Adelaide is great

Image :trends24

If the Adelaide Football Club motto is : Born to great things (Natus ad magna geranda) then it has been rising above the horribly complex and definitive loss of Phil Walsh and is taking our state and the AFL with it. Scott Camporeale has been trending for a couple of hours on Twitter because he is the new interim coach for the club and he is going to honour Phil Walsh's vision  and try to move through the emotion of the  situation that way. This follows on from what was, to all accounts - all accounts - a very moving and meaningful gesture yesterday from the March of Silence to the ceremony at the Adelaide Oval. Those who were there were deeply moved by it. The family has expressed thanks for such an obvious and huge support for their situation and everyone and anyone to do with football in this country has been picking up the lead of this club and uniting themselves for the family, for the game and for everything Phil Walsh represented. Football. He loved it. He gave his life to it. It meant everything to him that he could share his passion and enthusiam for the game. You do not have to know Phil Walsh or like football to know that Phil Walsh was an inspiration as a coach because he lived for the game and the good it could bring. His club has come together to support Meredith and Quinn Walsh so that they can see their awful situation is not beyond hope or care. The leadership displayed in how this is now unfolding is worth noting. It is a solid uniting of football fans and players which then has reached out to the rest of the community and allowed us to blur the pain a bit. We know it's a horrendous situation. We know it must be unbearable. We know that Meredith and Quinn Walsh must be feeling so black and numb. We cannot even guess really how they might be feeling. The Adelaide Football Club is living up to its motto because this is a gargantuan challenge to keep the spirit of someone like Phil Walsh burning strongly and brightly. This is not canonising him or making him more than a man. It's redressing the imbalance of fate and providing an undeniable blanket of solidarity around Meredith and Quinn who have some tough times to work through. 

Phil Walsh

Image : Adelaide Football Club

Adelaide is sad. You could feel it yesterday and then you could hear it. Everyone was affected by it and moved. Not just the football community , all of us. We could all see it was a painful, dreadful circumstance for a family to find itself in and the fact that it was a high profile family meant we were all connecting on a very real level about the way in which a happy family can go very wrong. We were talking about it because it had a profound impact. The saddness of it. The finality of it. The awful compexity of it. Phil Walsh was a very well respected and well loved coach and you knew it whether you followed football or not. This was someone who had given his life to the success and building of a sport which everyone loves. In Adelaide there is good rivalry between the Port and Crows supporters. It is the basis of so much fun and so many jokes. Yesterday, it wasn't about that at all.  It was about kinship. Football has lost someone who had strengthened and grown the sport but he had lost his life as a father. A man. The obvious family impact and emotion of it was clear. The club will rally around the family because the club motto is Born to Great Things. Nothing greater than taking this situation into your heart and working a way through it. I feel so so concerned for Phil Walsh's wife , Meredith, and his daughter , Quinn. What has happened to them as human beings is an impossibly tough call and they are having to work their way through the pain and complexity of it. This is a human story and the resolution, as such, will be a playing out of the club motto. The two women need to be cossetted and protected for the time being and will need all the love and help we can muster. In the end it will make us have a really serious conversation about family violence which is going to be painful and difficult but it is one we need to have. The football community will make us honest in fronting up to this. In the meantime, Adelaide cares and Adelaide is sad. Very sad.