1978 And All That: Sturt-Norwood Row Still Grinds My Gears

Forty-eight years, and grown men in Adelaide are still going red in the face about a free kick that may or may not have been a mark. I love it. I absolutely love it, and I reckon it says more about what’s gone missing from the modern game than any rule change document head office has ever put out.

For those of you who missed it because you were busy elsewhere – fair enough, it’s a South Australian story and Victorians have always been a bit parochial about looking north or east of the border – Sturt and Norwood have been arguing about a contentious call from the 1978 SANFL finals series for the best part of five decades. A mark that maybe wasn’t a mark, or a free kick that maybe should never have been paid, depending on which clubland you grew up drinking in. It helped send Norwood on to the flag. Sturt folk have never quite let it go. And now, with the eastern suburbs rivals apparently squaring off again this finals series, the whole thing has been dragged back out into the light like an old jumper nobody can bear to throw out.

Back In My Day, A Contentious Decision Actually Meant Something

I’ll admit up front I’m a Victorian through and through, a Carlton man to my bootlaces, and I’ve spent more Saturday arvos at Princes Park – sorry, Ikon Park, or whatever they’re calling it this decade – than I have anywhere near West Adelaide Oval. But you don’t need to have grown up barracking for the Double Blues, or the Redlegs, or the Double Blues of Sturt for that matter (funny how many clubs pinched our colours), to appreciate what a decision like that does to a footy community.

Back in my day – and I know, I know, here he goes again – a controversial umpiring call from a grand final didn’t get resolved with a press release and a quiet apology buried on page nine. It got argued about at the pub. It got argued about at the football club function room, over meat trays and warm beer, by blokes who were there and reckoned they saw it clean, and other blokes who were there and reckoned the whole thing was a disgrace. It became folklore. It became identity. And forty-eight years later, apparently, it still is exactly that in Adelaide, which tells you the sport still has some soul left in it even if the AFL executive floor in Docklands would have you think everything worth knowing about footy history started with the interchange bench and the six-six-six.

The Modern Game Would Never Let This Breathe

Here’s my grumble, and you knew one was coming. If that same disputed mark-or-free happened in an AFL final today, it would be reviewed, re-reviewed, sent upstairs, sent to some bunker in Melbourne with a bank of screens, and adjudicated on within about ninety seconds by a fella who’s never kicked a footy in anger in his life but has done a very thorough online course on interpreting hand contact. The controversy would be settled before the siren even went. No stewing. No forty-eight years of blokes at the bowls club arguing the toss. Just a ruling, a graphic on the broadcast, and everyone moves on with their lives feeling slightly cheated of the argument itself.

And I reckon that’s the real loss here, more than whatever happened out on the SANFL turf in ’78. We’ve engineered the doubt out of the game. Every contentious call now gets forensically dissected with sixteen camera angles and a slow-motion replay that makes it look like the players are moving through treacle, and instead of settling debates it somehow just gives everyone new things to be furious about on talkback radio. At least in the old days a contentious decision stayed contentious. It had to be lived with. It became part of a club’s story rather than a three-minute segment on a Thursday night review show that nobody remembers by the following week.

Umpires Then And Now – Same Job, Very Different Scrutiny

I want to be fair to the men in the middle here, because I know how this column can read sometimes and I’m not about to have a go at any umpire personally, past or present. The bloke who paid that call in 1978, whoever he was, made a genuine split-second decision in real time with no video review, no runner in his ear, no coach’s box on the phone to the box upstairs. He got it wrong or he got it right – honestly nobody will ever know for certain, and that not-knowing is sort of the whole point – but he made the call the way umpires have always had to make calls, which is instantly, under pressure, with sixteen blokes bearing down on him and forty thousand people ready to let him have it either way.

Compare that to today, where a marginal high-contact decision in a final can get looked at for the better part of five minutes by three separate officials while eighty thousand people at the ground stand around getting cold pies. I’m not saying the 1978 method was better in terms of accuracy – it almost certainly wasn’t – but there was something honest about it. A bloke made a call, the crowd reacted, the result stood, and everyone had to find a way to cop it on the chin or nurse the grudge forever. These days we’ve built a whole industry around relitigating decisions to death and somehow still not everyone’s happy at the end of it.

Why Sturt And Norwood Setting The Record Straight Matters

So good on the two clubs for apparently having a crack at putting this one to bed as their sides prepare to face off again. There’s something lovely about two proud old suburban clubs deciding, of their own accord and without a tribunal or a AFL panel forcing their hand, to sit down together and finally work through what actually happened that day. That’s clubland doing what clubland does best – looking after its own history rather than waiting for some corporate body to hand down a verdict from on high.

Whether it was a free kick, a mark, or – and I reckon this is more likely than anyone wants to admit forty-eight years on – a genuinely fifty-fifty call that could have gone either way and just happened to go Norwood’s way on the biggest stage, doesn’t really matter anymore in terms of the flag. That’s not being rewritten. What matters is that footy people still care enough about it to bother arguing, and in an era when every contentious moment gets homoginised into a graphic and forgotten by Monday, that’s worth applauding.

The Real Point I’m Grumbling Towards

Give me the old stuff every time – the long-running grudges, the pub arguments that never quite get resolved, the finals controversies that outlive the players who were even out on the ground that day. That’s footy history with some grit in it, not a highlights package with a neat bow on top. Sturt and Norwood can sort out their 1978 business between themselves, and fair play to them for trying after all these years. Just don’t expect me to get excited about whatever technology the AFL rolls out next to make sure nobody ever gets to argue about anything ever again.