the Prison Bar Guernsey in both Showdown's and in any final that we play against Adelaide which has only occurred once to date.

Someone designed the Prison Bar Guernsey replacing the white with silver, it looked amazing in my opinion, if anyone could post this design then that would be greatly appreciated.

Not every Port Adelaide fan even agrees on how often we should wear the Prison Bar design, less is best for mine as I genuinely get excited to view the team in it on the limited occasions we wear it.

OPINION: The Collingwood Versus Port Adelaide Jumper Debate from A Pies Fan’s Perspective: An In-Depth History

The Collingwood Versus Port Adelaide Jumper Debate From A Pies Fan’s Perspective: An In-Depth History

In recent seasons the jumper debate between Collingwood and Port Adelaide has been the hot topic for AFL fans and journalists. It has become tiresome to constantly hear about the topic so naturally I chose to write a heavily researched article on the matter. The community created by AFL fans at times tends to be a toxic one where topics spiral out of control and facts and logic are scarce.

Recently, Port Adelaide put forward another request to wear their Prison Bar guernsey in the 2022 Round 23 Showdown against the Adelaide Crows.

It seems the conversation has been heavily simplified to a biased argument between the two fanbases of each club, with others effectively weighing in based on which of the two teams they hate less. Admittedly, you probably couldn’t pick two worse fanbases to have this debate with, with both clubs possessing some of the most fiercely loyal fans in the sport, and for good reason.

On one hand you have Port Adelaide – easily the most successful and famous football club in SANFL history with 36 premierships and 38 second-place finishes, both of which are competition records across the team’s 143-year history. After entering the AFL in 1996, they soon rose up the ladder to be competing for grand final spots in the early 2000s before claiming their only premiership in 2004. Another grand final berth a few years later was followed by a struggling decade, but the club re-emerged as a premiership contender in 2021, making a preliminary final.

Opposingly, Collingwood are long known as one of the most famous sporting clubs in Australia and have 15 V/AFL premierships from 43 grand final appearances, the latter being a record by a considerable margin, although a painful one for fans like me. The club is a financial powerhouse of the competition and possesses one of, if not the biggest, fanbases. Pies fans epitomize and thrive off the ‘us against them’ mentality and, if anything, their loyalty cannot be questioned.

The debate centers around the AFL not allowing Port Adelaide to wear their iconic black and white prison bar jumpers in the national competition. This is because Collingwood, who were in the current competition before Port Adelaide, claim ownership of the black and white colorway and stripes within the AFL. Port Adelaide has been recognized in the SANFL for over a century wearing these colours and their nickname in the competition is the same as Collingwood’s in the AFL - the Magpies. This seems a simple argument but is far from it. In order to address the roots of the topic, some facts need to be addressed which are often forgotten by both fanbases and the media, whether to twist the narrative or simply because most people cannot be bothered to research things before voicing an opinion.

Time for a brief history overview. What is currently the national competition began as the Victorian Football League (VFL) in 1896 as a breakaway competition from the Victorian Football Association (VFA) which was founded in 1877. The Collingwood Football Club had been the thirteenth club to join the VFA upon the club’s foundation in 1892 before it moved across to the VFL and participated in the competition’s first season was 1897. From the beginning of the club’s history in 1892 and continuing into the inception of the VFL, Collingwood wore black and white stripes which are principally identical to the current design. The home game jumpers of the club have varied in design over the course of its history but have always been based around the black and white stripes and have never introduced a third colour.

The VFL began steps toward becoming a nationwide competition during the 1980s as it oversaw both expressions of interest and formal applications of entry from clubs primarily in Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland. A team from Los Angeles in America even applied, suggesting splitting matches across both countries however this was understandably dismissed. In 1982, South Melbourne relocated to Sydney and became the Sydney Swans; the first interstate team in the competition. In 1986, the West Coast Eagles and Brisbane Bears were granted licenses to enter the VFL which was soon renamed the AFL ahead of the 1990 season to signal the competition had truly become a nationwide one. Collingwood would go on to win the first AFL premiership in 1990.

