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The night Richo was inducted into the Hall of Fame

16/06/2014 By Dugald 3 Comments

The sky was crying. Late on a Wednesday night, ascending the platform six ramp at Richmond Station, to wait for the 11.12pm to Pakenham, I received a text. It was from Craig, who I’d walked from the pub with, talking about football and Richmond and past premiership years – 67, 69, 73, 74 – that in the damp night air rung like magical numbers.

Neon lights glowed on city buildings, heavy clouds hung low, I listened to the sound of wet car tyres on Punt Road and the text message said Richo inducted to Hall of Fame and all I could think: “good on him”.

If already he wasn’t part of this city’s folklore, he was now. If already he weren’t down in the history books, he is now. Richo had arrived. He had been anointed. And tonight, the whole damned city was his.

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I had seen Richo on stage last winter at the Corner Hotel, in the bowels of old Struggletown, and he was a revelation. A pin-up of Presentation Night #2, hosted by Francis Leach, and paired with You Am I frontman Tim Rogers – a sinewy rock’n’roll shinboner; all elbows and knees; the Dean Laidley type – he had the crowd on a string. He was candid, honest, entertaining, and amusing in his storytelling.

The other Wednesday it was Presentation Night #3, the creation of impresario Andy Kelly, a Woodsman at heart, again bringing together two strands of culture that Melbourne does best: football and live music.

On stage were Cameron Ling (“the mayor of Geelong, the king of Corio”) and Paul Dempsey, a tormented Sainter known better as the lead singer of Something for Kate. Results were no less beguiling.

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What’s at first obvious is that it’s improbable to dislike Cameron Ling. The slicked red hair, the pink skin, his open demeanour, and that wide, affable smile – the irrepressible grin of a winner – are disarming. He grew up in Geelong. Barracked for Geelong. Won three premierships at Geelong. His last kick in AFL football was a goal, as captain of the 2011 premiers, Geelong. He has local hero written all over him.

“My dream as a boy was to see a Geelong premiership,” he says. “I couldn’t have thought with the lottery of the draft that I’d be staying at home, and playing in those premierships. I consider myself very, very lucky.”

Talk on the night began with the 2009 flag against Leach and Dempsey’s beloved Saints – Tom Hawkins hitting the post, the Matty Scarlett toe-poke – and for Ling, the panic beforehand and “huge relief” afterwards. “Anything short of winning the premiership was a real failure for that group,” he says. “It was my least enjoyable year. I remember the Grand Final after-party, everyone was celebrating but if you looked around the room there were 22 guys asleep in their chairs.”

Discussion diverged to Gary Ablett Snr and Barry Stoneham, and pre-match change room routines, and Mark ‘Bomber’ Thompson (“He never yelled or screamed… I heard Damien Hardwick gave a real spray the other Saturday night”), and his first game of league football, at Football Park, when a Port supporter leaned over the fence as he warmed-up and yelled: “Oi Ling, I’m gunna fucken kill ya!”

He talked of footballers he most admired – Ben Cousins (“hardest runner, hardest worker”), Michael Voss and Nathan Buckley (“strong, hard bodies who win their own ball”), Scott Pendlebury (“so good at what he does”) – and fans like me could have pulled up a pew and listened all night.

There was talk about his coaching aspirations (Francis Leach quipped: “you’ll be the first redhead to go grey”); the relative intellect of former teammates (on Stevie J: “not a lot goes through that head”), and Brownlow night when Warrnambool-boy Jonathan Brown called him, affectionately and on-camera, a “big pink pig”. As Ling explains: “Any time I sweated up I looked like a big pink pig.”

As with Richo last year, self-deprecating humour serves a footballer well.

But the night’s biggest laugh came at the expense of Brad Ottens, nowadays a furniture-maker, and a story relayed by former Richmond coach, Danny ‘Spud’ Frawley. As Lingy tells it, Otto was in a police lock-up after a big night on the turps, and had the constable call his coach at three in the morning to pick him up. Frawley arrived at the police cell some time later, to find Ottens sitting with hands over his face. He looked up, dumbfounded, and with a look of incredulity, said: “Spud, what’d they get you for!”

Only at Richmond.

