South back from the brink

By DION HAYMAN

By agreeing to coach South Adelaide in 1988, John Reid took on one of the toughest jobs in Australian football.

“They were in a lot of disarray,” Reid said. “Financially they were buggered. I knew they were in strife but I didn’t realise things were as bad as they were going to get. We had very few on the committee. We didn’t have recruiting staff, you had to do everything. We just didn’t have any resources.”

That meant countless long nights at the club after training, pouring over potential recruits to organise scouting missions.

“The playing list was pretty average,” Reid recalled.

Partly with intent but mostly because of necessity, he assembled a squad of players from across the land who had been cast adrift or simply overlooked to play at a higher level.

“We cleaned out a bucket-load of them and went with younger kids – quite a few blokes who weren’t stars or anything but they were looking for a go. They wanted to have a crack, wanted to have a career.”

It was that hunger, that desperation that instilled in South a fighting spirit and resilience that accounted for what it lacked in pure talent.

“If you said to me, ‘what’s the first ingredient you’ve got that you think is going to be important?’, I’d say resilience. And I had a fair bit of positivity. We’d get beaten but I’d always find something positive out of the game.”

Reid’s rebuild saw him blood 24 new players in 1988, a season the Panthers’ lone win came in the fourth round against West. Another 17 new faces were handed debuts in ’89. Across those two years, players the calibre of Peter McIntyre, Nigel Smart, Darren Trevena and Mark Bickley were introduced.

Bickley, who was playing for Solomontown in the Spencer Gulf League, was undoubtedly the diamond of Reid’s bounty.

He had already been rejected by another Port Pirie export, Michael Nunan.

“All I wanted to do was play in the SANFL and we were in North Adelaide’s country zone so I came down and trained with them at the start of the 1988 season,” Bickley said.

“They’d just come off a flag and after training with them all through January, Mick Nunan said, ‘you don’t really have the attributes we’re looking for’. So I went back to Port Pirie and won the League medal and we won the flag. Because John Reid used to coach South Augusta, one of Reidy’s mates (David Shillabeer) rang him up about me. I said to South, ‘if you can find me a job, I’ll come down and play with you’. I was a sparky by trade so they got me a job at Mitsubishi, paid a $2000 transfer fee and it was done and dusted.”

But even with Reid’s thrifty recruiting, the Panthers spiralled into a death dive from which they almost failed to emerge.

“I remember going to a meeting at the clubrooms,” Bickley said. “We all got called in and told, ‘don’t go to the oval, go to the footy club’ and the meeting was, ‘we’re gonna merge with Sturt’. They said, ‘we’ve run out of money and we can’t afford to pay you’. But, for whatever reason, something happened. We rallied against it, there was a tin rattle and we somehow survived but that’s how dire it was.”

Adversity never lurked far from South’s door. And by the time of the Queen’s Birthday round in 1989, Reid and his team of misfits had celebrated victory just once in 30 matches – 40 including pre-season competition games.

But slowly, there were signs the tide was turning. A fortnight earlier, South had led Central by four goals at half-time, only to lose by a point after a Gilbert McAdam masterclass.

By the holiday Monday game, Norwood was ripe for the picking. The Redlegs were punch drunk at 3-5 after a three-game losing streak and had just lost Tom Warhurst to a broken hand in an 11-goal home defeat to top side North.

South had a small matter of 26 consecutive defeats behind them – the third-longest in SANFL history. Yet the clouds of doom over Football Park for the early game gathered for the Redlegs. The Panthers began brightly and led by nine points at half-time.

Norwood appeared to have broken their resolve, taking an 11-point lead with three quick goals in the third term but these Panthers refused to yield. They scored goals in time-on when they were expected to fold – seven of their 17 for the match.

They were inspired by WA recruit Gordon Gatti, a high-leaping headband-wearing Adonis who gained cult-figure status in just 15 SANFL games. He only kicked 11 goals for the Panthers but four came that day against Norwood.

They rode the highs with Glenelg signings Craig Woodlands and Geoff Winton. Woodlands booted the game’s first goal after just 22 seconds, Winton kicked three of his own and had the ball in his mitt when the siren confirmed South’s torment was over.

And they were driven to the 17.8 (110)-to-13.14 (92) victory by 19-year-old Bickley, who Reid declared after the match was “South’s hardest worker for many years”.

The admiration was mutual. “Reidy was a really enthusiastic coach,” Bickley said. “He had the ‘us against them’ mentally. That ‘we don’t have much and all the other clubs have everything given to them’ mentality, so he was a really galvanising coach. It was a really tight bunch who came from all points of the compass.”

Norwood coach Neil Balme graciously sought Reid out after the game to congratulate him. South’s players locked arms, prompting Winton to ask: “Who knows the club song?” And then they celebrated hard as any club would after such a run of outs.

“Winning that game was really the start of playing the footy we wanted to play,” Reid said. “We went back to the club that night and we had a bloody good night. I said to the boys, ‘let’s enjoy it, there’ll be plenty more to come’.”

He was right. They had to wait just five days for their next win, a three-point defeat of third-placed West Torrens at Thebarton. South ultimately hauled itself off the bottom, winning six games that year.

The Panthers played finals the following season, toppling Norwood again in the elimination final. And they were minor premiers in 1991 but failed in both finals against North and West.

Reid’s six years as coach of the Panthers remain dear to his heart – even more so than being an intrinsic cog of Adelaide’s dual AFL premierships.

“I still think my biggest achievement was taking South from near extinction to playing in finals and keeping the club alive,” Reid said. “I look back on it with great pride to be honest, it was a mammoth task and we got out of it.”

SOUTH             5.3   10.4   15.6     17.8       (110)

NORWOOD    4.3   8.7    11.11    13.14     (92)

BEST – South: Bickley, Tatterson, Trevena, Gatti, Dillon, Whitford, Dewhirst.

Norwood: Aish, Thomas, Ducker, Maynard, Ross.

SCORERS – South: Gatti 4.0, Schmid 3.3, Winton 3.1, Woodlands, Tatterson 2.0, Mitton, Valente, McIntyre 1.0, Bickley 0.2, rushed 0.2.

Norwood: Ducker 6.6, van der Meer 2.1, Pyke 2.0, Tanner, Robran 1.1, Maynard 1.0, Richardson, Staritski, Helyar 0.1, rushed 0.2.

UMPIRES – David Elliott, Neville Thorp

CROWD – 17,834 at Football Park as part of double-header.