There is a strange thing that happens in South Australian football twice a year. Supporters who spend most of the season talking about finals, list builds, premiership windows and “the ultimate prize” suddenly reduce the entire moral universe to one binary proposition: I hate the Crows, or I hate Port.

For a week, maybe two, the premiership becomes theoretical. The ladder becomes background. The broader inequities of the AFL become abstract. All that matters is whether the neighbour, cousin, workmate or bloke at the pub gets to smile on Monday. Or perhaps more accurately, whether or not they get a frown on Monday.

History Forgotten

The Showdown is not a contrived concept. Port Adelaide carried a century of club identity into the AFL. Adelaide carried the weight of South Australian representation, albeit through a compromised birth. The rivalry was never just teal and black against navy, red and gold. It was old SANFL memory: Port Adelaide Magpies against the rest. But thanks to over two decades of AFL intervention, that’s all gone now. Now, it is contrived.

South Australian football is just too easily led. When the time came for them to stand up to the VFL after the NFL Night Series exodus, they lacked the spine. And after initially resisting the VFL’s overtures for an SA representative team to join, they caved in after a threat to grant Port Adelaide a solo license – a catalyst for the Showdown rivalry.

The mistake SA football has made is assuming that because the Port v the rest rivalry was authentic, the Crows v Power grudge match would be also. And that it wouldn’t be used by people who could profit from it.

Changing The Narrative

The Showdown is repeatedly described as one of the greatest rivalries in Australian sport. It’s not. It’s just one of the most marketable.

Recent coverage of Showdown 59 leaned hard into the drama: Brayden Cook’s last-gasp winner, one-point chaos, ARC controversy, Adelaide Oval noise level, and claims that the fixture deserves a standalone national slot. Bread and circuses.

Notice the language. The Showdown is rarely sold as a football match. It is sold as catharsis. Tribalism. Grudge. Hatred. Theatre. Something primal. Something that supposedly reveals the soul of South Australian football — but all it really reveals is the commercial greed of the body that now controls its narrative.

The AFL knows a supporter base angry at each other is easier to manage than a supporter base angry at the structure of the competition. Which is to say that SA football fans are their own worst enemy. No matter how bad the conditions get under the tyranny of the AFL, they show up in league leading numbers every single year. They drink the AFL media’s disingenuous flattery like kool-aid.

South Australian football has two AFL clubs and one external problem. But twice a year, for each the problem is conveniently reframed as the other South Australian club.

Port supporters look at Adelaide and see entitlement, compromise, state-team mythology and corporate comfort. Adelaide supporters look at Port and see underserved arrogance, hypocrisy, grievance, historical self-importance and an endless demand to be treated as exceptional.

But, the truth is that nothing either club has ever done to the other is anywhere near as bad as the way the AFL has treated South Australian football.

In the form of Adelaide v Port Adelaide, the AFL was gifted a historic rivalry built on noble indignation. It then branded it, monetised it and profited from it. The by-product is two supporter bases who’ve largely forgotten why they hate each other. They’ve accepted the AFL’s version of the “rivalry”.

Showdown 59 was almost too perfect an example. Both clubs were barely treading water before the game. Neither had a great win-loss record. Enter a one-point showdown finish. A last-gasp goal. Score review outrage. Booing of AFL officials at the game. A week of content. A thousand arguments. It was magnificent football. It was also magnificent distraction. From both clubs’ real problems and from the ineptitude of the AFL.

Enemies Redefined

It’s worth remembering that South Australians spend Showdown week convincing themselves the entire football world is watching. Victorians, when they notice at all, regard it with the indulgent smile of empire: isn’t that cute, the colonies are fighting again.

In Adelaide, we play up to master’s pets on the head. We dance and sing and ask, “Was that enough master?” In Melbourne, they lower their spectacles, look down their nose and say, “Yes, good little subjects. Very entertaining. Keep it up. Just don’t look over here.”

The AFL has whitewashed the ‘official’ history of Australian Football to the point where the contributions of Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania have been reduced to footnotes. When SA elevates the Showdown above all other games, and even the premiership, we simply legitimise that untruth.