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As with all things football, the temptation is to compare: to put this player up against that; this team versus that team; how the game was played in this era compared to that era. My inclination is to measure Presentation Night #3 against its earlier incarnation. But this is unfair and unnecessary. And I can only imagine how the inaugural version – musical-poet Paul Kelly up on stage with football-poet Bob Murphy – must have been.

I kick myself still for missing this night; for not being where the party was at.

Richo’s stories are not Lingy’s stories, and vice-versa, but each are equally engaging in their own way. What can be said with authority is that Richo has more contemporary musical tastes than those of his Channel 7 commentary box cohort. The latter brought along some vinyl for the night – a song he would play in the car on his way to games. ‘The Sound of Silence’.

How can anyone dislike Simon and Garfunkel?

The counterpoint to the evening was Paul Dempsey, a Black Rock boy, a Saints man, an earnest fellow, reserved in manner and temperament. Whereas Tim Rogers had used the evening as a wondrous confessional – about his love of football culture, his mental illness while growing-up in suburban Adelaide, his passion for life – his friend Dempsey projected as guarded and clipped.

All the hurt of St Kilda’s grand final near-misses looked to weigh heavily on his shoulders. He appeared anguished.

Then again, standing behind the microphone, he delivered two of the night’s highlights. His second song was a version of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ (“In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream…”) and in this filled and darkened room my heart skips a beat. I love Bruce. Always have, always will, and although maybe something from Nebraska could have bettered this, in these opening chords there’s a promise of escape and Dempsey duly delivers.

And at night’s end he sings a cover of The Angels’ ‘Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again’. News of the day had been the untimely death of the bands’ former lead singer, ‘Doc’ Neeson. Here was instant respect; for Paul Dempsey, and how he commemorated the death of his compatriot. The crowd hollered for more. We rose as one. None of us truly wanted to leave.

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I spent that night mostly nursing beers and standing alongside Craig, a decent, learned and fair-minded man, whom I’d met at the Western Oval and took an instant liking to. He barracks for Richmond. He is tall and lean and has ginger hair, and looks as if he’d fit nicely on a wing. And he runs a football-themed blog (Footy Maths Institute, although rebranded as Futebal Instituicao for the World Cup) and is fine company on Twitter (see @Footy_Maths).

Having returned to Melbourne several years ago, after so long away, here is a type I want to meet, talk into the night with, share stories with, go to a game of football with, and on a Wednesday night stand at the back of a pub on Swan Street in Richmond and watch three blokes on stools and at a high table talk about football and life what it all might mean.

If I am to get out only once or twice a year, I am happy if it is to Presentation Night. Long may the format prosper; long may it become a cultural institution of this city.

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The World Cup is underway and Francis Leach is in Rio, and our benighted Richmond has dug itself only deeper into a hole, and our CEO is away in Brazil – having a sojourn in the sunshine – so we look elsewhere for consolations and little mercies. In 90 minutes of football played in a faraway land and telecast early on Saturday morning, I found more happiness and pride than in any 90 minutes of watching Richmond play this season, and this saddens my heart and leaves me bereft.

But still, there is beauty in our code of football.

Catching a train to the game on Saturday, crossing the Yarra and rounding the bend into Richmond Station, I read a piece on the Presentation Night webpage that brought forth tears. Written by Toby Martin, from the band Youth Group, he tells a story at the end about his father, and Collingwood and Carlton, and a chance encounter with Nathan Buckley at a 7-11, that makes me want to hug strangers. It’s a story about compassion, and how football brings us together, and reflects on who we are.

There is hurt at Richmond this winter. It is because we care, because it means something to us, because we choose to make it part of our life. If this hurt is not acknowledged, it is meaningless. If it is meaningless, there is no point to this game of ours. If we have no game, who do we become?

Our game, our club, our team, our colours, they’re our very identity.

Standing among strangers behind the goals on Saturday afternoon, in the thinned-out crowd, I try to distil the meaning of the day in a few lines:

When the crowd rise behind the goals at the Punt Road end,
when the banners and flags and floggers fly in the air,
when all our colours are held aloft,
when the chants begin,
when voices cry out,
that’s when I love to be at the football.

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C’mon the Tigers!

