ON SATURDAY night, I will play my 20th Showdown and I can honestly say the novelty hasn’t worn off at all.

The Showdowns are still my favourite games of the year. I love the whole week – the build-up, the way the fans get into it and just how much is riding on these games. A Showdown can really make or break peoples’ weeks – and as close to a final as you can get during the season.

I can still remember watching the first-ever Showdown in 1997.

It was just before I was drafted by Port Adelaide. I didn’t really follow either team, but I went along and had a look anyway.

There was a real buzz around Footy Park. In terms of the intensity and how much the crowd got involved, it was something South Australia had never really seen before.

Two years later I made my AFL debut in a Showdown.

I started on the bench and it was a Crows’ home game, so there were 40,000 Crows fans there and maybe only 10,000 from Port.

The Crows fans gave me a really good ovation when I came on. Now, I look back and think how times have changed, because that would obviously never happen these days.

We lost that game and I only had a couple of possessions, but the build-up and excitement of debuting in a Showdown has stayed with me.

I do like to get stuck into the Crows’ fans a bit, but that’s not a one-way street, by the way. They have a fair bit to say to me out there.

If you kick a good goal against the Crows, you turn around to the crowd and give them a bit, which fires them up even more. It’s all in good fun and I don’t have anything against them ... deep down.

Form counts for nothing in these games. No matter how you’re going personally, or as a team, you manage to get yourself up for it. Two matches in particular stick in my mind.

One was the first Showdown of the year in 2003. The game was really tight all day, but we managed to kick away in the last quarter. I was playing up forward and scored a couple of goals late in the game. I remember being really pumped up because it was one of those Showdowns where no one picked us to win.

In the last Showdown of 2006, the Crows were flying and preparing to play finals. We’d had a pretty disappointing year, so we were determined to finish off the last half of the year strongly.

I was pretty animated in the last quarter of that game. We hadn’t won a Showdown for quite some time and beating the Crows meant we were able to end the season on a pretty big high.

Probably the only good thing about last week’s loss to St Kilda is the fact that we’re playing the Crows this week.

The boys were pretty embarrassed with the way we went about things on Friday night and we definitely have a point to prove this weekend.

The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL.