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There is a bunch of us Richmond supporters in our early 30s who have only known misery from their football club. We all have jobs, some have mortgages, some children. We generally get along OK in life and don’t ask for much other than to sit back on the weekend and observe a set of circumstances of which you have absolutely no control and enjoy it. We’ve adopted NRL, NBA, EPL and NFL teams and cheered when they won but deep down knew that we’d much prefer it to be Richmond. I even have a theory that Richmond supporters are the best at pretending they care when Victoria wins the Sheffield Shield and the only bridge too far is caring about who wins a Big Bash game.

We’ve had glimpses, flashes and signs of promise but all have gone as quickly as they came. Last week’s build up to Friday didn’t feel like the other glimpses, it promised to be different. Richmond this year has had a calmness about it that has been missing during even the best of times in recent years, this wave of momentum feels timed and sustainable. It felt like it could have even survived a slip up on Friday and everything would still be OK.

But then the night came and the slip up didn’t.

For some reason, night games at the MCG just feel bigger. The backdrop of a night sky makes you feel like it’s the only thing happening in the world, and with 95,000 people watching on Richmond played like there was nothing else in the world. It was a delight to host Geelong at our home ground for such an occasion but weird they decided to leave their forward line back down the highway.

In the stands it was primal and on the ground it was savage, I’ve never heard such crowd noise nor seen such onfield pressure. When people have asked me how it was over the weekend I’ve only been able to mutter something about ‘really good and very loud’, that’s about where I am at for the moment.

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Chatting with Richmond fans in the lead up to the evening there were three scenarios:

1. We shat the bed
2. We played well and lost, or
3. We played well and grinded it out.

Five minutes into the first quarter we were able to rule out door number one, but door number two was still a very real and scary option. Little did we know, and even less could we expect, that a door number four was on the horizon: we’d do it easy.

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During the match I was too terrified to process anything more than the scoreboard and Dusty having the ball but on watching the replay (three times and counting) there were loads of moments that jump off the screen.

I could write tens of thousands of words Demonblog style and break them down one by one, but few were better than Ellis clattering into Dangerfield in the second quarter. Both had eyes only for the ball and while Ellis was greeted by five or six mates urging him on, Cam Guthrie and his shocking haircut simply walked straight past Dangerfield as if it was the most basic of training drills. He was obviously preoccupied with getting the post match lines right in his head about how hard done by they were for having to travel 70 kilometres to play the biggest game of the year at a first world ground.

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All year long the praise for Richmond has been qualified and followed with ‘but they’ll need to find a second tall forward for the finals’. It would have been easy and must have been tempting to bring in Griff once we had a couple of runs under his belt. Instead Dimma and co stuck to the script and backed in the game plan.

The comparisons to the Bulldogs of last year have increased as the year progressed and will likely click into overdrive now that we are down to the last four. For me though the narrative is similar but the stories are very different. The Bulldogs took an unconventional forward line into the finals last year because of injuries, Hardwick has taken his unconventional forward line into the finals this year because it works.

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Jack and Nank deserve more love than they’ve received externally, as both continue to pull double and triple shifts to make the setup work. Jack plays both full and centre half forward and in an industry determined to measure key forwards only by goals kicked he offers a full suite of services. Nank’s worth is summed up through the words that are often muttered after his name in commentary ‘has worked tirelessly tonight’, that should be his nickname.

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Our season has been viewed through the prism of Dusty and on Friday, as he has many other times this year, he did the brilliant things that made the difference.

But this wasn’t a win placed solely on his shoulders, it was like a game of pool where 21 people set up the game winner for him and he knocked them in on a hot streak. With six minutes to go in the third quarter he’d been only fair and we were grinding it out, by the ten minute mark of the last quarter he’d gone for the throat and it was over. I’ve played pub pool with blokes like that, they’re off buying drinks and talking to girls and but manage to find their way back to the table and win the game when needed. You really want them on your team, and you hate playing against them.

Picking a Dusty highlight this year is like picking your favourite Rolling Stones song but the shake and bake on Tom Stewart and bounce down the wing is shooting quickly to the top of the charts. Who knows what is to come this season or for the next seven for that matter but the occasion and, my god, the noise when he took off down the wing will be very hard to top. The ball ended up with Prestia in the square, the siren went not long after and the decibel level shot off the charts again as they gathered for the huddle.

It was special moment in what was a very special night and Martin Scorsese makes the Richmond movie (or Dusty movie) that’s the bit he’ll play Gimme Shelter over.

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The last quarter was, to put it simply, perfect. The slow buildup maximised pressure and despite the fact we’d been the better team for just about the entirety, the lead was narrow enough for Dangerfield to have dragged back on his own if he stopped kicking it out on the full for a few minutes.