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Not so long ago on this Wednesday night, alone at Richmond Station, feeling high on life, I remembered what Richo had said last winter; about arriving in this city as a Devonport schoolboy, off the ferry with his car and a freshly-minted Melways, and driving straight to Punt Road to see what he could make of himself.

He made us all look his way. He made us take note. He found for himself a belonging. That’s why all of us, we love Richo.

Tiger tiger burning (increasingly less) bright

Email:  dugaldjellie@gmail.com

Twitter: @dugaldjellie

Dugald 16/06/2014Filed Under: dugald_14, front

Voices in the crowd: Jayden & Phil, my sister & I

10/06/2014 By Dugald 43 Comments

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Kangas v Tigers: Same family, different colours

When my eldest sister was born, she could hardly breathe. Unknown to my parents at the time, in a hospital ward in Shropshire, England, in the winter of 1965, she came into this world tangled in her umbilical cord. It wrapped around her neck. In those vital moments of life, she gasped for oxygen and none came to her brain.

My eldest sister lives still with our elderly father, has a part-time job in a supermarket cleaning and stacking shopping baskets, and she’s a whizz at finding the nine-letter word, or remembering numberplates and birth dates, and you couldn’t know of someone more loyal to family. But she has trouble balancing, a poor diet, cannot manage her finances, needs assistance with personal grooming, has a limited social circle, and can hardly look after herself.

Truly, many times I’ve no idea what goes through her head. I worry about her. I’m protective of her. I cannot understand her. She barracks for North Melbourne.

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Last season, I received an email from a Richmond fan that stripped me bare.

Sent by Philip Jupp, from his smart phone, he wrote:

I have followed each blog you write and appreciate the love you have for our great football club. That piece this week in regards to Nick’s [Vlastuin] first goal and the gratitude to Chris Knights [knee injury] makes me proud to support the yellow and black. My whole heart goes out to Knighter after the last couple of seasons riddled with injuries, to just get back to near his best and then succumb to another season ending injury brings a tear to my eye. My 12-year-old boy, while mentally as sharp as an axe, is wheelchair bound and suffers from cerebral palsy. For years I was in denial regarding Jayden’s condition, even in the early years selfishly despising him for his condition AS IF IT WERE HIS FAULT. Then one day about six years ago he had somehow grabbed my RFC scarf, tangled it in his electric wheelchair and sped around the house to get my attention and take me to the lounge room where RICHMOND was playing. He pointed and cheered hysterically as the replay of a goal Brett Deledio had kicked was being replayed. From this moment on we have been members and go to every Melbourne-based game there is. The Richmond football club united my son and myself in a way I will be eternally grateful, and I owe them so much.

I just wanted to share this love for the RFC to another person that I know shares it to the same intensity.

GO TIGES

Regards, Phil Jupp

Phil’s openness and honesty, his selflessness – grieved by the knee injury to Chris Knights, when he’s faced with a lifetime of caring for his son – made me gasp with gratitude. There is wonder in this world, there is bravery.

He wasn’t to know of my sister, and her cerebral palsy. He wasn’t to know how having a sister with a disability has profoundly shaped my life and those too, of my parents and other siblings. He wasn’t to know how immediate the issue of disabilities – mindful always of the welfare of another, how society treats them, how they might be unfairly disadvantaged – has always been for me.

Ever since I’ve been conscious to the emotions of others, I’ve been conscious to my sister’s condition. I needed to contact Phil. I needed to tell him this. I needed to look him up. I needed to meet Jayden at the football.

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My eldest sister has barracked for North Melbourne since the drawn 1977 Grand Final – the first to be broadcast live on television – which we watched at my grandparents’ house, beside Barongarook Creek on an edge of Colac. Each year, her devotion to the Kangaroos grows only stronger, becomes more committed.

She wanted me to join her to the football on Sunday night, when my heart was hardly in it. She wanted the company. Our father has bought her a reserved seat membership for the past eight years, and she goes to every Melbourne game she can, and family days at Arden Street, where she adds to her autograph collection.

She always goes alone. She sits by herself. And if her team wins, it’s a pleasure that thrills her for a week.

So she asks me to go and I cannot deny her, and on Sunday night I buy a ticket and try to sweet talk stadium officials into letting me sit in one of the many empty seats around her. They say no. My face knots in tears.

