A broken jaw for Kurt Tippett means he will not be able to take the field for Sydney's semifinal against Adelaide at the SCG on Saturday. It also means that for once the Crows will be facing a highly rated opponent without having to contend with a player once counted among their number.
Alongside Tippett, Patrick Dangerfield (Geelong), Jack Gunston (Hawthorn) and Phil Davis (Greater Western Sydney) were all Adelaide draftees, learning their trade in the AFL and showing enormous promise before choosing to leave the West Lakes nest that had nurtured them. Had that quartet remained in Adelaide, the Crows' first 22 would be the envy of the league, but as it is they haunt the club like the ghost of Christmas past, come to visit Ebenezer Scrooge.
As with Scrooge's Yuletide introspection, their departures led to questions about how the Crows functioned, and about Adelaide as a place. While interstate recruits invariably discuss the "go home" factor with potential clubs at draft screening and in their early days after arrival, Adelaide seemed more affected than most.
This had a history going back numerous years before the Dangerfield generation. The likes of Kane Johnson, Chris Knights, Jonathon Griffin and Nathan Bock all fled the Crows when presented by opportunities either for a home posting or a rich contract to set them up for life after football. Bock's departure to the Gold Coast was compounded when Davis, the man groomed to replace him, elected to accept the entreaties of GWS.
Plenty of contention surrounded Gunston's desire to return to Melbourne right at the moment he looked to be maturing into a forward of considerable skill, and the Hawks have read the benefits of Adelaide's earlier nurturing work. Hawthorn supporters have taken to singing "You wish you had Jack Gunston" to the tune of We Wish You A Merry Christmas: nary a Crows supporter or administrator can fail to wince at that one. In the same year Gunston left, the re-signing of the unassuming wingman David MacKay was looked upon as something of a minor miracle.
Of course it was Tippett who but epitomised Adelaide's sheer frustration about retaining players. In a saga daubed across newspaper back pages for far longer than anyone at West Lakes would have liked, the salary cap transgression designed to keep Tippett in Adelaide for the short-term, cost the club enormously in terms of draft penalties and staff bans, before the Swans were able to pick him up for no gain by the Crows. It remains the most embarrassing chapter in club history.
The lesson learned at the time was twofold. First, there seemed little point in stretching the rules to accommodate players who did not want to remain in Adelaide. Secondly, the market pressure created by the addition of Gold Coast and GWS to the AFL had allowed players to be far more aggressive in chasing home pastures or bigger contracts. The Crows had been caught in a major storm, and hurt themselves further by trying to swim against the current.
Since then, smoother waters have been sought and largely found. Ironically, the circumstances in which Adelaide have settled their list down and become more successful at retaining players actually revolve around the bonds formed by draftees from outside South Australia. Daniel Talia, who joined the Crows in the same year Tippett signed his fateful three-year contract extension in 2009, summed up how things had changed -- Adelaide is now a desirable place in which to grow together.
"It's funny, a lot of the guys at the club now are from interstate and I feel like that's really bonded us closer," Talia (Calder Cannons) said of a group featuring the likes of Rory Sloane (Eastern Ranges), Rory Atkins (Calder Cannons), Tom Lynch (St Kilda) and Josh Jenkins (Essendon). "With the events of last year we're a really tight knit group and our culture's one of our strong points.
"We've got a great culture and guys want to hang around and be a part of that. We've got a core group who are 18 to 25 and we don't have many senior guys other than Thommo [Scott Thompson] and Dougy [Richard Douglas] and those kinds of guys. We're all growing up together, playing footy together and developing as a group. It's a really exciting time to be around the club and guys want to be a part of that," says Talia.
Many of the old headlines were dredged back up by Dangerfield's decision to return home to Geelong at the end of 2015, a decision he had made some months before but kept quiet. However it is now possible to view his exit as something of an outlier to a wider trend, for young interstate players of promise to decide that Adelaide isn't just the place to be for a football education, but as a club to make your home.
"Certainly, and with more games of footy and the more we play together I feel like the more we're going to improve,' Talia said. "It's an exciting time, an opportunity for our group to play some good footy and win finals. We don't just want to make up the numbers, we want to go the whole way."
Added to the sense of togetherness at Adelaide is the fact that the team have not been built through the pick of the national draft, nor the generous concessions offered to new clubs elsewhere. Instead this is a group carefully compiled from lower draft choices, rookie draft selections and trades. Contentions that the Crows lack the star power of other clubs may actually be a strength: they know they must work for each other to be a chance, whether on the field or at contract time.
Crows re-signed in the past two years: Brad Crouch, Daniel Talia, Brodie Smith, Josh Jenkins, Rory Atkins, Mitch McGovern, Tom Lynch, Rory Sloane, Sam Jacobs, Richard Douglas, Rory Laird, Luke Brown, Jake Lever, Charlie Cameron, Jake Kelly, Kyle Hartigan, Riley Knight, Reilly O'Brien