The Port Adelaide Football Club was founded in 1870 and is the oldest football club from South Australia. They were a foundational club in the South Australian Football Association (SAFA) which was later renamed the SANFL. Now this is where the root of the argument lies: between 1870 and 1901, the club wore several different guernseys which ranged from blue and white hooped jumpers to a completely pink outfit, but these designs never included any black and white stripes or any black in general. It wasn’t until 1902 when the club adopted the Magpie emblem and their first black and white striped guernsey, which is 10 years after Collingwood was established with this identity. According to a newspaper article from ‘The Observer’ dated 26 April 1902, this change was made because of the excessive cost of dyes for their blue and magenta guernseys which kept fading. Their new black and white striped look became known as the ‘prison bar’ uniform due to the use of around half a dozen skinny stripes in comparison to between two and four wider stripes from Collingwood. Toward the middle of the century, Port Adelaide transitioned their guernsey to a look which was almost identical to the one Collingwood was using at the time and still uses today. In the late 1950s they then transitioned back into the prison bar look which has remained in the SANFL competition to this day.

One point that must be mentioned is that the South Australian representative team between 1881-1906 were the first known football club in Australia to wear black and white. Whether Collingwood ‘stole’ this design upon establishment in 1892, as former Port Adelaide chief Brian Cunningham believes, is unlikely and cannot be known. Black and white stripes are hardly a revolutionary design – almost every sporting league in the world has a team with them. However, this idea is completely separate to Port Adelaide and the SANFL and holds no weight in this conversation like some suggest.

In 1990 the Port Adelaide Football Club applied to become the first South Australian club in the AFL. Legal issues that arose meant that the Adelaide Crows would become the first club from the state in 1990. Port Adelaide would later join the competition in 1996, beginning participation in 1997. The club left the Magpies emblem to the SANFL team (which became the reserves team for the AFL side) and became the Port Adelaide Power, adding teal to the black and white colours in order to distinguish from Collingwood. When Port Adelaide entered the competition, a binding agreement was signed between the club and Collingwood conceding the black and white colours and Magpie emblem to Collingwood within the national competition.

In 2003 the AFL introduced an annual Heritage Round where teams were permitted to wear any style of guernsey from their history. For the initial season, Port Adelaide wore a black and white prison bar guernsey from 1914 which was perhaps the furthest from the Collingwood jumper than any other black and white style outfit in the history of the club. Still, it was met with contention and so in 2004 the Power donned one of the earlier mentioned magenta and blue jumpers seen in the 1800s. In 2005 the Power wore a white guernsey with blue hoops, which was their first guernsey ever worn in the SANFL in the 1870s. In 2006, the AFL Heritage Round adopted the ‘electrifying eighties’ theme which meant the Power were forced to sit out because their only guernseys in the 1980s were black and white ones too similar to Collingwood.

To ensure the successful and peaceful continuation of the heritage round – already a popular one amongst AFL fans - an agreement was signed by several parties which read: “The Port Adelaide Football Club has the option to wear a black and white stripe Heritage Guernsey for all AFL Heritage Round games allocated as Port Adelaide games only. The exception is a home game against Collingwood.” The agreement was signed by current AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan on behalf of the AFL (who at the time was the Chief Broadcasting and Commercial Officer), Eddie McGuire on behalf of the Collingwood Football Club (President at the time) as well John James (the Port Adelaide CEO at the time). The AFL Heritage Round fizzled out and its last official season was in 2008. Several teams have continued to wear throwback guernseys intermittently since then, but not in relation to any official league-wide Heritage Round.

Fast forward to 2020 and the AFL, with support given from Collingwood, allowed Port Adelaide to wear the prison bar guernsey during a showdown match against Adelaide on the provisor that the club was celebrating its 150th anniversary. This sparked debate whether or not the Power should be able to wear the guernsey in future showdowns and potentially other games, with Power president David Koch suggesting that part of the 2020 agreement was to continue discussions around allowing Port to wear the prison bar guernsey more frequently. Koch has gone on to suggest that the 2007 agreement be effectively invalidated due to the discontinuation of the Heritage Round, even implying that McGuire knew this would eventually happen and tricked Port Adelaide into signing the agreement. Koch elaborated to suggest this is an example of Victorian bias within the AFL.

Since then, the debate has evolved into a war between Collingwood and Port Adelaide fans as well as past and present club officials rather than who it really is between – Port Adelaide and the AFL. McGuire, Koch and outspoken former Power player Kane Cornes have spearheaded the debate in the media for their respective sides – hardly people you want representing you when rationality must be maintained. The three have aided in turning the conversation into a childish, insult-laden fight and as a result the topic has twisted into something it isn’t. A small group of Port Adelaide fans even claim they wore black and white before Collingwood did, perhaps conflating this with the aforementioned uniform of the colonial era South Australian representative team.