Nick Vlastuin on radio said that he wasn’t sure when to be happy and relax, which is fantastic to hear because none of us ever do so why should they really?

For me on the night, it was the Lambert goal which looking back at the replay is completely ludicrous given the time still to play out but given Geelong had kicked four goals for the night until then it was probably fair enough. Then the dam burst, only this time the flood of goals ruined their night instead of ours.

I don’t know how dam walls usually burst, but when it did everyone was lining up for a crack. Including the skipper, my goodness the skipper and his perfect hair, who hit a contested footy at pace and on the spin and kicked the goal that made up for three elimination finals.

The guy who has copped it from everywhere from years who now leads his band of brothers into a preliminary final. That was a moment I’ll never forget.

As covered by the RTT lads Friday night doesn’t even the ledger for the last thirty years, but the promise of the next three weeks hints at the debt being repaid and then some.

Two more.

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The votes [double points for finals]

10: Nick Vlastuin – Dusty blew them away but it was the first half of grinding that built the stage for him. He has been a very good player for a while now but this might have been the night the rest of the footy world took notice.

8: Dustin Martin – What is there left to say? He did it when it needed to be done, we’ve got the best midfielder in the league.

6: Alex Rance – ‘Taylor stitched up him a month ago’ they said. They probably should have played Taylor on Friday then. Wait, what? He was playing?

4: Dion Prestia – He’s never going to be the cleanest because of where he wins the ball, but he did the hard yards that we’d lacked in finals of recent years.

2: Josh Caddy – Fought hard early, run hard late and got one up over his own mob and extra points for obliterating Mackie in the second quarter. Our Mr September?

Deepest of apologies to the captain who I’d have loved to worked into the votes but I couldn’t manage it.
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Leaderboard

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The Predictability Factor

Last time I was handed the keys to TTBB was after the most unlikely of Richmond performances as we peeled off a three quarter time deficit, running rampant in the last quarter against Melbourne. This time is seemingly straight out of the Richmond-Hardwick playbook, and the handback of what most clubs would deem a match winning lead.

Unfortunately a lack of time this week means there won’t be any huge amount of analysis in this post, if you are after that then head over to The Roar for Cam Rose’s article about the Groundhog Day situation we find ourselves in.

What I will say is the sense of inevitability at the G on Sunday was all encompassing. We played some great footy in the first 45 minutes before Sydney worked us out, but once Lloyd turned the footy over and they scored late in the second quarter it seemed like we’d seen this movie before, more than a few times, and knew exactly how it was going to end.

From a glass half full approach, these things used to happen in a 20 minute burst (hello North Melbourne games) but Sydney took three quarters to achieve what we all knew was going to happen. Is that progress?

Sydney worked us out mid-stream and planned accordingly. I’m not the first person to observe forward structure is lacking, Jack is doing too much overtime and we need a second target. That Sydney team is big enough, ugly enough and have been around the traps long enough to adapt and force us to go up the wing, knowing that we didn’t have the get out option.

Things look like they might be a little bit different against Carlton on Sunday if we play Maric Snr, Ivvy isn’t going to be the great circuit breaker of our time but he should structure us up going forward and mean that it isn’t Jack or bust.

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My votes

5: Alex Rance – Sydney is my favourite Rance game of the year because it’s the one time we get to see him go full defensive against Buddy. I love Buddy, I will always love Buddy, but my goodness it was great to see Rance beat him senseless.

4: Trent Cotchin – All the attention is on Dusty but the captain is putting together a fine body of work in 2017 and it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s leading the B&F. He ran himself into the ground in the last quarter to try and push back against the tide, unfortunatley he wasn’t able to overwhelm the Swans midfield on his own.

3: David Astbury – Not all that long ago we used to watch Astbury waiting for the worst and now he has learned from the best. The chatter will keep asking him for go forward but there is no way in my mind you split up that duo.

2: Josh Caddy – I assume when we pitched to Caddy the brief wasn’t ‘come to Richmond and play some kind of quasi CHF role’, other than Jack he was the only one who could hold the ball in a contest.

1: Shai Bolton – Little bit chuffed I get to give the first TTBB vote to Shai. He set us alight in the first quarter and it won’t be the last time. We got Bolton with the compensation pick for Vickery and in ten minutes he kicked as many goals as Ty has managed all year. Strap yourself in, he is going to be so much fun to watch.

