TIM GINEVER drove into the “privileged” car park space assigned to the Port Adelaide captain under the still standing bar on the western side of Football Park’s now-gone members grandstand.
“I opened the door …,” recalls Ginever of his arrival at West Lakes for SANFL grand final day in 1994 after not uttering a word to his wife Angela during the short drive from nearby Albert Park.
“… and I went to the knee!”
Ginever was carrying the weight of his football club. He had all year with greater responsibility than in any previous season at Port Adelaide. Now, it was at its heaviest. The demands on Ginever and his team had never been more imposing …
This was not Ginever’s first league grand final … nor his last. At 28, he had already celebrated at Alberton with the Thomas Seymour Hill premiership trophy as his constant special guest in 1988, 1989, 1992 and that tumultuous 1990 season which was on repeat in 1994.
“The pressure I felt before that grand final was enormous,” recalls Ginever. “I had never felt as nervous before a grand final … but this one had more than a premiership on the line.”
In the Port Adelaide Football Club’s 154 years since foundation in 1870 there are moments that define the people, the community, the club that has an unrivalled story in South Australian football. But the campaign – on and off the field – to take that story “Since 1870” to the national stage is arguably the most significant chapter in the grand tale that is Port Adelaide.
A media organisation recently revisited the key moments sparked by Port Adelaide in 1990 to end South Australia’s absence from the expanding national competition formed from its VFL base. It titled the series “Divided”. Yet at Alberton, the events of 1990 to national promotion from suburbia in 1994 underline all that can be achieved when the Port Adelaide Football Club is united to a common cause. Unity. At Alberton, there was one vision held by all, president to boot studder, as they say – the club needed to secure what had been taken from it in 1990 by the SANFL clubs using court action to block (but not end) Port Adelaide’s passage to the AFL.
This was the ultimate “them versus us” battle that symbolised the Port Adelaide Football Club as fashioned by its patriarch Fos Williams from 1951. And true to Port Adelaide tradition, 1990 and 1994 are remembered with trademark on-field successes – the 1994 premiership defining, if not enhancing, Port Adelaide’s reputation for winning against the odds.
Next month, on August 11, Ginever will gather his 1994 premiership team-mates – and the men and women who proved how clubs rather than players or teams win flags – at Alberton for a reunion that also tells how time marches fast.
Jack Oatey Medallist as best-afield in the 1994 grand final Darryl Wakelin last week was reminded of such when he sent a text message to his father Chris.
“I was telling Dad about the photo shoot at Alberton for the retro gear the club has produced for what I said was our 20th-year reunion,” Wakelin said. “Dad replied sharply, ‘Try 30 son …'”
Times flies. But history can never forget what happened in 1994 while Port Adelaide exists in the AFL. This was the year that allowed then club president Greg Boulton to hold up an AFL licence at Alberton and tell the faithful: “There will be a Port Adelaide Football Club forever.”
It is such a significant year. Try to argue it is not the most significant in the club’s long and storied passage from pioneer days in South Australian football to national glory.
Wakelin cherishes the 1994 season for the significance that exceeds a premiership, one of seven (1988-1990, 1992 and 1994-1996) won while South Australia spent a decade in transition from suburbia to national football.
“As a player in 1994, particularly a young player, your focus is on what you are doing and have to do to stay in the league side and win the flag,” says Wakelin, who was aged 19 as he started his second season of SANFL league football in that landmark 1994 year. “I knew there was something significant – the chase for that AFL licence – going on. But that was in the background.
“Now, 30 years on – not 20, as Dad has reminded me – I can reflect on 1994 and what it truly meant to the Port Adelaide Football Club and what part we, as players, had in that AFL licence campaign while (club chief executive) Brian Cunningham, (president) Greg Boulton and the board did all that work off the field to get that AFL licence.
“And 1994,” adds Wakelin, one of the few men to be part of that significant SANFL flag and the breakthrough AFL flag in 2004, “stands out a lot to me. I am most proud of what we all did as a football club in 1994.
“To perform as we did on the field says so much of what this club can achieve when it is challenged. That is Port Adelaide.”
Tim Ginever celebrating a goal during the 1994 Grand Final. Image: Port Adelaide Football Club.
GINEVER started Season 1994 – “a bloody hard year, I will say that” – with his emotions to be stretched from one extreme to another.
“It was quite a year,” Ginever recalls. “Quite a year …”
On the eve to his promotion as captain to succeed Greg Phillips – a decision that surprised Ginever – his father-in-law Darrell Jones died of cancer.
“He was the club’s ball steward; and a bloody determined one too,” recalls Ginever. “He would be chasing kids down Fussell Place to get back a ball kicked over the fence at training or match days at Alberton Oval. We learned he had cancer on the Friday night before our round one game (against Central District at Elizabeth Oval). He died on the next Tuesday.”
The emotional roller coaster that would define Ginever’s – and Port Adelaide’s year in 1994 – was starting with the extreme rises and dips.
The captaincy with the traditional move to the No.1 jumper was assigned to Ginever in the week leading up to the SANFL season-opener, as was the way at Alberton then.
“There were a dozen blokes who could have become captain once Greg Phillips retired,” Ginever says. “They chose me. That is a huge honour.”