Earlier this year, the debate was reignited after the AFL approved the Sydney Swans’ red-V guernsey for 2022 away games in Victoria as a nod to their South Melbourne roots. It must be clarified that this is not the same situation as Port Adelaide find themselves in; primarily because the colours and jumper designs worn by Sydney have no clash with other clubs. One might say Port’s prison bar doesn’t clash with Collingwood’s, but there is of course a similarity far greater than one between Sydney and any other team. Additionally, and more specifically, South Melbourne simply relocated to Sydney and kept the team colours, unlike Port Adelaide who effectively created a new sub-franchise with a different emblem and colours in an entirely different competition.

The fact of the matter is Port Adelaide signed agreements and accepted lucrative deals in the 1990s to introduce the teal colour into their uniform and adopt the Power emblem. In doing so, they established that the Magpies and the Power were separate, split entities which were tied only by the history of the club and the fact that the SANFL team acts as the reserves team for the AFL side. Admittedly, however, the 2007 agreement was a step toward allowing Port Adelaide to recognize their origins as an organization and one that should be revisited due to the fact that the Heritage Round no longer exists.

Personally, I think it’s both plausible and a great idea for Port to wear their prison bar guernsey in Showdowns twice a year. This is what most fans want – it is logical and allows the team to honour the history of the club from which they derived. Furthermore, I also believe Port Adelaide should be allowed to wear the strip for any home games in South Australia if they wanted, barring when Collingwood visit. Some fans believe Port should be allowed to wear the guernsey anywhere they want. Whether or not you think this should be allowed, is it even necessary? The Port Adelaide Magpies have no history in any state other than South Australia and their only AFL premiership (2004) won in Victoria was whilst wearing the teal.

It's probably only a matter of time before the AFL approves the prison bar guernseys for showdowns, and this has my full support. Most logical Collingwood fans (yes, we exist) that I’ve spoken to think the same way – it has no bearing on the state of Victoria at all or any specific club bar Port Adelaide. At this point, the debate is not even about the idea of wearing the jumper at all, more so the fact that Port Adelaide must honour the agreements they’ve signed in the past. Perhaps the AFL has held back engaging talks in respect to Collingwood, meaning new Pies president Jeff Browne could hold the key to Port Adelaide’s wishes. Thus far he has stated he will not approve Port’s Prison Bar guernsey in the AFL upon any request, however, time will tell.

OPINION: "What a deplorable TV commentary yesterday for West Perth v West Coast finals' clash," by Chris Preedy, 1 September 2019.

OPINION: What a deplorable TV commentary of the Eagles v West Perth clash yesterday. Now I'm not a supporter of either team but for Channel 7 anchor man, Mark Readings, it was not one of your finest moments. Talk about a biased call, was there any other team other than the Eagles out there playing yesterday Mark? You must get intimidated having a former Eagle sitting next to you, that's about the only conclusion I can come up with. Some of your classics, "the Eagles are dominating the game", yet the scores are just 4 points apart and only one kick separates them, and then in the last few minutes, after the Cardies just hit the front with a great goal from that little ripper of a skinny kid, "if WP get up to win this it'll be the biggest heist in history". Bloody hell, there's only one kick in it for a huge part of the game and you just continued to dribble garbage, did you ever see the other team out there, they were wearing the blue and red guernseys? All day you raved on about how superior the Eagles were, it was just sickening. I think poor old Cometti felt embarrassed at times, he was very subdued, and he's not about to say otherwise. Don't ask him, he's a gentleman. We appreciate the TV coverage but we'd also appreciate an unbiased commentary as well (by Chris Preedy, first published as a Facebook post, 1 September 2019).

OPINION ARTICLE: "The way forward for the state leagues", by K. James, 20 August 2018.

The way forward for the state leagues (written 2013 with minor updates here and there)

What is the way forward for the tier-two state leagues around the country? The two obvious paths forward, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, are the “retro” approach of the WAFL and the expansion approach of the Queensland Cup rugby-league competition. A third, out-of-left-field approach would see clubs like Port Melbourne from the VFL apply for and join a competition in another state, for example the SANFL. Obviously this option applies to exceptional cases and not to the majority of clubs in a league. A new issue to have recently emerged (not covered in detail in this book) is the fielding of Adelaide Crows and Port Adelaide Power reserves team in the SANFL and West Coast and Fremantle reserves teams in the WAFL. In the WAFL host clubs are presently (as at December 2016) East Perth for the West Coast reserves and Peel Thunder for the Fremantle reserves.

