Chapman sounds like the worst type of person to be involved with a living, breathing football club.



We scoffed at the likes of Trigg and the complete lack of accountability for every sideways and backward decision he made during his marathon tenure - and he deserved it because he's a patronising campaigner whose career record in no way justifies his smarmy FIGJAM attitude - but Chapman is something else entirely.



Glenn Archer previously described his type as 'linament sniffers', well-heeled white collar types who work their way into the inner sanctum of football clubs to rub shoulders with players and coaches with absolutely no idea as to how the joint works or what the parameters are for success.



When the videos of the 19th Man chants night and the subsequent remaster of the club song came out - something more in keeping with an off-broadway production of the Lion King - it fuelled long-held suspicions that the Adelaide Football Club has no idea what it's raison d'être is. It's not there to produce cheesy diversity advertisements that are more in keeping with corporate America (woman having a blast? check! grandfatherly old man looking pleased? check! passionate child? check! non-threatening southeast asian of indeterminable origin? check!), it's there to win games of Australian Rules Football. But you wouldn't know.



The rest of the state has long scoffed at our heritage and associated marketing. The Creed, the prisonbar, "we are Port Adelaide", "never tear us apart", but you know what? We know who we are. And we know what we want, and we know what we represent. Our football club, which launched itself from its base on the corner of Queen Street & Brougham Place to the national stage by playing tough, uncompromising, winning football, exists to make its members and supporters proud and its rivals and haters losers. That's it.



We don't exist to serve as fluffers to the SANFL and its parasitic member clubs. We don't exist as some sort of quasi-pantomime for the entire state to get behind by default, with a phalanx of pliable ambassadors in the media dutifully pushing our barrow (careful, Penbo).



We exist to win premierships. You're either with us or against us.



And after a horrendous flirtation with the Crows' generic "all things to all people" model we decided to ignore all clayton's advice to the contrary and unashamedly emphasise who we are, tore away from the cesspool at West Lakes and the dormant Port Adelaide base came back in droves. Haysman, Duncanson, Koch, Thomas and a host of others behind the scenes made that happen with a single-minded determination not seen in South Australian football since Bruce Weber pulled the trigger in 1990.



Boat-shoed spivs like Chapman? When you allow yourself to be bewildered by and can't outmanoeuvre the likes of Stephen Rowe when pressed on football operations matters, it's obvious you need to GTFO and back to the world of banking where you belong. For too long he and Trigg have been allowed to personify the vanilla mediocrity that used to drip off the likes of North, Glenelg and WWT when one of them would emerge to challenge us in the late eighties and nineties as it became increasingly obvious we'd outgrown the SANFL.



They inhabit a realm padded with corporate jibberish further emphasising their complete detachment from reality. Supporters and members - the lifeblood of any club - are 'customers' and 'agitators'. Poxy kiddified rebrands unapologetically foisted upon them because a cartoon bird head assumedly tested well at Mitchell Park kindergarten.



And yet all the while everyone, from the CEO down to Dimity of Christies Beach, deludes themselves into believing they're this sleeping juggernaut that slays its enemies while rivalling a Jennifer Hawkins-Ariana Grande scissor session for appearing superattractive to anyone from the outside.



I guess that's why they beat us at football nearly half the time.



Rob Chapman? 4 more years!