Generation by generation there are true Port Adelaide heroes who mark their rise to club captain with significant success immediately. Bob Quinn in 1939. Geof Motley in 1959, completing the six-in-a-row flags. Tim Ginever in 1994.
“That 1994 season is, as they say, quite a moment in time,” recalls Ginever.
“I saw Ivan Eckermann recently and we reflected on how 1977 was significant to the Port Adelaide people for ending that long (12-year) premiership drought. Ivan knows just how much that flag meant to our people at the time because of the reaction he and his premiership team-mates had on returning to Alberton after the grand final at Football Park.
“That is it for me in 1994.
“I’d almost say – almost – it is the best premiership memory for me. You have to remember it is paired with another during this chase for an AFL licence. There is 1990 too.
“In 1990, we stuck it up them with that premiership. It was a bitter-sweet year. We were stopped from going to the AFL, but only temporarily … we won the flag that everyone outside of Port Adelaide wanted Glenelg to win that day.
“We won the battle in 1990 … and won the war in 1994 when we make it to the AFL. We get the SANFL flag. We get the AFL licence. That is a pretty significant year.”
A newspaper snippet documenting the 1994 Grand Final.
SEASON 1994 is, as Ginever puts it as a tribute to senior coach John Cahill, “a classic Jack year”.
“We start sharp,” says Ginever.
Port Adelaide gets to its first bye in the nine-team competition with three consecutive wins against Central District, South Adelaide and a 60-point workover of traditional rival Norwood at Football Park.
“Then we go through a patch in the middle, including losing three in a row,” adds Ginever, referencing the seven-week rough patch between byes when Port Adelaide falls back to the pack with a 3-6 win-loss record. This includes being hit by eventual grand final opponent Woodville West-Torrens by 66 points on Anzac Day at Football Park; losing to West Adelaide by one point after opening that match at West Lakes with a 9.1 to 0.1 start; and losing three in a row to Central District, South Adelaide and Norwood just before the bye.
At mid-June – with the bidding process for the AFL licence at its peak – Port Adelaide was far from convincing on the field with a 6-6 win-loss record in the SANFL.
Off the field, every SANFL club was now involved in the bidding for the AFL sub-licence to be owned by the SA Football Commission. Only Port Adelaide stood alone. Norwood and Sturt were aligned first; on June 22, 1994 emerged the so-called “Cartel” of Central District, North Adelaide, West Adelaide and Woodville-West Torrens; and the next day, Glenelg and South Adelaide completed the pack as a combine.
July began with an SANFL strategy paper recommending Port Adelaide be awarded the AFL licence and Norwood adopt the first South Australia-based licence assigned in 1990 with a partnership deal that absorbed the Adelaide Football Club that would be moved to The Parade to re-establish the neutral status of Football Park.
While the political cards were looking favourable to Port Adelaide, the need to shuffle the deck at Alberton was obvious to John Cahill while he carried the demand to reinforce the club’s AFL ambitions with another SANFL premiership.
“Jack is turning to new faces at this point; young guys to give us a spark,” recalls Wakelin. “Andrew McLeod. Troy Olsen. Stephen Carter. Simon Pedler. And me.
“There were still 12 guys in the team who knew how to win premierships. So we (the tyros picked by Cahill to inject new enthusiasm in the team) had a huge amount of confidence being around these older, more-experienced players.
“Once Jack picked you, there was one demand you could not ignore. And he made it very clear to us: You had to perform!
“Jack delivered that theme all year. I can still hear him saying it now – You have to perform!”
On return from the bye, Port Adelaide smashed Glenelg (coached by Mark Williams) by 132 points, slipped to the pace-setting Woodville-West Torrens by 42 points at Woodville Oval and then … “we really came back,” says Ginever. “It was a classic Jack year … nice start, not so great in the middle and a big finish.”
Port Adelaide closed the home-and-away series with nine consecutive wins – and a most-telling 82-point win against Woodville-West Torrens at Alberton Oval to command second spot with a 15-7 tally.
Senior coach Bruce Winter had taken his Woodville-West Torrens team past the Cheltenham cemetery to Alberton Oval with the minor premiership sealed a month before finals began. He gambled in a way that backfired, significantly.
“Bruce put his key players in different spots – Phillipou from centre half-forward to centre,” Ginever said. “They thought they had nothing to lose, so they flirted with their form. They not only lost the match, they gave us a psychological moment that would mean a lot to us a month later.”
John Cahill celebrating the premiership.
ULTIMATELY, the top-five finals series in September would repeat the theme of the home-and-away marathon. The grand final was much more than just a football game to crown the kings of SANFL football.
As AFL boss Ross Oakley sat in the plush seats at Football Park – as a guest of the Port Adelaide Football Club – the off-field battle to settle the long-running debate on promoting a suburban team to the national stage was at its peak.
What brings Ginever to his knees before walking into the changerooms at Football Park in September is a month of enormous demands on a player group that reflected the Port Adelaide Football Club throughout that 1990-1994 period. Under intense pressure, legends were made – particularly with Ginever in a grand final that defined him, his team and his football club.
Next week, the finals, the grand final, the aftermath …
