FLASHBACK: NOT VERY NICE, GARY
CROWS’ LAST G-TOWN WIN:
“John Reid was the footy manager at the time and he bought a carton of beer for the bus trip and that never happened unless it was a footy trip.” RHETT BIGLANDS
THE last time Adelaide conquered Kardinia Park, Gary Ayres was coach and gave the crowd the bird, Ian Perrie polled three Brownlow votes and John Reid shouted a carton of beer for the bus trip back to Melbourne.
The Crows won back-toback games at Sleepy Hollow in 2002 and 2003 — and have not won there since.
Now 14 years later as the Crows prepare to break their Geelong hoodoo tomorrow night, key players from 2002 and 2003 have shared what those wins meant to the club.
“John Reid was the footy manager at the time and he bought a carton of beer for the bus trip and that never happened unless it was a footy trip,” ruckman Rhett Biglands said.
“It meant a fair bit to ‘Ayresy’, coaching against his old side. He put a fair bit of emphasis on it — more so than games against Hawthorn I reckon.
“It was pretty rare for Ayresy to want us to have a few beers, but he really wanted to celebrate that one and ‘Reidy’ knew what that rivalry meant to him.”
So did the crowd, because Ayres gave Geelong supporters the middle finger at halftime, the two-fingered salute after the final siren and pointed to the scoreboard as he made his way into the rooms.
“That’s what I remember,” Michael Doughty said.
“The crowd must have been absolutely ripping him.”
Kardinia Park in the 1990s and 2000s was not a nice to play footy if you were the visiting side and it was not a good place to lose.
“It was an awful place if you lost. They had this really small meeting room and after the game Ayresy could give an almighty spray,” Doughty said.
“If you played a bad one he would tear you a new one, I remember he gave Ian Perrie one of the best sprays I’ve ever heard after a game at Geelong and that’s probably why Ian played so well there another time.
“It was always cold and windy and they (Geelong) played the ground so well.
“The new grandstand probably protects it a bit now and I still think they’re fairly beatable down there — not like in those years from 2007 onwards.”
Although they won backto-back games there in the early 2000s, memories of big losses a decade earlier remain fresh in Mark Bickley’s mind.
“We’ve had some horrible hidings down there,” Bickley said.
“In 1991 and 1992, Geelong kicked 27 and 32 goals against us, it got really ugly.
“But that win in 2002, ‘Roo’ (Mark Ricciuto) kicked five and they were pretty much all in the second half, he was the difference and really silenced the crowd.”
Ricciuto remembers bits about the game.
“I think I was playing on Darren Milburn,” he said. “I was midfield changing forward and just had a good day.
“It was a longer trip to one of the last true suburban grounds and we loved travelling as a group, knowing if we had a win we could have a beer on the bus on the way back.”
The next year the Crows went back to Kardinia Park and made it two on the trot.
“Before they (Geelong) hit their straps we knew their preseasons were average,” Biglands said of playing Geelong in that era.
“We knew ours were good and they were doing 100m beach sprints down at Torquay and that was it.
“But that all changed when Geelong got Paul Haines across from Adelaide and they built that big endurance base.”
Perrie got the three Brownlow Medal votes from the win in Round 10, 2003, for his 16 disposals, 11 marks, and one goal from centre halfforward.
“It’s like going to Adelaide now in that it’s a bit of a fortress,” he said of playing at Kardinia Park.
“You got the flight to Melbourne and bus to Geelong, and that’s not part of your normal routine.
“I remember playing with James Begley that day, we had a lot of different cattle coming through the side at that time and we were still transitioning from the Blight premiership era through the Ayres era and into the Craig era.
“So it was just good to go down there and have a win against an improving side like us at the time.”
Bickley said James Gallagher kicked the winning goal and it was as sweet as any minor round win he had played in.
“I don’t remember too much about it but James Gallagher kicked the winning goal,” Bickley said.
“A lot of the players in that team would never have played at grounds like Moorabbin, Windy Hill or Victoria Park, and it’s one of the great feelings to win at those suburban grounds.”