For a half a game of football, I stand in the concourse above her, on the wing in aisle 36, before a chorus of royal blue and white, with a cold wind on my back from the railway yards, with my sister below and dressed in all her regalia, and as she always has been: alone. Nobody else in the stadium knows her story. Nobody else in the stadium knows how much I love her. Nobody else knows what it would mean for both of us to sit at the football together – for her to show me a part of her life that means so much to her.

She has the Kangaroos; she has hope, she has a routine, she has everything.

But rules have no room of sentimentality, and I text her and say I’m standing with her up the back, and she should enjoy her seat and come and see me at quarter time. She texts back: “Dugs. Here’s a good race relations tip put Bachor Houli on Majak Daw!!!!!”

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All smiles: Jayden Jupp, 12, and his dad, Phil, at the football last season.

I met Phillip Jupp and his son Jayden at the football several times last year, to say hello but also to let them know I wanted to write a story about them. We had a loose arrangement that I’d catch a train and drive home with them after the Elimination Final last year. I wanted to write a story about the joy of leaving the football after a win. I wanted to write about happiness etched on Jayden’s face. I wanted to write about a father and his son, returning home from a game together, floating on victory, their lives removed temporarily from everyday realities.

But Richmond lost, and a dream was over, and all us fans wanted for was solace, alone, to lick wounds. Phillip and Jayden went their way; I went mine. At the time, there was only misery in that loss. Only despair.

I met Jayden first at the Adelaide game last year. He has the sweetest laugh, the sweetest smile. He was parked in a wheelchair bay, alongside his father, and Wayne Bradshaw, 48, from Wonga Park, who explained: “I broke my back 20 years ago and I’ve been coming to the footy ever since. I could never see life after Richo. I’m an old Tiger, I know how my team can break my heart.”

I watched part of the game with them. Deledio lined up for a set shot and Phil asked: “Is he going to kick it, Jay?” Jayden’s big smile of approval had ‘yes’ written all over it. Lids kicked the goal and it was high-fives all around.

“When we’re watching at home its white chocolate after a goal,” says Phil. “A piece of white chocolate. He loves white chocolate.”

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Jayden at the MCG with his regular crowd, including Wayne on the right.

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Tigerman: A homemade Tiger toy given to Jayden by an elderly fellow Tiger supporter who sits a few seats up.

Standing alone at Etihad on Sunday night, among the North crowd, I warm to the occasion in the second quarter. Richmond kick goals. I see Trout on the TV monitor above. It’s my first viewing of Ivan this season, and this is reassuring. Dusty kicks around his body for a goal and pumps his fist and I pump my fist, too. Shane Edwards is like a pick-pocket up forward. And halfway through the second term I am proud of my team, and of Dusty, and think how so often they seem to play well when they’re off-Broadway – on a Sunday night, away, removed from the spotlight.

“C’mon North, pick up your game,” shrieks a woman nearby.

“Goldie, you’re getting towelled up, mate,” calls-out another.

“Stop whinging Aaron Black and GET THE FOOTY!”

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I had hoped to meet Phillip and Jayden at the game on Sunday night, but it wasn’t to be. Besides, I had my sister’s company. At quarter time, I had permission to meet her at the fence, and asked a stranger to take our photo. We must have looked a spectacle. I know she would be happy having such a fuss made over her. Family is everything to her. It is all she has.
At half time, in a light-headed mood, I asked if she’d like to join me in a visit to the Richmond cheer squad. I wanted to show her another football family. I wanted her to see how others celebrate football and the team they barrack for.

I cannot speak for other cheer squads, but what I like most about Richmond’s gathering is that it’s open to all. It is a family that looks after each other, and looks out for each other. I’ve thought often that a team is as good only as its weakest player, just as a club is as good only in how it looks after those most in need. Here is a beauty of football. All of us are equal as barrackers; we are as one in our passion for the game and our team. So long as we do not overstep certain rules and social mores, each of us has a place at the football.

It is a broad church, an accepting church, and a church that shelters so many who otherwise have so little voice in our community. The cliché is true. It is more than a game.

