The AFL has today issued a statement declaring that reports of 38,340 South Australians attending a game of non-AFL football at Adelaide Oval yesterday are fake news.
“It wasn’t AFL, and there’s no such sport as SANFL, so I don’t see what they could possibly have been playing,” said AFL CEO Andrew Dillon, speaking from league headquarters in Docklands, Melbourne.
“This kind of thing isn’t unusual for South Australia. They’ve previously tried to claim that people were playing something called football in that state before 1858, which we know is impossible, because the great sport of AFL was invented in Melbourne in 1858. To the best of my knowledge, Adelaide didn’t even exist until the late 1870s.”
Adelaide was founded in 1836. The SANFL was founded in 1877, twenty years before the VFL, and 113 years before the VFL changed its name to the AFL.
Dillon said the crowd figure was the giveaway. “Our average this season is 38,553. You’re asking me to believe a competition that doesn’t exist got within 213 people of the national competition? On a Sunday? Without a single team from Melbourne? Who would they even have been there to watch?”
The statement was released roughly thirteen hours after the AFL’s own website, afl.com.au, published a full match report detailing Norwood’s 14-point win over Sturt, the Redlegs’ 32nd premiership, in front of what it called “a bumper crowd of 38,340”.
Asked about the report, Dillon said the site had clearly been hacked, “probably by someone in Adelaide, if it exists.”
He was equally unmoved by claims Norwood kicked 5.3 to a single behind in the final quarter, four of those goals coming from Tristan Binder. “Four goals in the last quarter of a grand final, and I’ve never heard of him? If a bloke had done that, he’d have been drafted by now and be two years into requesting a trade to a Victorian club.”
“The only football the AFL recognises in South Australia is Gather Round, which the South Australian government pays us to hold.”
The AFL confirmed the only grand final this year will be played on Saturday between Fremantle and Brisbane, two non-Victorian clubs, in Melbourne, where it will be held every year until 2059 regardless of who is in it.
Norwood supporter Kym Beulah-Road, 54, of Kensington, said he was fairly confident yesterday’s match took place, citing a ticket stub, a sunburn and a premiership pin.
He did concede the AFL one point. “They’re right that it wasn’t AFL,” he said. “That’s why we went.”