The Queensland Cup, the former Brisbane suburban rugby-league competition, has expanded to include teams in all of the major Queensland coastal cities, not presently servicing an NRL team, including Cairns (Northern Pride); Mackay (Mackay Cutters); Rockhampton-Yeppoon (CQ Capras); and Sunshine Coast (Sunshine Coast Falcons)[1]. The competition has also expanded south-east to the Gold Coast (Burleigh Bears and Tweed Heads Seagulls), south-west to Ipswich (Ipswich Jets), and overseas to Papua New Guinea (PNG Hunters). Toowoomba Clydesdales formerly played in the competition and hopes to re-enter.

On balance, the Queensland Cup has probably been right to follow the expansion course because the Queensland regional cities are of reasonable size (50,000 to 250,000 people) and rugby-league fans in those cities do not have a local NRL team. I recall once watching Central Comets (now CQ Capras) play a Saturday night game under lights within the cosy confines of Browne Park, Rockhampton, where everyone is within 20-metres of the pitch. The club does a wonderful presentation of the whole event there and, with a crowd of around 3,000 people in a cosy ground, the atmosphere is compelling. However, entry prices remain relatively cheap and there is always a vacant seat directly behind the fence for someone arriving a few minutes before kick-off.

Channel 9 televised Queensland Cup matches from 2012 (replacing the ABC) which has provided a further boost for this second-tier league. Television cameras appeared at the grounds of the three north-coast clubs, CQ Capras (Rockhampton, formerly Central Comets), Mackay Cutters, and Northern Pride (Cairns), for the first time in 2012.

Western Australia is a different proposition in that towns in Western Australia are much smaller than those in Queensland (10,000 or 20,000 people compared to 50,000 or 150,000 people) and any expansion club in the former state would probably follow the path of mediocrity followed by Peel Thunder. On balance, I believe that the WAFL competition should not further expand although clearly the Goldfields and Geraldton regions have appeal. Australian Rules football has a long and wonderful history in the Goldfields region in particular stretching back over a century. The WAFC/WAFL hierarchy should keenly study Queensland Cup developments as well as, more obviously, developments in the SANFL and VFL.

I now turn my attention to two interesting 2011 developments involving state league clubs in Hobart and Perth. Firstly, Jason “Aker” Akermanis’ turned out for Glenorchy versus Clarence in the Tasmanian State League (TSL) competition on Saturday night 2 April 2011 in Hobart. Because of the presence of Akermanis this game attracted a record crowd of 8,480 people.[2] It is certainly wonderful to see such an accomplished and decorated player give something back to second-tier football. It is probably because Hobart had and has no regular AFL team that Aker attracted larger average crowds at Glenorchy than he would have attracted had he signed on with a WAFL club.

Secondly, Swan Districts’ players were praised by letter writers to the Brisbane-based Courier-Mail newspaper, Wendy and Darren Schultz of Sherwood, as a result of 64 Swans players arriving via charter plane in Sherwood, Brisbane to assist in clean-up operations after the floods of January 2011.[3] Of course the letter-writers could not refrain from utilizing the expected poor pun of swans taking well to water! The great attitude of the players involved (there are far fewer unmanageable egos at this level of the game) and the fact that Swan Districts could mobilize as many as 64 players quickly suggests that the smaller WAFL club operations can respond more effectively to at least some emergencies than the AFL corporate behemoths. The actions of the Swans club and its players are consistent with the club’s modern (re-)branding as a community-based club with a community ethos. The cleaning efforts got the club some coverage in the Courier-Mail newspaper whereas it would be close to impossible for it to gain newspaper coverage in Brisbane for its actual on-field footballing exploits.

Swans’ act represents existential acting-out of a strategic re-branding which is really just a tinkering and a slight re-emphasis of attributes that the club has possessed throughout its life. The concept of a community-based club assisting a community on the other side of Australia is an interesting one and it suggests innovative ways and approaches for tier-two clubs to carve out niche markets and brand-names for themselves which do not involve fighting head-on the hegemonic AFL clubs. The Foxtel Cup (2011-14) also offered some hope and extra meaning for second-tier clubs around Australia as players and supporters got to test themselves out on the national stage. However, the games should have been played at the clubs’ traditional home grounds instead of as curtain-raisers to AFL matches. With the Foxtel Cup axed the only hope for forgotten traditional tier-two clubs now is a rebel competition outside the auspices and control of the AFL.

To return to the topic of ground redevelopment and rationalization, Subiaco Oval today is a fully corporatized ground, sold out to West Coast season-ticket holders for West Coast home games, and surrounded on all sides by homogeneous grandstands and the ubiquitous, horrible, plastic bucket seats. The once great traditional ground with the atmospheric, concrete terracing, so close to the play on the Roberts Road scoreboard wing, is now a hollow corporate shell and is completely distasteful for traditionalists. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault would have said, the corporate people aim to control, physically as well as psychologically, every aspect of a football supporter’s game-day environs and experiences. They cannot understand that some people like to watch games from grandstands but others prefer either grassed banks or concrete terracing.

