Eerie silence and hot chip wars as Adelaide Oval swings back into action

In his 35 years as a passionate Port Adelaide fan, Brad Chilcott has witnessed some remarkable feats at the Adelaide Oval, but nothing quite like what he saw transpire on Saturday (June 13). And it didn’t happen on the Oval outfield where his beloved Aussie rules football club handed local rivals Adelaide Crows their worst defeat ever on their shared home-ground. Instead, it took place in the western stand, where he sat three seats and two rows apart from the 699 others who occupied that section of the Oval for Showdown 48, the AFL local derby. The deed itself: a Port fan flinging a hot chip at a Crows fan seated 15 rows below him and “clocking him on the head” with it.

According to Chilcott, the rival supporter had it coming. He’d spent minutes leading up to the chip attack hurling abuse at the Port players. And his reaction was to turn around with a stern gaze before getting back to feeling upset with his own team’s performance. For Chilcott, the unprecedented incident summed up an unprecedented night where a live crowd watched live sport inside an Australian stadium for the first time in three months. In an ideal scenario after all, with a packed house, the Port fan would never have managed to hear what his counterpart was screaming. Neither would he, despite his evidently good arm, have had a clear shot at the Crows supporter like he did with only 2240 “fans” allowed to attend the Showdown.

It was an incident that gave some insight into what the cricket experience might offer in a post-lockdown COVID world.

“One thing different here was that the banter between spectators was much more amplified. You could hear everyone in your section, including someone abusing your favourite player right down the front. So, there was a lot of yelling back and forth between Port and Crows,” Chilcott, the founder of Welcoming Australia which works towards promoting multiculturalism and social cohesion, tells Fame Dubai.

Though the Crows fans might not agree, the eventual outcome of the Showdown was a success. For the prospect of crowds returning for good to sporting venues around Australia anyway. The number is only expected to go up owing to the “respectful” Showdown crowd who according to the South Australian government officials followed all protocols to the hilt. And with six months still to go for the scheduled first-ever Australia v India pink-ball Test, it looks very likely that a sizable crowd might end up yelling back and forth with Virat Kohli & Co at the Adelaide Oval come December.

In less than two weeks will come the second stage of the crowd experiment in Adelaide when close to 5000 fans will be allowed for the start of the SANFL (South Australian National Football League) season. There’s also been talk from Prime Minister Scott Morrison about letting close to 10,000 fans into venues with limited seating as early as next month. And Chilcott, who tries to get in two days of the annual Test every year, is confident of being there to see the much-awaited slugfest go ahead.

International cricket is set to make its own return in less than a month’s time when the West Indies, currently quarantining in Manchester, take on England in the first-ever bio-secure Test series in history. There’ll be no crowds in Southampton or Manchester though unlike here. And the sound of bat on ball will be the only factor contributing to the ambience.

“A country cricket match with a few parents yelling at their kids,” is what the Showdown with a handful of spectators around felt like for Barb and Andrew Staniford. The couple were among the additional 240 guests allowed in the corporate suites at the Adelaide Oval on Saturday. Though originally Crows fans, they were there like they have been for the last 10 years representing one of the lead sponsors of Port Adelaide. And their “weird” experience commenced from the time they hailed a cab to get to the venue a bit earlier than the rest.

“Generally, there are a lot of roadblocks. You’ll find a portion of King William Road being blocked and the War Memorial Drive completely barricaded. But this time, there was none of that. We actually got dropped off comfortably right outside the Oval and walked in without a hassle,” reveals Barb.

It is expected that by the end of the year there will be a lot more people, in the thousands even, lining up outside the Members Entrance at the River End. And so too the road blockades that Mrs Staniford didn’t encounter last weekend.

She adds that once they were in their suite, the alcohol and other refreshments had to be self-served while only around 15 people occupied a room that generally sees up to 40-50 guests. They were also asked to stay indoors and not venture out to the balcony while at one point the staff also shut the glass windows. The Stanifords’ evening started with a customary meal, where again they had to maintain social-distancing. That is before they received a surprise visitor, Professor Nicola Spurrier, SA’s chief public health officer, and the woman who has led the state’s battle against the virus.

