The most shocking story in league football since Norm Smith’s sacking in 1965.

It was by chance that I was over in Melbourne for a week with the family on a cultural holiday, looking forward to the Collingwood-Hawthorn game that night, and come the Friday morning, we turn on the TV in the hotel and flashing across the screen is the most unbelievable piece of footballing news we’ll ever see… the head coach of an AFL club had been murdered, by his own son, in his own home.

As a sign of how unbelievable it was, I still have the copy of the special edition Herald Sun that was rushed out that afternoon… even a guy standing next to me at Flinders Street Station had to ask if it was true:

Of course, it also led to the historic precedent of the Adelaide-Geelong game that Sunday becoming the first league game in VFL/AFL history to ever be cancelled outright without being replayed/rescheduled, with both clubs splitting the 4 points.

As for the game that Friday night, I went with my dad and it was just about the eeriest game I’ve ever been to, because everyone had to watch with the reality of a coach having just been murdered, and there was also the added historic part to the game that Walsh had debuted for Collingwood in 1983, before he was traded to Richmond in the midst of the club’s trade wars that nearly sent Richmond into extinction, and was later the Brisbane Bears’ inaugural best & fairest in 1987.

There was also another serious story not even 24 hours earlier at Hawthorn… Jarryd Roughead, not even 5 days after he’d been best afield in Round 13, had a melanoma removed from his lip, which very quickly took a backseat to the events of Friday morning.

As for the game, it was a fairly tense (I.E not as fierce as it could’ve been given the circumstances) and ultimately close game that Hawthorn won by 10 points, thanks in part to Collingwood’s poor goalkicking (Travis Cloke up forward had 20 disposals, 11 marks but ultimately kicked 1.4), combined with 5 goals straight from Cyril Rioli and a late goal to Luke Breust, and of course after Walsh’s death the AFL had made the decision not to play the winning team’s song at the final siren, which nobody had realised until that moment…

So after a few minutes of confusion in the crowd, all the players and coaches went out to the centre circle and held a joint huddle as a show of respect, which got a great round of applause and became the norm for all the remaining games that weekend.

Then the next week, the Crows somehow found the courage and strength to actually get up and play West Coast in Perth, which ultimately did end in a heavy defeat, but saw the most moving post-game scenes since Fitzroy’s last game in 1996, ironically also at Subiaco:

But a week after that, in a Showdown that served a tribute to Walsh for his services to Adelaide and Port Adelaide, the Crows won by 3 points, in the greatest Showdown ever played.

10 years on there is still that thought about what became of the Adelaide Crows in the next couple of years after 2015.

Would the 2017 Crows, who won the minor premiership and were beaten Grand Finalists, have been as successful as they were with Walsh as coach instead of Don Pyke, considering Patrick Dangerfield was always going to leave for Geelong at the end of 2015…

And would the post-2017 Crows have been as unsuccessful as they were with Walsh leading the way, given the Collective Minds camp most likely wouldn’t have happened, followed by various unsuccessful trades and Tex Walker’s racism incident, which among other things led to the Crows going 7 consecutive seasons without a finals appearance, a streak that may come to an end this year.