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[1] Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queensland_Cup [accessed 4 November 2016]; http://www.qrl.com.au/intrust-super-cup/clubs.html [accessed 4 November 2016].

[2] Source: Anonymous (2011a), “Akermanis can still draw crowd”, The Courier-Mail [Brisbane, Australia], 4 April, p. 63.

[3] Source: Schultz, W. and D. Schultz (2011), “Swans arrived at right moment”, Talkingpoint [Letters to the Editor], The Courier-Mail [Brisbane, Australia], 26 January, p. 50.

OPINION ARTICLE: "The simple pleasures of lower-tier football", by K. James, 6 August 2018.

The simple pleasures of lower-tier football (written 2013 with minor updates here and there, FC United of Manchester still plays in the National League North)

The WAFL is now similar to non-league English soccer (and lower-tier Scottish leagues), far down what in the UK is termed “the pyramid”, where games are run professionally; the clubs have traditions; and the crowds are small but dedicated. The WAFL has lost, for the most part, its army of “fair-weather fans” that used to attach themselves especially to clubs like East Perth and South Fremantle back in the day. The club diehards have remained, by and large, with the clubs except perhaps for some previously staunch West Perth fans disillusioned by the move to Arena Joondalup. The VFL/AFL era has been a real existential test of people’s loyalties. In the WAFL’s Golden Era, people would declare and pretend that they were hardcore fans of this or that WAFL club but in those days the competition was glorious and people’s loyalties were not really tested. Existentially speaking, those 800-1,000 committed supporters of each WAFL club that continue to attend WAFL games weekly have proven themselves to be the most committed WAFL club supporters by their actions. The great, traditional, ex-NSL, ethnic soccer clubs, such as Adelaide City, Marconi Stallions, Melbourne Knights, Preston Lions, South Melbourne, and Sydney United, are now relegated to the Victorian Premier League (VPL) or the equivalent competitions in the other states, and are in exactly the same position as the WAFL clubs.

Montrose 2 Elgin City 0, lower-tier Scottish soccer.

WAFL football is now still very enjoyable, but in a different way, as these days you can spread yourself out, there are empty seats often to your right and left, and the queues for the toilets, food, and beer are small and manageable. The WAFL is now like the Western Australian premier league soccer, rugby, and rugby-league competitions have always been in that the atmospheres can be wonderful partly because you can assume that all of your fellow spectators are dedicated and knowledgeable insiders! If you do not allow your mind to wander into that place of comparing the new to the old WAFL you will find that attending WAFL games today is quite enjoyable.

Interestingly, disillusioned Manchester United fans set up in June 2005 a community-based club, FC United of Manchester, which plays to small but dedicated crowds in cosy, compact stadiums in a minor league (National League North) below and outside the Football League (sixth-tier of the pyramid, five tiers below the English Premier League)[1]. Each club financial member owns one share and gets one vote regardless of her / his financial contribution(s). With an average crowd of 1,969 for the 2008-09 season, up to and including 9 November[2], FC United was then drawing around five times as many people, on average, as the typical club in its division. After moving from Gigg Lane to Broadhurst Park in May 2015, the club averaged a gate of 3,394 in 2015-16, a season-on-season increase of over 57% and the fourth highest attendance in non-League football. The club’s record home crowd is 6,731 people at Gigg Lane, Bury versus Brighton & Hove Albion, FA Cup Second Round, on 8 December 2010[3] beating the previous record of 6,023 people versus Great Harwood Town on 22 April 2006[4].

United FC is an organic and authentic community-based response to the increasing corporatization of soccer and the alienation that now exists between fans and players and between fans and administrators at English Premier League (EPL) level. The grassroots WAFL clubs are the equivalent of FC United of Manchester whereas the West Coast Eagles are the equivalent of Manchester United.

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[1] Source: Fuell, T. (2009), “Fans doing it for themselves”, Non League [United Kingdom], December, p. 104; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_League_North [accessed 4 November 2016]; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.C._United_of_Manchester [accessed 4 November 2016].

[2] Source: Non League magazine, December 2009 issue, p. 102.

[3] Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.C._United_of_Manchester [accessed 4 November 2016].

[4] Fuell, “Fans doing it for themselves”, p. 104.

