Where did we go wrong? Shattered Adelaide players ponder grand final defeat against Richmond at the MCG last Saturday. Photo: AFL MEDIA

Ground and crowd were no excuses for Crows’ crumble

Adelaide was the best-performed team of the 2017 AFL season heading into the grand final. Unfortunately for the Crows, when it mattered most, they fired barely a shot.

That’s the nature of finals football. A season of solid work and a faultless preparation can all be brought undone by a poor couple of hours. It happens.

Adelaide had no excuses, and to the credit of coach Don Pyke, his players and the entire club, none were offered. “I think if you ask our players individually, they’d be some who say they produced one of their poorer performances on what is a big day,” Pyke said after the loss.

Football, however, is an emotional game, and football fans not always as level-headed. And thus has begun another narrative out of defeat for some disappointed Crows fans. That in the grand final being played at the MCG, the dice were stacked against their team.

The grand final should have been played at Adelaide Oval, goes the argument, as the Crows qualified higher. That they effectively played away against a team on its own home ground shows that this is really still the VFL, they claim.

Frankly, it’s all rubbish. But it’s worth at least explaining why. And why the AFL grand final and the MCG are inseparable.

Let’s start with the logistics. The MCG is a venue which holds more than 100,000. Adelaide Oval holds under 54,000. Behind the “G”, the next biggest capacity stadium in the country is Sydney’s Stadium Australia, which holds 83,500, and is also universally loathed by anyone with anything to do with AFL football. The soon-to-be-opened Perth Stadium will hold 60,000. The Gabba holds just 42,000.

What self-respecting sporting organisation would deny itself up to 50 per cent of its potential live audience on the showpiece day of the season? It’s a no-brainer.

Now let’s tackle the integrity issue. The “world against us” types reason that as the fifth non-Victorian team in a row to fall victim to a local side on grand final day, Adelaide is more proof that on unfamiliar turf before a hostile audience, the odds against the team from outside Melbourne are simply too great.

But the grand final venue is hardly the only compromise made on integrity. There’s the fixture, for one. A 34-game season in which every team plays every other twice is logistically impossible. A 17-game season in which it’s just once leaves an enormous hole in AFL revenue streams. Some teams end up with a better fixture than others. It’s the luck of the draw.

Teams from outside Victoria have to make up to a dozen road trips a season, those from Melbourne no more than half-a-dozen. But on their own turf they also get the benefit of playing teams who will never play more than two games a season there.

Besides Geelong’s Simonds Stadium, Victoria has just two venues, the MCG and Etihad Stadium. The local teams have no home ground advantage against a local rival, and teams from beyond are hardly unfamiliar with those two venues, either.

So why do the sides from other states keep falling at the grand final hurdle? Well, harsh as it may sound, perhaps they simply haven’t been made of stern enough stuff when it counted.

Are the venue and crowd really credible reasons for a shocker in the most important game of the year? And do we just accept that they are disadvantages anyway?

A hostile crowd? I sat at ground level of the MCG on Saturday. Had it been the Crows piling on the goals and not Richmond, trust me, the roars wouldn’t have been a lot less substantial, because Adelaide had a heap of support in the stands, and you certainly heard it when Rory Sloane then Eddie Betts kicked the first two goals of the game.

The nature of grand final ticketing means that the crowd is more evenly split in terms of support than in other games. Indeed, Richmond had a lot fewer fans watching its grand final triumph live than watched its preliminary final win over Greater Western Sydney.

Familiarity? Sure, the Tigers go pretty well on their own MCG, where they won 12 out of 14 games this season. But leading into the grand final, Adelaide hadn’t lost in three trips to the ground this year, and had lost just twice in 10 games on the MCG since 2014.

If the dice are so loaded against teams from outside Victoria, how did West Coast twice beat a local team to win premierships in 1992 and 1994? How did Adelaide itself knock over St Kilda and North Melbourne in 1997-98? How did Brisbane do it three years in a row between 2001-03 against two “heavyweight” clubs in Essendon and Collingwood? And how did Sydney do it against Hawthorn five years ago?

Losing a grand final sucks. Particularly when you’ve finished a season on top of the ladder. That’s the Crows’ lot now, and it’s a bitter pill to swallow. But sometimes you just have to cop your medicine.

Adelaide is a strong, resilient and professional club. It will deal with the fall-out, move on and no doubt bounce back. Hopefully, some of its less rational supporters can dispense with the conspiracy theories and do the same.