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Votes and notes by Sean Ross, founder of The Benny
It’s impossible to write about last night without mentioning the wonderful occasion the fixture has become. 85,000 isn’t just a crowd, it’s a bloody big crowd, and from my brief AFL Tables research this morning it’s the biggest home and away crowd Melbourne have played in front of since 1962.

Though the evolution of Anzac Day into Anzac round sits uncomfortably and our role in it seems more than a little like an attempt to cash in, you can’t ignore that kind of attendance on a rainy Melbourne night. It isn’t like it’s going anywhere and I may as well embrace it. The fact it seems to annoy Eddie is just an added bonus.

You can’t fault the time and effort that has been put into the pre-match ceremony and the points of difference that are made available in a night time fixture. There is something magic about that many people sitting in the dark in silence during the Last Post with only their thoughts and reflections for company. Deafening silence is a weird concept but that’s the best way to describe it. That the same 85,000 people spent the next two hours screaming deliberate whenever the ball went near the boundary only adds to the importance of the silence before it.

The game itself and, more importantly for this blog post, Richmond, finally lived up to the stage. For whatever reason we had stunk up games against Melbourne for the three years before, the first following Tom Hafey’s passing and then the two first chapters of this fixture. In three games we hit the fixture out of form, Melbourne hit the ball far harder and the scoreboard told the rest of the story. With an average margin of less than five goals, the collective scoreboards flattered us because we had never really got close to them.

In an era where players and teams are judged and analysed through efficiency, tackle counts and pressure acts the role of ‘bogey teams’ is under appreciated and if we dropped this one we were quickly headed to that area with Melbourne. Try and tell me Carlton weren’t in our heads for the first 4 years of this decade.

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So with all that water under the bridge, at three quarter time I sat in the Olympic Stand wondering why I’d put my hand up to do the TTBB votes against Melbourne of all teams. A team we hadn’t beaten for three years while they weren’t any good, and now that they’re OK it looked like we may never beat them again.

During the last break it was hard to see how we’d manage to roll over them. We needed to find four goals and stop them from scoring, to that point we’d managed only seven in 90 minutes and they’d had little trouble finding one in transition whenever we pressed up on them. Chatting to a mate I optimistically put the chances of us running over them at around the 10% mark, I figured something was up with Spencer given Watts had been rucking but I didn’t know Melbourne were two rotations down otherwise I would have bumped it up to around 25%.

What I hadn’t, nor had most Richmond folk on Twitter (by a reflective look at my Twitter timeline), factored in was that Melbourne, so incredibly chirpy until then, would shut up shop as soon we made a run at them.

How it progressed from there shows that sport is quite often not fair.

The (far) worse team for the first hour and half got a roll on and pinched it. Given the number of times we’ve been on the receiving end of that it shouldn’t have felt so good, but my goodness it did. When Jack kicked his last to put us in front and the heads of the Melbourne players dropped in unison there was an air of invincibility, that glorious feeling that you’ve just hit the lead and the other mob aren’t willing or able to grab it back. How many times have we been on the less fun end of that feeling?

I’m generally a pretty awful person when it comes to following sport. In most other aspects of life I’m perfectly nice, but the sight of thousands of MCC members heading for the car park after Caddy kicked the sealer provided enough warmth and joy to get me through a Siberian winter. Package up the video of that mass evacuation and put it on the club site and I’ll watch it more times than Dusty leaving Ted Richards sprawled on the turf at Homebush and flying into an open goal. Sit down and stick it out you pillocks, there was only two minutes left.

They’re an interesting team Melbourne. They have a lot of really good young players but more than a few stinkers still hanging around, while we have less really good players but mostly our players are OK enough to get you through. What they are stacked to the gills with though is front runners, Jones and Viney are everything you want when things are going right: chippy, confident, fierce at the ball, ruthless and effective. They terrorised us at the clearances for three quarters (to the point where I can’t have been the only person wondering why we didn’t pick Miles. But they must both have either ran out of puff from not shutting up all night or headed off early to get a jump on the MCC members because I can’t remember seeing either in the last quarter, and to think our skipper is the one who cops grief. What they do have though is a couple of young midfielders coming through who are eye wateringly good. If they can keep Oliver and Petracca fit and developing they’ve got a platform to really cause some chaos in the years ahead, so even though the tables have turned for now I don’t expect this one to be a Brisbane like winning streak.

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It will be left for others to dissect the first three quarters so please forgive me for solely focussing on the final stanza and a few names jump off the page.

Houli provided clean hands and poise that had been lacking from anyone in a Richmond jumper. Hardly an effective line of possessions was strung together without his involvement. Dusty looked more than a little hobbled for the first three goals but either pushed the pain out of his mind, played through it or got an injection that I want in on and produced some of his finest bollocking when it was needed most. In defence Rance and Grimes owned the back half of the ground, let very little past and only let Hogan hit the scoreboard through intervention from officialdom.