Port Adelaide Magpies supporters, Foxtel Cup match versus Claremont, Subiaco Oval, Saturday, 16 July 2011 (attendance: 1,000).

Port Adelaide Magpies supporters, Foxtel Cup match versus Claremont, Subiaco Oval, Saturday, 16 July 2011 (attendance: 1,000).

North Adelaide supporters (SANFL).

South Fremantle Cheer Squad (WAFL) (formed 2002).

OPINION: "My opinions on East Perth Football Club Inc. (formerly of Perth Oval)", by P.B., 6 June 2018

It's a Strange Old Flag - East Perth Football Club offices @ Leederville Oval, 6 July 2011.

OPINION ARTICLE: My opinions on the East Perth Football Club (formerly of Perth Oval, Brewer Street, now of...well, never mind), by Phil Backshall (He's a part of the town), 6/6/2018

East Perth Football Club was and still remains today West Perth’s arch-rivals. East Perth was a strong club throughout the 1960s and up to 1978. However, the Perth Oval-based club generally failed to match it in the 1980s with the new powerhouses South Fremantle, Claremont, and Swan Districts (in the early-1980s) and East Fremantle and Subiaco (in the mid-1980s). The East Perth club had possibly begun to suffer the after-effects of a declining junior base in its inner-city areas, a factor that may also partially explain Perth FC’s poor years from 1980 onwards. The declining junior base was the primary factor behind West Perth’s 1994 move to a more lucrative junior zone in the Joondalup area in Perth’s outer northern suburbs. In hindsight, perhaps, the 1978 grand-final between East Perth and Perth represented the end of an era, the last hurrah of the traditional inner-city clubs.

My belief then was that East Perth supporters were an overly serious and macho bunch that believed that their team was the toughest and most ruthless. They generally did not respect other clubs at all and especially West Perth. It was mostly East Perth fans who used the racist “Garlic Muncher” tag for West Perth supporters because, like South Fremantle, West Perth had always been (or at least since the 1950s) a multicultural club both in terms of its playing squads and its supporter base. The club welcomed these supporters and players and gained a reputation as a multicultural club. Both West Perth and South Fremantle represent districts with large Croatian / Yugoslav and Italian populations. Most of the ethnic soccer clubs, associated with the Croatian, Greek, and Italian communities, are based in the West Perth and South Fremantle catchment areas. Despite this, South Fremantle has never been burdened by a tag such as “Garlic Munchers” possibly because East Fremantle fans have always been far too gentlemanly and self-assured of their own worth to resort to such insulting labelling of a rival club. The other six WAFL clubs tended to be more strictly Anglo in the 1970s and 1980s, although East Perth and Swan Districts have had significant numbers of Aboriginal players and supporters.

The official “Royals” nickname for the East Perth club was an enigma. On the one hand, I felt that some East Perth supporters were somewhat embarrassed by it because it did not gel neatly with their working-class (Aussie not British) tough-guy image. This interpretation is based on the “Australia as a rugged colony” tradition which played a major role in Ashes Test cricket matches in the 1970s. On the other hand, the Royals’ nickname for East Perth and the club’s crown symbol could have been viewed in white-supremacist / British nationalist terms. If this meaning wasn’t overt during the 1980s (it clearly wasn’t) it was arguably at least there in the background playing with people’s collective subconscious, and especially those of West Perth supporters when they were hit with the “Garlic Munchers” tag. It is unfortunate that political correctness arrived too late and Royals’ fans were not castigated for their insulting use of the racist “Garlic Munchers” label for West Perth fans during the WAFL’s Golden Era. In the 1980s East Perth and East Fremantle fans were probably those least likely to wear club colours at their games although this is admittedly a subjective memory. 

Our West Perth Cheer Squad believed that East Perth players and fans took themselves too seriously and lacked charm and humour. The cheer squad members also felt that, although both clubs were mid-table in 1984-85, West Perth had a faster running and more skilful side. West Perth fans thought that West Perth’s 1982 recruitment of East Perth centreman George Michalczyk (whose nephew is the West Coast Eagles player Dean Cox) was a master-stroke as he fitted the team’s game plan well and he was also more of a physical player than many at West Perth. The team’s token tough-guy in the late-1970s and 1980s was the Vietnam War veteran John Duckworth but with Duckie there was a humorous side to him (like Carlton’s Peter “Percy” Jones and North Melbourne’s Peter “Crackers” Keenan) and he tended to be primarily a ball-player and not one for king-hits off the ball.

