LIVING THE DREAM

BY PETER CORNWALL

Don’t fret, your time is near.

SANFL supporters who have been longing to see their club’s colours on top of the West End Brewery chimney have been living the dream in the past five years. With players coming and going at a frenetic rate and sides progressing from pretenders to contenders like never before, there’s hope for every club - and every fan.

You don’t have to have been knocking on the door for even one season and there’s no talk these days about having to lose a grand final before you can win one. Rebuilding? Forget it.

Get the right coach, strong leadership and players who are willing to work hard, work together and play with no ceiling and any drought can be smashed.

South Adelaide has been rocked by last-minute player losses to the AFL in the past year. Panthers fans, without a premiership since 1964, are tearing their hair out after superstar ruckman Keegan Brooksby was snatched away by Hawthorn in March. But a premiership has never been closer for all clubs.

Just a decade ago, all-conquering Central District snared its ninth premiership in 11 seasons. But, incredibly, the Bulldogs now are the seventh-most-recent flag winners, the Eagles, Norwood (three), West, Sturt (two), North and Glenelg winning them since the Doggies’ remarkable dynasty ended.

West Adelaide languished in ninth place in 2014, not having won a premiership since 1983. Bloods fans were pinching themselves after coach Mark Mickan orchestrated a stunning grand final win just a year later. Sturt jumped from eighth in 2015 to the flag in ’16. Coached by Martin Mattner, who had starred in the Blues’ previous flag in 2002, they completed back-to-back flags in 2017 - the first time they had achieved the feat since winning their fifth flag in a row way back in 1970. North Adelaide “won” the wooden spoon in 2017. But Josh Carr’s Roosters won the premiership just a year later - coming from fifth at the end of the minor round. Their flag ended a club-record 27-year wait.

Glenelg finished sixth in 2018, not having made the finals since 2011 and facing a premiership drought that extended back to the heady days of grand final wins under Graham Cornes in 1985-86. Mark Stone’s men proved anything is possible to storm to a stunning 28-point win in the premiership decider against Port Adelaide, the Bays completing one of the most dramatic rags-to-riches triumphs of all.

Glenelg’s fans have been living the dream, taking unnecessary detours to meander past and admire the black-and-gold colours on the Port Rd brewery chimney, just three years after the club might have closed its doors for good. Glenelg launched its Save The Tigers debt demolition campaign in June 2016, the threat of extinction all too real having amassed more than $3 million in debts. As if that wasn’t bad enough, just six months later the roof of Glenelg Oval’s HY Sparks grandstand was ripped off in a storm. There was no choice but to demolish the 80-year-old stand, which already had seen better days but which housed the changerooms for home and away teams, the Tigers’ players’ gym, medical and meeting rooms, a coaches’ box and timekeepers’ box.

Club president Nick Chigwidden and chief executive Glenn Elliott directed the transformation of training, gym and changeroom facilities now up there with the best in the SANFL, the freak wind that seemed to have caused such devastation later dubbed The Perfect Storm. And 2019 was just about perfect, a profit recorded for the fourth year in a row and Tigers fans out in force in the bumper 39,000 grand final crowd, SA’s sleeping giant well-and-truly awakened.

Chigwidden admitted when the club’s financial crisis saw it in “serious, serious trouble”, its longterm vision was to win a flag by its league centenary in 2021. “A flag at that point seemed a world away … to win one this quickly is unbelievable,” he said.

The Tigers will be coming hard, desperate to repeat the historic back-to-back flags of the ‘80s. But they have proved to everyone anything is possible.

Keep believing. You could be living the dream sooner than you think.