Jack was the difference, and it had to be Jack, following three weeks of double time playing both full forward and centre half forward. It’s very rare that a 22 person team walks off the ground victorious and you can point at one person and say ‘they wouldn’t have won without them’. A few times a year Jack gets into a zone where he can do no wrong and it doesn’t matter who he’s playing on because he knows he is better than them. When Jack is in that zone it doesn’t matter how the ball comes in, he’ll zig and bring the ball to ground or zag and get it on the second grab. Not only would we not have won without Jack, we likely would have lost convincingly, because it would have been a whole lot more than a four goal margin at three quarter time to overcome.

When he’s in that zone he doesn’t miss, and that last set shot was kicked with ice running through his veins. I love him.

We are quite spoiled as Richmond fans to play in front of so many big crowds despite a lack of success that rivals the French military, in just one of the last 11 years have we failed to have a game that has drawn more than 70,000 people. When Richmond kick a goal to the Punt Road end in front of a big crowd it’s like a drug, you want to tap that feeling and never let it go. If it’s that good from the stands I can only imagine what it’s like on the ground and, though I have nothing empirical to base this on, I can’t help but suspect that feeling is why we’ve managed to keep players over the years. You only have to hear Prestia speak to realise it’s a drawcard for those from elsewhere.

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So where does all that leave us now? I think it’s pretty clear that this isn’t a superstar 22 but they’ve committed to a game plan that, after years of schlepping 18 months behind Hawthorn, just might be ahead of the curve. For now we’ve beaten who we should and there isn’t a heap more you can do than beat the five teams you’ve been fixtured against in the first five rounds.

To me, it’s the first time since 2013 we are fun to watch. Winning lots of games in 2014 and 2015 was fun, but how we played wasn’t. Collectively the forward line is attacking the ball like men possessed and the mosquito fleet are mopping up anything that Jack misses. The midfield is a group again instead of just Dusty and Cotchin. The backline, who would have been within their rights to set up a picket line, start singing Solidarity Forever and refuse to go to work last year, are no longer constantly under siege. They have the time and space they need to defend but also attack.

Watch the club highlights from the last quarter, the five goals are the result of build up play up the ground. It may not have seemed it at the time given we were all emotional wrecks but they’re fun goals to watch. In the back half of last year every goal seemed to be a result of something resembling the suffragette movement. We had to beg, borrow, plead and fight for everything.

Now Shaun Grigg is palming off volleyball taps to Dusty as we peel off a four goal deficit in the last quarter in front of 85,000 people. More of that please.

Of the new guys, neither Caddy or Prestia has set the world on fire but their impact is felt across the 22, as they release Dusty forward, Cotchin doesn’t have to be at the bottom of every pack and Caddy in particular has a very happy knack of kicking goals at important times despite Luke Darcy bottling the call.

Big Nank was a cult hero before he played a game because he attacks the ball with a ferocity we’ve lacked. His rucking is a developing art and bigger tests from opposition will come. When he gets touched up by more established players, and he will, it will be important to remember that he is yet to click over 20 games.

These three arrivals combined with the emergence of Butler and Castagna mean there is also something resembling depth at the club. Not so much in the key forward stocks but we have midfielders, half back flankers, half forwards, small forwards, rucks and defenders ready to go if and when called upon. It’s a long season and we’ll need them.

Chances are that Adelaide will get away from us and the ‘who have they beaten?’ chorus will quickly transition to ‘reality check’.

And you know what? You can’t really blame the media. The big four sell papers, deliver traffic and for a good while now we’ve been the only one of the big four you’d walk across the road for if they were playing across the street. It’s better to be talked about than ignored.

We are 5 and 0, and we aren’t going to win the flag but we’ll have some fun trying.

Embrace it, thrive on it, enjoy it.

Go Tigers.

The votes

5: Jack Riewoldt: Could it have been anyone else? Until now he has saved his very worst for Melbourne, but this was his very best.
4: Bachar Houli: A beacon of calmness and poise when everything around him was chaos.
3: Dylan Grimes: Last on the stats sheet but far from last in effectiveness, killed everything that came near him.
2: Alex Rance: He even started doing that thing where he beats forwards senseless and then out marks them for added humiliation, paired up with Astbury to brain Hogan.
1: Toby Nankervis: Wasn’t playing against much but that’s hardly his fault, his tap work in the last quarter was sublime and his silver service to Cotchin helped set up Jack’s sealer.

With thanks to the TTBB crew for letting me dust off the keyboard!