Duckie meant a huge amount for player and fan morale; it could be argued that his return to the senior team at age 35 in 1985 was another reason behind the team’s finals’ appearance in that year although he did not himself play in the first semi-final versus Swan Districts which the club lost. Duckworth missed the last two qualifying games of the 1985 season due to the after-effects of swallowing a fish bone. He had not trained for three weeks as at the Monday of the lead-up week and had lost seven kilograms. He intended to resume training on the Thursday night before the first semi-final but ultimately he did not play. Duckworth surely must have enjoyed John Wynne’s philosophy of having minimal pre-season training. He inspired the players and was worth much more to West Perth than his kick, marks, and handballs tally might suggest. The extremely charismatic and popular centre-half-forward Phil “Spock” Bradmore fits into the same category. Atkinson reports that Peter Menaglio won the Breckler Medal for club fairest-and-best player in 1984 while “Spock” Bradmore won the medal in the following year.

East Perth back then had a large number of fair-weather fans (as of course did West Perth) who would turn out in force for the big games and sit on the grassed scoreboard banks. Most of these have gone on to support one of Perth’s AFL clubs. With East Perth there were certainly dumb-thug elements among the fair-weather army. As an example, when I went with Tim B., an East Perth supporter, to the big West Perth versus East Perth game at Leederville Oval on 26 August 1978, my father lagged behind us as he had to lock up all the car doors manually. As this was happening, Tim staged a mock fight with me on the footpath. Just as in a cliché-ridden movie, an old panel van, the vehicle of choice for mentally challenged thugs back in the day, drove past Tim B. and me at that moment, and shouted out some brain-dead encouragement to the one wearing the East Perth colours. East Perth’s travelling supporters would sit on the huge Leederville Oval scoreboard bank at West Perth home games and, as mentioned, usually they did not wear the club colours. This grass bank has largely disappeared today, in the interests of the gentrification of the ground and the takeover of the top part of the grass bank by the Town of Vincent, but it can be seen in its full glory in the picture on page 219 of Atkinson’s book. On very big match days, most of the scoreboard bank crowd would end up standing rather than sitting (at least at the top and on the sides and edges).

Tim B. in recent years (first on left)

East Perth had an organized cheer squad in the mid-1980s. David Lockhart posted on the Lost WAFL Facebook page on 4 December 2013 to explain that he had been “the leader of this rabble” from around 1982 to around 1988. He writes that the cheer squad was funded by the East Perth club and had 40 members at one point. He says his group knew the other cheer squads well and participated in the combined State of Origin cheer squad a few times. Our West Perth group did not know any of the members of David Lockhart’s cheer squad although Lockhart’s group knew Fat Pam’s group which continued making the banners for the West Perth players to run through into the 1984 season.

The East Perth fair-weather fans back in the day all expanded significant effort trying to look macho and serious. Ironically, Leederville Oval has now become East Perth’s home ground since the club was forced to leave Perth Oval for the Perth Glory Soccer Club. It is indeed ironic that the East Perth club, which prided itself on its macho, Aussie, tough-guy image over the years, would have to leave its home ground for soccer, the so-called sport of, to use the title of the late Johnny Warren’s autobiography, “fairies, wogs, and poofters” (yes, Garlic Munchers). One might even want to refer to the concept of “karma” here, a concept that many of the middle-aged, and upper-middle-class “Buddhists” living in the now gentrified East Perth suburb can probably relate to. As the Full Points Footy website comments: “East Perth actually played its home matches at Leederville [Oval] during season 2000 owing to Perth Oval being consigned to the heretics, i.e. it was needed for the ineptly named ‘Perth Glory’s’ soccer fixtures”.

I can remember attending the second last West Perth versus East Perth game ever played at Perth Oval on Monday 1 June 1998. I sat under the tin shed in the south-western corner, just to the right of the main grandstand if you were looking across from the scoreboard bank. There was an official crowd of 4,853 people, a very high crowd for the post-Fremantle Dockers era. East Perth actually won that day, 16.8 (104) to 8.10 (58), although West Perth made the grand final in that year only to lose it to East Fremantle. This 1 June 1998 match was the last WAFL game ever to be played at Perth Oval in front of a crowd exceeding three thousand people.

