InDaily says goodbye to Football Park, known by some as AAMI Stadium, ahead of its final big-time match on Sunday – the SANFL grand final.

Goodbye Footy Park: I never really knew you, despite all we’ve been through.

I’m sorry that I never really loved you.

I’m sorry that I could never bring myself to call you AAMI.

I’m sorry that after an early romance I all but abandoned you.

I saw you trying hard – tarting yourself up – and it pained me, because I knew it was already over.

I remember those early days when you were a distant aspiration – something I’d only seen on the TV; something I could only imagine embracing.

Back then, you were stark in your youthful simplicity – an unadorned concrete oval, like a Roman arena, built for straightforward purposes.

There was no romance – that was all ahead of you.

The first time I saw you – in the concrete, so to speak – was on a Year 7 trip from the country to the city. You seemed enormous, but what stuck in my Mallee mind was the very greenness of your grass, and the echoing emptiness of the terraces. I could imagine the loneliness of the World Series Cricket players a year earlier, when you hosted a lone “supertest” and a trio of one-dayers, watched by barely anyone, the lack of crowd amplifying the tinny thunk of the ball on bat.

What would we give now to see the likes of Viv Richards, Andy Roberts and the Chappell brothers in their prime? Or Abba, for that matter, who also played within your grey embrace?

Footy Park’s biggest ever crowd at the 1976 grand final. Photo courtesy SANFL

My first trip to see you – for a game – was a Grand Final, in 1980. I stood behind the southern goals, on the bare concrete terrace, hoping against hope. We lost, and the trip home took forever, but you stuck in my mind – or rather, the fact that you were almost completely clothed in screaming, passionate humanity. It was the loudest noise I had heard to that point.

No matter that you boasted few adornments; back then we were more accustomed to tiny suburban grounds with flooded toilets, splintery wooden benches (if we were lucky), and terrible drainage – the kind that causes a cut-up mid-winter oval to stink like a pig-sty. By contrast, you were a palace.

Four years later, I found myself at another Grand Final and this time I had a seat. In September, your unforgiving aluminium benches didn’t freeze my bum off – that was a special pleasure reserved for the heart of winter. My team won that day; on the hazy video cutaway, I fancy I can still make out my sister cheering madly after Neville Roberts kicked the goal we all knew would win the game.

Even in the euphoria of that day, leaving you was easy. After the joy, came the pain of crawling along Trimmer Parade or West Lakes Boulevard, only leavened by listening to the wash-up on 5DN (or that great day we spotted KG – a real Adelaide celebrity – racing in his car back to the Channel 9 studios to host his Saturday afternoon footy show).

The 1980s then became a blur of hazy nights: the Origin years, as I think of them, when South Australia finally started defeating the hated Victorians with some regularity. Within your borders, Stephen Kernahan kicked 10 goals in a narrow loss; Peter Motley launched himself to mark over the top of Gary Ablett (Gary Ablett!) on the member’s wing, on the way to victory, and Garry McIntosh ran off the interchange with only one thought seemingly in his mind – to punch ‘Chopper’ Cunningham.

Those were nights of constant nervous glances at your high/low-tech scoreboard – the words and numbers put together by lighted yellow dots, making the display look like the high-score list on a corner deli Galaxian machine.

This was you at your greatest – simple, utilitarian, nothing to distract from the drama within.

This bald charm was still there, maybe even enhanced, when the AFL made its unexpectedly early arrival.

And then it all began to change – new stands, new seats, corporate boxes, chicken salt.

Enemy supporters sitting side-by-side, chipping away at each other, were replaced by a grey army of genteel supporters carrying cushions and thermoses and tupperwares of fruitcake, or cooking supermarket sausages on luke-warm tripod barbecues in the car park.

Port wore teal (teal!), and the Crow lads were booted into action, winning a couple of Premierships and putting you – and us – into the centre of the football world. The future stretched before us like a pageant.

Then it was Port’s turn, winning so many games and, inevitably, a premiership.

Things began to drift after that. Port went away to contest the 2007 Grand Final and returned, wounded, barely recognizable, like Civil War veterans limping glassy-eyed back to their home town, never to be the same.

Port’s crowds dwindled, and then the Crow fans followed.

We’d all been to Melbourne by then, and walked from the city straight into the shining indoor expanses of Etihad, and marveled at the height of the MCG’s stands, and the still roaring passion of suburban team supporters.

Port took to covering vast empty swathes of your seats with tarpaulins to mask their embarrassment. It was as if they had eaten from the tree of football knowledge and discovered that they were, indeed, naked and ashamed.

Yes, there were still exciting moments and your physical presence asserted itself occasionally (the post tearing open Wayne Carey’s leg, vituperative supporters leaning over your ramparts to abuse Eddie), but the end came suddenly and, to be honest, could you really be surprised?

The 1988 SANFL grand final. Photo courtesy SANFL

The world around you had been changing also.

West Lakes was no longer the exciting new place to be and build; this Venice-on-Royal-Park had long been usurped by Golden Grove – newer, bigger and filled with Crow supporters.

The free buses only highlighted how long it took to reach you; how difficult it had become to drive and park and tramp along with the other supporters to enter your borders; and it wasn’t a romantic journey down a hill and over a bridge to the MCG, but, rather, a plod around confusing suburban cul-de-sacs, and through permapine fenced parks, the only sound the crunching of volcanic rock mulches beneath the sensible shoes of the throng.

No.

The romance, always such a light flicker, guttered and died.

For rising in the city was a new dream in which, like modern life itself, the trimmings, the extras, the accoutrements, will be as important as the substantive whole – the pre-match boutique drinks at a “small bar”, the secure city car parks, the gently curving river, the purposefully raw-boned restaurants serving bespoke gourmet versions of the chips, burgers and hot dogs that were once served, badly, at your too-few food outlets (a killing irony).

And, at the game, there will be wi-fi and superscreens and more shelter from the rain, and an old scoreboard that doesn’t have yellow globes that sometimes blow.

And once we’ve all trooped to Adelaide Oval and drunk in the newness, the comfort, the sheer convenience, you will be forgotten, save for the protests of locals who will, as is the Adelaide way, not want anything to change despite the obvious futility of that emotion.

Your grandstands will be torn down; your seats removed.

You won’t return to swampland, although that would have been fitting, almost comforting.

What will happen is that you will be surrounded by flats and houses and shops, and then, your heart will once again return to utilitarian simplicity: an oval of green, where the only meaning to be found will be in the actions of those who run around on your expanses.

What are your Footy Park memories? Email us at [email protected], including your full name. The editor reserves the right to edit letters.

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