Adelaide folk are still bitter and now want "Best of 3 Grand Finals"
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Erin Phillips has a creative idea to resolve questions about Victorian teams getting an advantage on Grand Final day. But it hasn’t gone down well with fans.
Phillips was a guest host on Triple M Adelaide’s Dead Set Legends on Saturday morning when callers were debating the fact the past five Grand Finals had been won by Victorian teams against an interstate opponent.
Since Sydney downed Hawthorn by 10 points in 2012, Fremantle, the Swans, West Coast, the Swans again and Adelaide have fallen short on Grand Final day.
All those matches were played at the MCG even though the past three seasons the “visiting” team finished higher on the ladder than its Grand Final opponent after the home-and-away season.
AFL boss Gillon McLachlan said this week he had no issue with the decider being played at the ’G every year, adding the league has a contact with the MCG for the next 20 years. But Phillips threw up a compromise of sorts more familiar to fans of her other sport, basketball — a best-of-three Grand Final that could be shared between the home states of both competing teams.
“Obviously, the Crows finished top, they get the first home game,” she said.
“Second one goes to the MCG and then game three gets decided back at Adelaide Oval. Why not?”
The idea had some supporters but they were vastly outnumbered on social media.
One Facebook user Gazza Barber called it “absolute rubbish trash talk”, Steve Fisk said the suggestion was “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard” and Jay Holor described it as a “rubbish idea that benefits no one”.
Objections included the cost of tickets for fans who wanted to go to three Grand Finals, the toll on players of travel and extra games, allegations of sour grapes from Adelaide and the fact Brisbane, Port Adelaide, Sydney, West Coast and the Crows — in 1997 and 1998 — had all won Grand Finals at the MCG.
The best analysis of this year’s Grand Final may have come from Crows fan Jack Mackay: “Maybe if Erin led us instead of Tex we coulda won.”
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