“She just walked in as part of the checks she was conducting around the stadium. Some of the people in the room started cheering for her and telling her what a good job she’s been doing. She looked a little shy then and then just said ‘may the best team win’ and left,” Barb says.

“There were 22,000 members who decided to continue paying their fees and only 1475 tickets up for grabs. I happened to be one of the lucky ones.” ©Fame Dubai

The Oval itself before the players ran out carried an eerie feel, she adds, despite the presence of the smattering of people in the stands. There was an explosion of noise, however, when the Port Adelaide players ran on to the field in their legendary yet contentious prison-bar guernseys in what is the 150th anniversary of the club. Chilcott, donning his Port Adelaide ‘Power’ scarf, was among those creating a din around the Oval. He had come to the stadium by himself, having left his son to “hang out” with the puppy they’d bought earlier in the day. The western stand, he reveals, were mainly individuals like him who’d come there by themselves and the lack of “mates in groups” meant there wasn’t the kind of buzz you’d generally expect at such a high-profile event.

The ability to “identify individual voices” in the crowd though was just one of the many unique experiences on Saturday for Chilcott, who’s been a Port supporter since the age of 7. It started with how he even managed to procure a ticket for the big game. Chilcott and his family had been gifted club memberships on his 40th birthday. He decided to renew it this year despite the potential threat of the pandemic completely wiping out the football season. And when South Australian police commissioner Grant Stevens announced last week that the Adelaide Oval will be the first to experiment with permitting a sparse crowd for AFL matches, Chilcott decided to put his membership number in the ballot organised by his club for tickets.

“There were 22,000 members who decided to continue paying their fees and only 1475 tickets up for grabs. I happened to be one of the lucky ones,” he says.

The Crows, for the record, were limited to only 475 tickets as this was deemed as a “home” game for Port in a curtailed AFL season which has been reduced to 17 rounds from the original 23 owing to the Covid-19 outbreak. And for good measure, considering the rather hapless show their team put on during their 75-point loss.

“Funnily, people spoke more with each other than they would when there’s a packed crowd. But as I walked around to my allocated seat after entering through the North Gate, I could sense the lack of buzz, the strangeness of the dispersed crowd,” says Chilcott.

Chilcott and the other members had received an email from the club with some specific instructions, which included “carrying your membership card” and “downloading the Covid Safe government app”. He reveals though that his phone wasn’t scanned and there weren’t any excessively stringent security protocols in place.

“The only time I was actually asked to sanitise my hands was when I went to the Kiosk to get some food and drinks. And they were being strict on social distancing in the lines at the Kiosk too,” he adds. For the Stanifords’, the only aspect that stood out in terms of health policing was how only one person was allowed to be on the escalator at any given time with a security staff actually standing guard at the top of the steps.

The NRL and the AFL have been trying to enhance the atmosphere around their games by adding ambient crowd noises to their coverage. And there was talk of the real crowd noise at the Oval being amplified further by placing microphones at strategic locations. Chilcott doesn’t recall seeing any near where he was sat but did have some of his friends watching on TV wondering how the 2000-odd could have generated such a racket, even if the ratio of Port fans to Crows fans was somewhat similar to the final scoreline.

“Once the game started, the crowd was actually louder than I expected them to be. But on the flip side, there were also periods of dead silence, which you never see in a full stadium. The loudest was at the start and also at the end when they played the team song,” he explains.

There has been a sense of irony on the field ever since the AFL has restarted with regards to how the players aren’t wary of grabbing and jumping over their opponents in an attempt to secure the sherrin (the footy ball) but make sure that they celebrate goals only with elbow bumps. And Chilcott admits that it wasn’t easy for the Port fans to express their unbridled joy at the result as they would normally with hugs and high-fives to anyone else in Power colours. For good measure, he did make his way later to the bar in the city, where Port fans generally meet-up following a home game, and he jokes about how there were “hugs and high-fives” with nobody watching. It was a fitting end to a night where normalcy, even if only a tinge, returned to the Adelaide Oval and sport around Australia. As Chilcott puts it, “Just being in a public venue with a number of people felt like such a foreign concept. So even though it was a sparse crowd, it felt good to do something normal.”