Former Adelaide Crows captain Mark Ricciuto has opened up about the infamous brawl between Crows and Power players at the Ramsgate Hotel back in 2002.
Ricciuto was on the Saturday Rub yesterday on Triple M and spoke of some details about the night, setting the scene for the brawl that was to follow.
“It was the day after (the round 5 2002 Showdown) actually, and Port had had the edge on us for a while, and we went down to Henley Square, which is quite a good area of Adelaide to celebrate Simon Goodwin’s 100th game,” Roo said.
“We’d lost another one (Showdown) and they were getting on top of us a little bit… it was a bit of a long Sunday afternoon.
“We were down at a restaurant and they’d run out of booze, so we sent one of the blokes Benny Nelson over to the Ramsgate bottleshop to get a few more bottles of wine.
“He came back and said ‘the Port boys are over at the Ramsgate!’ and someone said ‘we better go over there.”
“I said ‘if we go over there, make sure we don’t back out’.”
“We went over there and we were half done by that stage, obviously weren’t thinking straight.
“One thing led to another and next thing instead of 300 people being inside the Ramsgate, there were 300 people outside the Ramsgate and there’d been a bit of shenanigans go on.”
Ricciuto said not everyone that followed him to the Hotel was involved, but most players knew exactly what they were in for.
“There was reports of someone hiding under a table, there was reports of someone hiding in the rose garden across the road,” Ricciuto said.
“But as you know when you do get in a blue you’re not too worried about what else is going on, you’re concentrating on the job at hand.”
Along with the Brownlow Medallist the other main player in the fiasco was Port Adelaide's Josh Carr, but Ricciuto said there's no bad blood between the pair.
“Honestly in the end, on the night and at the time it was fairly full on but looking back it was a bit of a fun,” Roo said.
“I’ve had a few chats to Carry since and we didn’t speak for probably a year or two afterwards, but when you’ve finished up and look back on it it’s a bit of fun.
“You probably don’t see it happening too much these days, things have changed a bit.”
Ricciuto also recalled a hilarious phone call the club received in the days following the incident.
“One of the funniest things was we had a supporter ring up the club on the Monday or Tuesday after the blue," Ricciuto said.
"They said ‘look I don’t care that the captains leading the players astray, I don’t care that we’ve lost the Showdown, but I’ve got a bloody Mercedes with a dent in the bonnet and all I want is it to be fixed!”
