Mark Ricciuto Opens Up On The Pub Brawl Between Crows And Port Players In 2002

Bit of a long Sunday afternoon


Article heading image for Mark Ricciuto Opens Up On The Pub Brawl Between Crows And Port Players In 2002

Former Adelaide skipper and Triple M personality Mark Ricciuto has spoken about the famous Ramsgate Hotel brawl between a set of Adelaide and Port Adelaide players around the 15th anniversary of the ruckus.

Roo was on the Saturday Rub yesterday and gave his side of the story on what went down on that evening at the Ramsgate Hotel between the Crows and Power players.

“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.”

There wasn’t too much dissent from the other Crows lads.

“I said ‘if we go over there, make sure we don’t back out’,” Roo said.

“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.”

Once they got over there, not all of the players were so forthright.

“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.”

Roo said that there’s no bad blood between him and Port tagger Josh Carr, who was the other main player in the saga.

“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.”

The story had an amusing post-script when a fan contacted the club about the brawl.

“One of the funniest things was we had a supporter ring up the club on the Monday or Tuesday after the blue," Roo 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!”

Listen to the full chat here:

9 April 2017




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