Port Adelaide will wear its black-and-white ‘prison bar’ guernsey in this year’s AFL Heritage Round and for any future Heritage Rounds being played at AAMI Stadium from 2008 onwards.

After years of discussion with the AFL the club is satisfied that it has an outcome that will ensure its supporters can celebrate the club’s unrivalled history in designated rounds.

The agreement with the AFL ensures that during Heritage Rounds where Port Adelaide is scheduled to play at AAMI Stadium, it will wear its black-and-white ‘prison bar’ guernsey.

The agreement also guarantees that the club will receive an equitable spread of games at AAMI Stadium in Heritage Rounds.

Port Adelaide chief executive John James said he was extremely pleased the club’s supporters would see Port Adelaide wear its black-and-white prison bars once again.

“As it stood, for whatever reason, the AFL made it very clear it was unwilling to allow our club to wear black-and-white for all Heritage Rounds, and that there would need to be some form of negotiation if it were to happen at all,” James said.

“It has been a period of long and very intense negotiations. We are fiercely passionate about our history and the people that made this club great and got us to where we are today, which is playing in the AFL.

“We have never been willing to compromise on our history or heritage by wearing a hybrid guernsey or to vary our history in any way. We illustrated that by not participating in Heritage Round last year.

“We’re very pleased that our supporters will be able to share in the celebration of our wonderful history this year and every time we play in Adelaide during Heritage Round.”

The club believed that unless it arrived at an agreement, the inevitable yearly debate would continue and that it was possible it would never be allowed to wear the famous black-and-white prison bars in which it won 31 SANFL premierships.

James said that the supporters’ desires were foremost in the club’s thinking in reaching a resolution on the issue.

“We’ve listened to our supporters. They’ve told us how important it is that we participate in Heritage Round by wearing our most famous SANFL colours, and we believe this is the best possible result we could achieve for them and our club, given the constraints in place,” James said.

“We’d like to thank all our supporters for their passionate words to the club on this long running issue and for getting behind us on our fight to honour our heritage in Heritage Rounds.

“We also want to reiterate that we love the new history we are creating in the AFL in our new guernsey and colours of black, white, silver and teal.

“Our aim is that relatively speaking we achieve similar success this century in our current guernesy, as we did in the past century wearing the black and white. We encourage our supporters to cherish the past as we do, but also to embrace the future and let’s grow and move forward together.”

This agreement puts to bed a negotiation which started back in 2003 when the AFL allowed the club to wear a 1914 black-and-white guernsey in Heritage Round. Since then the AFL has refused to allow Port Adelaide to wear a black-and-white guernsey, a decision which saw Port Adelaide boycott last year’s historical celebration.

The Power will work with manufacturer Reebok to produce a replica of its 1970s guernsey to wear in Heritage Round this year – which is Round 14 against the Western Bulldogs at Telstra Dome. The club is hopeful it will have a home game in Heritage Round next year.