As if the deaths of former Port Adelaide player John McCarthy, former Melbourne coach Dean Bailey and cricketer Phillip Hughes in the last three years hadn’t already rocked the South Australia sporting landscape, then the shock death of Adelaide Crows coach Phil Walsh will no doubt have hit the hardest.
55-year-old Walsh was found murdered in his Somerton Park home at 2:00am on Friday morning following a domestic violence dispute, and his 26-year-old son Cy has been charged by South Australian police with murder.
His death has come as a shock given he is highly respected within the entire AFL community, in particular at Collingwood, Richmond and the Brisbane Bears, the three clubs with whom he spent his playing career, and at Port Adelaide and West Coast, the two clubs where he served as an assistant coach.
However, it was the Adelaide Crows that gave him the opportunity to coach in his own right, and he took it with both hands, coming on board at the end of the 2014 season following the sacking of Brenton Sanderson.
The Crows appeared to have improved under Walsh’s coaching following two years of underachieving under Sanderson, winning their first three games to be sitting on top of the ladder after as many rounds, before slowly descending into their current placing of seventh with a 7-5 win-loss record.
Their last outing before these tragic turn of events saw the club come from behind to beat the Brisbane Lions by 13 points at the Gabba. Slow starts to matches had proven to be the catalyst for some of their losses this season.
The game between the Crows and Geelong Cats has been cancelled, with the AFL declaring the game a draw with the two clubs to share two premiership points each. It is the first time in modern AFL history that a game has had to be cancelled due to such an unprecedented tragedy.
After the dust settles on what has been a day of tragedy for the Crows, their focus will then shift to their Round 15 away match against the West Coast Eagles, before which they must go through the process of appointing a caretaker coach to lead them through until at least the end of the season.
Their next home game will be against the Gold Coast Suns on July 25, but not before an away Showdown against Port Adelaide six days earlier. You’d think that their next two matches will have an emotional feeling attached to it, given how respected Walsh was by both the Eagles and Power.
For the Cats, it will mean a second consecutive week of not playing, Chris Scott’s men having enjoyed their bye last week. Thus, by the time they play North Melbourne at Etihad Stadium next Saturday night, it will have been 20 days since their last match, a 24-point loss to Melbourne at Simonds Stadium in Round 12.
The remainder of the round will go ahead, despite a call from former Port Adelaide captain Warren Tredrea for it to be postponed. The Sydney Swans and Power had already started the round, with the Swans winning by ten points at the SCG on Thursday night.
It would have been difficult already to cancel the remainder of the round, given the challenges the AFL would have faced in rescheduling matches and ensuring that the rest of the season would not clash with any other sporting codes including the NRL and the upcoming Rugby Championship.
The Power were in Sydney preparing to fly home when they learned of their former assistant coach’s death. CEO Keith Thomas has paid tribute to Walsh and alluded to the 2012 death of one of their own, player John McCarthy, in his address.
It had been almost three years since McCarthy’s equally tragic passing, after he fell to his death during a post-season holiday to Las Vegas. That in itself was a huge shock given how popular he was to the Port Adelaide Football Club, whom he joined in 2012 after four years at Collingwood.
Eighteen months later, the AFL world was then rocked by the passing of former Melbourne coach Dean Bailey, who was serving as an assistant coach at the Adelaide Crows after leaving the Demons close to the end of the 2011 season.
Bailey had been diagnosed with lung cancer and was a popular figure at both the Crows and Demons, and had only returned to work after serving a 16-round suspension for his role in the latter club’s tanking scandal.
And who could forget Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes, whose passing last November shocked the nation as he too was also a popular figure not only in the cricketing world, but also all around Australia.
Just like the deaths I have already mentioned, the tragic passing of Phil Walsh has shocked not just the AFL world, but also Australian sport in general, but it was the manner in which it happened that has stunned everyone.
I was fortunate enough to meet him at a game between the GWS Giants and Adelaide Crows at Spotless Stadium just six weeks ago. He was very humble and I held my utmost respect for him, as I do for any other AFL identities that I meet. I wished him and the club good luck for that match, which they lost by 24 points.
In the end, he will be remembered for being a man of great integrity whose long AFL coaching career dating back to his days as a Geelong Cats trainer has been cut tragically short in the most unbelievable and unthinkable of circumstances.
In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how the Adelaide Crows cope with the sudden death of their senior coach; it will also be interesting to see how they respond on the field when they take on the West Coast Eagles at Domain Stadium next Saturday night in what is expected to be an emotional clash as he was well respected by both the Crows and Eagles.
R.I.P Phil Walsh. Gone but never forgotten.
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