DION HAYMAN: Eight SANFL league directors hold a beating heart in the palms of their hands.

It’s a heart not quite as healthy as it once was.

It beats for a once-vibrant local football competition much-loved by South Australians for countless winters.

More than 50,000 people regularly attended the five SANFL games on weekends in the 1970s and ’80s, often standing shoulder to shoulder on narrow terraces at suburban football grounds oozing character and raw charm.

The ghosts of legends past still walk these grounds.

We still have those same grounds and, save for one merger between Woodville and West Torrens, those same teams.

A much smaller but fiercely loyal and passionate crowd still follow their clubs in rain, hail or shine. They still give a damn.

But all that could change in a heartbeat in the next week.

The Adelaide Crows, created in 1990 to stave off an attempt by Port Adelaide to take up an AFL licence, want to play their reserves team in the SANFL.

Two reserves teams operating in a League competition will reduce it to a farce, a competition without a soul.

It’s the highest standard competition outside the AFL and, most importantly, it’s convenient.

The Crows say it’s a better alternative to having their list spread across all clubs.

Port Adelaide says it wants the same deal; a single reserves side in the SANFL.

But here’s the problem: can two “reserves” sides be held in the same passionate regard as eight senior club sides?

To field those reserves teams in the SANFL’s League competition is an insult of the highest magnitude that will lead it to its grave.

Integrity is the lifeblood of any sport.  Without it, scorn, ridicule, suspicion and apathy flourish. Look at cycling in the shadow of the doping scandal. Or the unsatisfying diet of one-day and Twenty 20 cricket against the backdrop of illegal betting and match-fixing.

People are not stupid. They know when they are being conned. And two reserves teams operating in a League competition will reduce it to a farce, a competition without a soul.

It will be a competition that swings from week to week on the fortunes of two imposters who care not whether they win or lose, who “borrow” players from their rivals to fill their own team and who play all their games away from home just to gain acceptance.

For how long can we expect people to part with their $14 at the gate to stomach this?

Curiously, many of the same men who fought so long and hard to keep South Australian football from the clutches of the old VFL in the late 1980s with the birth of the “Player Retention Scheme”, a scheme designed to keep the state’s best players in Adelaide, are the same men now steering us toward oblivion.

It is not too late.

The oldest surviving football league in Australia need not be sacrificed on the Crows’ optimistic promise of $87,000 per club per season in extra revenue.

It is a figure barely enough to pay the light bill at most grounds and certainly not an amount that will ensure the long-term survival of SANFL clubs who are not capable of spending within their means.

The answer is hard work and good, solid administration. But too many clubs see this money as an easy remedy – a quick fix.

Too many SANFL clubs live in fear of saying “no” to the Adelaide Crows.

Too many fear being left behind, cast adrift and made irrelevant.

But that is what will eventuate if they ignore the pleas of the remaining faithful who represent their membership and match-day support.

What is any club without members and supporters; people who care?

These people are campaigning at local games with their “No AFL in SANFL” placards and gathering signatures in a last-ditch plea to retain the competition they love.

You will find no one at local grounds championing the pro-reserves teams’ cause.

If six of the eight League directors vote “yes” to the Adelaide Crows in the next week, the SANFL is fatally wounded.

And there will be at least six SANFL club directors with blood on their hands.

I hope those men have a heart.

Dion Hayman is Channel 9 Sport producer, a former editor of the Football Budget, and SANFL tragic.

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