The clearest evidence of the Showdown’s place in the AFL imagination is the recurring suggestion that one should be played in Melbourne. That idea only could only make sense to someone who saw the Showdown not as South Australian football culture, but as content. A thing to be lifted out of its soil and staged at the imperial amphitheatre for broader consumption. Bread and circuses.

It’s Time: A Return To Integrity

Norwood and Port Adelaide did not hate each other because either side was unserious. There was hatred, yes. But hatred attached to achievement, territory, tradition, style of play and supremacy. Norwood wanted to beat Port because they were the best. Port wanted to beat Norwood because they presented a valid threat. There was contempt, but beneath it there was recognition and at least some respect. So it went for all of the SA clubs’ rivalries with Port.

The old rivalries had arrogance, bitterness and cruelty, but also sporting logic. To beat the rival was to prove something. It was not merely to mock their existence. It was to assert supremacy over a club whose legitimacy was already established.

This is where the AFL’s Showdown narrative becomes illogical. Adelaide and Port Adelaide supporters are not trying to defeat a respected rival. Much of the time, they are trying to defeat a rival they claim not to respect at all. Adelaide supporters spend the year calling Port a delusional suburban relic. Port supporters spend the year calling Adelaide a plastic composite franchise. Then both supporter bases arrive at Showdown week acting as though victory over this illegitimate opponent is supposedly the deepest possible validation.

That makes no sense at all. If the other club is really as fraudulent as you say, why does beating them matter so much? That level of hypocrisy always reveals ignobility.

The Showdown is no longer about proving greatness, as the SANFL rivalries were. Now, it is about earning the right to call the other side pathetic.

A noble rivalry says: we are great, you are great, and only one of us can stand above the other this time. An ignoble rivalry says: you are piteous, we are less so, and for one week that will have to pass as glory.

South Australia: this petulance is beneath us.

A New Direction

Don’t get me wrong – the Showdown should matter. Rivalry is one of the few remaining things in football that still feels authentic. But may it be true, meaningful rivalry. Not this petty high-school feuding we’ve bought into.

When the siren goes, South Australian football has to remember that the enemy is not up or down Port Road. They’re the rivals. They enemy is over the border: the system that taught us to spend our deepest anger on each other.

This is precisely why the Showdown is so valuable to the AFL. A premiership race requires excellence. A rivalry product only requires hostility. The clubs do not need to be great. They do not even need to be good. They only need to hate each other loudly enough for the cameras to capture.

In a healthier sporting culture, the league’s emotional architecture would point upward, toward the premiership. In the AFL’s content economy, it increasingly points sideways — toward feud, humiliation, and individual idolatry.

The Showdown should be intense. It should be parochial. It should hurt. But it should not become the emotional ceiling of South Australian football. If Adelaide and Port Adelaide exist only to ruin each other’s week, then both clubs have accepted insignificance on the national stage. An insignificance crafted and rejoiced in by their masters at AFL House. They have become supporting characters in the AFL’s entertainment economy: loud, useful, bitter, and safely contained.

Put plainly, the Showdown cannot be the best SA has to offer. Acceptance of that ensures continual premiership failure for both teams.

At the end of the day, all South Australians know someone who is a supporter of the other team. Hell, plenty are married to one. I still remember sitting alongside Port Adelaide fans at Football Park, improbably united in the only thing that mattered more to both of us – beating Victoria.

It’s time SA football fans put down the baseless anger and took up the common fight. By all means love the Showdown. Look forward to it. Desire to beat Port Adelaide or Adelaide in the same way you did in the 80s when you wore a Magpies, Bays or Norwood scarf. But also, do it in the same was as you did then.

Next time you head to a showdown armed with evidence for the other team’s pitifulness whilst simultaneously espousing the virtues of beating them – take a moment to remember the red guernsey with the gold and royal blue V. Reclaim your dignity, show some goddam respect, and turn your indignation toward the real enemy at 140 Harbour Esplanade, Docklands, Melbourne.