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Sunday night lights: (L-R) with big sis in the Richmond Cheer Squad (photo bombed by Yogi);
Ava Hosie, 5, all half-time smiles at the game with her grandparents;
on the wing filled with North members, “like a Tiger”.

For the second half, my sister and I are together at last. We find empty seats at the Coventry End, beside the Richmond cheer squad, and I raise my voice in approval, and my sister joins the orchestrated hand-clapping, and I remind her she need not barrack for my team. What I know about my eldest sister is that she’s easily swayed. She’s an easy target, easy to take advantage of. She wears her colours proudly, as she should. We knock knees. I tell her she needn’t feel afraid to shout out for North.

And this, in the second half, is her great good fortune.

All the play, all the celebration, all the joy and happiness, all the assured football is at their end. Nearby voices in the crowd tell of our sorrow.

“Where’s the microwave?”

“This is a MENTAL BREAKDOWN. It’s a BREAKDOWN.”

“What have they done to us?”

“I can’t see us coming back from here.”

“Bring the other team back.”

“C’mon Tigers, 34 years.”

“It’s a stupid game, anyway.”

Most of the commentary is good natured. There is shared resignation. We might have been up by six goals at half time, but none wearing yellow and black could sit easily with that. We are Richmond. We have history. We trade in heartbreak and disappointments. We can find the most careless of ways to lose a game.

In the last quarter, I find consolation trying to mark the ball behind the goals. I want a touch, a stat for the night. Others find consolation in gallows humour.

My big sister turns, and says: “This is not actually as feral as it is sitting around there in my seat.”

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We walk into the night together, my sister clutching my arm, unsteady on her feet, her voice hoarse, and on the way to the train and on the way from the station, I ask her to sing me the North theme song, and she delights in this. It intrigues that its lyrics include the word “recreation”. In an age of corporate football, it seems so quaint, so pure. It reminds that football is at its heart a pastime, a game, a winter folly, a bit of fun.

But there is little fun for us Tigers at the moment.

On Sunday afternoon, Stan Alves on ABC Grandstand radio gave a half-season report card on all clubs, and Richmond was the only team he adjudged a D. Fail. Of all the teams in the competition, we were an exception, as it seems our destiny is to be. Only us Tigers could manage to turn a game of football like that.

At game’s end I made my way to the nearby players’ race because I wanted to see the raw drama of the vanquished leaving the arena. Football, in times like these, it’s a blood sport. I wanted to see the body language of hurt. For these players, there must be a confusion of emotions: anguish, disappointment, shame, fear, resignation. Nothing feels as heavy in a football club as does the weight of loss.

What I hadn’t written in my notebook in the second half, was the invective from the Richmond crowd directed toward one of our own, Tyrone Vickery. Here was my dilemma. What’s to be gained in documenting this scorn? But if I don’t write it down, am I disregarding a truth? In times of recurring defeat, being a barracker is a fraught business.

But a lingering scene from the night came from the player’s race. Most of the participants had left the field. Damien Hardwick walked down the concourse – a lonely figure – and up above an incensed fan gave him a lungful of advice. “VICKERY CAN’T PLAY! VICKERY CAN’T PLAY!”

His voice was filled with venom and anger and spite and hurt, and a desperation that comes when a house of cards falls. His rage was powerful. It was a passion. But it made me think of how this club of ours is in such strife, pulling itself apart, filled with discord, in denial, bereft of answers, and now turning on itself. It was raw, and this rawness was honest and true.

On the way home I sent a tweet on the train: “I have a pain in my heart and its name is Richmond #noknowncure”

When going home, I thought of Philip and Jayden, and wondered how they might be feeling, what their response is to our club falling-in on itself. Would they ever turn their backs on the club? Could they ever look the other way? I think their hearts must be aching this winter.

My big sister came to our place to stay on Sunday night. I set her up to watch the replay of the second half, then turned away and ate half-a-tub of ice cream. She kept shouting out that she could see us in the crowd. She smiled and laughed. I was happy for her.

Tiger tiger burning (not at all) bright

Email: dugaldjellie@gmail.com

Twitter: @dugaldjellie

Dugald 10/06/2014Filed Under: dugald_14

On training at Punt Road & an unknowable match & Presentation Night #3

03/06/2014 By Dugald 5 Comments

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Tiger woman Ann Bakker, from Brighton, at training at Punt Road on Friday.

troutUnder an entirely blue sky, last Friday morning I caught a train to Punt Road Oval. It was my first training session of the year. I wanted to show support for my team, joining others at the fence in glorious sunshine. I wanted to know if our attendance – our enthusiasm – couldn’t yet help right this season from its confusion.

