THE way some people are carrying on you would think the State of Origin guernsey is the sporting equivalent of the Shroud of Turin, a holy object which must be held up as sacrosanct and left unsullied forever more.

The Crows have done us all a favour by trying to resuscitate this jumper,which has been gathering dust in a cupboard somewhere, unused, for the past 15 years, and breathing new life into it. There was absolutely no sign on the horizon that this jumper would be worn again.

Maybe now the Crows' plan has been scuttled, it never will.

In Round Two it would have been on display. There is a fair chance that South Australians would have spent the next 42 days discussing little else.

The Crows have done this in a deliberately provocative way, and a way which is great for football.

More: Read our original story about the Crows' decision to wear the state jersey

It underscores the intensity of the rivalry between the Crows and the Power, and sets up the debut showdown at the new Adelaide Oval as one of the greatest grudge matches of all time.

Let's look at the criticisms of what the Crows have done.

The first is that they have got no right to use a state jumper as they are not a state club.

media_camera Come on - it's just a guernsey. Crows mid-fielder Scott Thompson with the new jersey for the Showdnow.

Sorry, but the Crows were formed as a state club and are overwhelmingly regarded as a state club.

The back-to-back flags in 97-98 were a galvanising state event, which brought almost everyone across the state together in an outpouring of pride, save for a few sad-sacks down Alberton way and those SANFL purists who rejected the idea of a national comp.

If you would be happier sitting in the rain watching a South-Westies clash, filling in the score in your Budget with an old pencil, good luck to you. But for most of us the arrival of the Crows 23 years ago was the moment footy got truly awesome, and 1997 the moment it went beyond awesome.

Rucci's view: It's a mark of disrespect

Whether Port fans like it or not, the Crows are the club which a big majority of South Australians call their own. They entered the comp in 1991 wearing the red, blue and yellow of our origin jumper, in a move which no one regarded as controversial at the time.

They are the club which billed itself from its inception as "the team for all South Australians". Port resisted their entry and then tried to sneak in through the back door.

The other criticism of the Crows is that the use of the jumper is somehow divisive, and draws an unpleasant line between Adelaide and Port Adelaide. Excuse me?

If you think it's the role of football to bring people from opposite clubs together so they can hold hands, sing Kum By Yah, and declare that it doesn't matter whether you win or lose but how you play the game, then you know nothing about football and have clearly never attended a showdown.

The rivalry between our two SA clubs is intense, for all sorts of reasons, and this stink over the jumper is merely the latest chapter in that rivalry.

The third argument being bandied about is that a Victorian club such as Collingwood or Melbourne would never wear the Big V jumper. Of course they wouldn't. Those clubs were created to represent their suburban communities within Melbourne. The Crows were created from every South Australian club to represent their state.

I am not one of those Crows fans who dislikes Port. Last year they were a much more exciting club to watch than mine, and they have got the wood on us in the Showdowns, as last year's consecutive chokes by the Crows demonstrated.

I've got nothing but respect for Port's tradition, their history in the SANFL of physicality and unstoppable self-belief. But I never thought that they'd sound like whingers, and they sound like whingers now.

Surely the Port way is to let the scoreboard do the talking. In all honesty my only worry about the jumper drama was that we might have fired them up so much that we'd get smashed in round two, and that the jumper we would have cheekily made our own would be sullied not by a terrific marketing stunt, but another Crows Showdown defeat.