Despite East Perth vacating Perth Oval, West Perth supporters did not have the last laugh because East Perth then joined Subiaco as the new co-tenants of Leederville Oval! The ground has now become a yuppie, boutique style ground with most of the scoreboard wing gone (it can be viewed on Google Earth) as well as the around-the-ground seating including the cheer squad’s seats behind the northern-end goal. In the general public parts of the ground only the seats in front of the tin shed in the north-west corner remain. Subiaco has built a tasteful new social club / grandstand in between the main grandstand and the tin shed which, if my memory serves me correctly, was home to a stepped section of gravel or concreted terracing (or an upwards sloping gravelled or concreted section) topped with a bar and / or a hot food caravan back in the 1980s (similar to the still-existing can bar terrace at Lathlain Perk). Despite all the changes, I still feel very much at home in the famous old ground. The old gates in the south-western corner have gone replaced by new Phil Matson Gates. It was somewhat cute and very politically correct to name these gates after Phil Matson who was a successful player and coach at both East Perth and Subiaco in the first half of the twentieth century. He can’t have had many challengers. I can’t imagine that the Alex Hamilton Gates or the Kevan Sparks Gates would have been deemed suitable names, these being the only two players I can think of from more recent years who played for both clubs. Oh, wait...The Peter Spencer Gates? I would like to see that!

The fact that Leederville Oval has become East Perth’s home ground does not sit well with me, but, as Brian Atkinson pointed out in personal e-mail correspondence, once West Perth moved out any other club had the right to move in. Clearly Subiaco, after being forced out of its Subiaco Oval headquarters by the new power-brokers of football the Western Australian Football Commission (WAFC), perceived that a move effectively just down the street to Leederville Oval would pose the least threat to its identity as a name change would not be needed. Ironically and sadly, the only visible signs of red-and-blue I observed when I visited Leederville Oval on the peaceful and sunny winter morning of Wednesday 6 July 2011 was the colouring of the brand name of Medibank Private, the current sponsors of the ground, at the back of the old main grandstand. The ground is presently a mish-mash of colours, a genuine post-modern collage, as you can see the blue-and-black of East Perth only 20-metres away from the maroon-and-gold of Subiaco. However, despite this, I still love the dear old ground (as I also love Dorrien Gardens).

Roy "The Spoon" George (centre) - EP fan at high-school.

Evidence of the East Perth fair-weather fan mentality is the fact that the club’s average attendances have been among the lowest of all WAFL clubs in the post-West Coast Eagles era. The so-called “dedicated” East Perth supporters of the early-1980s all quickly jumped ship at the first opportunity to support the new, artificial, corporate West Coast franchise. The concept of “loyalty” in Western Australian football since 1987 has been strained, muted, and bastardized, with some strange individuals following both West Coast and Fremantle in the AFL. Imagine people supporting both Manchester United and Manchester City or both the legendary Glasgow clubs Celtic and Rangers! Other West Australian football followers switched teams twice, once from their WAFL club to the West Coast Eagles in 1987 and once from the West Coast Eagles to the Fremantle Dockers in 1995.

A famous American sports fan turned commentator, Joe Benigno, wrote in his only partly tongue-in-cheek book Rules for New York Sports Fans that the number one “rule” for supporting sports in New York City is that you cannot have more than one team per sport, i.e. you cannot support both the Yankees and Mets in baseball or both the Giants and the Jets in American football or both the Knicks or Nets in basketball or two or more of the Rangers, Islanders or Devils in ice-hockey. This rule has always been modified in Australia where you were “allowed” to support one football team per competition in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, you could support Geelong, East Perth, and Port Adelaide or West Perth, Richmond, and Norwood (to name the three clubs that David Palm played for). This was unchanged in theory but became very confusing in practice after the West Coast Eagles joined the VFL/AFL as it was then “permitted” for you to leave your existing VFL/AFL team to support the Eagles which most, but by no means all, people did. Then in 1995 you were “permitted” to leave the Eagles to support the Dockers especially if you lived anywhere near the Fremantle area or if you had historic or family ties to either one of East or South Fremantle.

The Dockers, like baseball’s New York Mets in relation to the Yankees and soccer’s Melbourne City in relation to Melbourne Victory, became a team you supported if you didn’t like the Eagles as much as a team you supported for its own sake. Philosophers Marx and Engels might have called the Mets and Dockers the anti-theses of the dialectical contradiction in that they only make sense in relation to the “big brother” that they always measure themselves up against. 

Taken from the book Fucking Hostile: West Perth Football Hooligans 1984-86 (pages 67-72), available to buy at the following links:

Paperback: http://www.lulu.com/shop/philip-h-backshall/fucking-hostile-west-perth-football-hooligans-1984-86/paperback/product-23667104.html

Hardback: http://www.lulu.com/shop/philip-h-backshall/fucking-hostile-west-perth-football-hooligans-1984-86/hardcover/product-23667148.html