Trout was there. Lyn was there. Shelly was there. I met a woman visiting from Darwin for the Dreamtime game, now with her daughter and her four-month-old grandson. His name was Joel. I asked if he was named after Joel Bowden.

“Selwood,” said mum. “His dad’s Geelong.”

I went because there is an attraction in seeing the players – professional athletes – up close. I tell it how it is: they are beautiful. Young and immensely fit men in a physical prime of their life, in their bodies is a dream of what life once was, of what it could be, of how it may have been. They have unproblematic good looks. They are pharaoh boy-gods. They are what so many of us wanted to be.

dimmaAnd up close – away from the prism of television, the detachment of a stadium – they also become human. They are no longer names and numbers, lists on a stats sheet, “cattle” to be bought and sold at season’s end, appraised by all. Up close they again become young men. Young men with partners, wives, some with young children. Young men with ambitions and vulnerabilities, with pride and fear. Young men earning a precarious living, probably never feeling entirely secure in their job – despite a contract – knowing all the ways it could go wrong.

Brendon Gale walks the boundary in a crisp white business shirt. Dimma is in a black tracksuit, looking relaxed. I ask for a photograph and he obliges. I miss my opportunity to ask for a coffee catch-up.

On Friday morning I felt uncomfortable for having recently criticised the performance of some players. I owe Shaun Hampson, Troy Chaplin, Steve Morris – possibly others – an apology. What I see on Friday morning is that all players are trying in their own way, as hard as they can. Their mistakes are not deliberate. Their errors are not wilful.

I come to understand that from distance – watching from the stands, or through television glass – my heart has hardened. I’ve turned into a critic, and I do not want to be that person. Down that road leads only bitterness.

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On Saturday night I was reliant on others for the score, and to interpret the game. I was elsewhere; at a wedding, in Church Street, Richmond. It was a crowd mostly of medicos – all specialists – and at times I felt awkward. What have I done with my life? It was an evening of fine champagne, and introspection. None were probably too interested in football, despite the groom’s predilection for Hawthorn, mentioned in speeches.
Before the game, Skippygirl (@SatchSkippygirl) said she’d send quarter-time tweets. In her four messages is a summary of a night:
OK Dons 28-1 but maybe Tigers will get it together for 2nd quarter.
OK enjoy the wedding it aint pretty here
Enjoy the wedding :(
Oh dear, enjoy the dancing.
A tweet came also from Darren Crick, from Canberra: its not good mate… don’t look!
Chris Rees (the better half of TTBB) sent a text: Wish I was at a wedding too. Just terrible. 0-26.
And a text came from a mate, Dave: Sitting in a bar in Lombok watching game – beer in my hand. Got a great souvenir to take home – 9 stitches in face.
What happened, you OK? I replied.
His response: Got hit by an Essendon surfboard.
Then early on Sunday morning, Dave sent this: “Am listening to a call to prayer from local mosque… considering going down. Go tigs!

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I’ve not seen the game and am not sure I will. Advice via Twitter after midnight on Saturday seemed unequivocal.
@SatchSkippygirl: Don’t watch the replay, no no no no no
@jebsrock: do not watch the replay. It will be painful. #holidayinSeptember”
@Suzeme: I’ve already deleted the recording.
@BorisABLBuzz: At least it was easy to create a few hours free space on the DVD hard drive… #brutal #brokenrecord #hugme
@ReadingSideways: don’t watch it. We’ve seen it all before, too often.
@BAFLD: that’s 120 minutes you’ll never get back – I wouldn’t bother

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vale_hardwickMonday morning and in the letters-to-the editor section in The Age newspaper, between commentary about federal politics and capital punishment, Tom Pagonis (from Richmond) adds three words to the issues of the day: Vale Damien Hardwick.

It is surely a brutal business being the coach of one of the big teams in Melbourne, when the tide’s running against you. The losses are so public, the humiliation so complete. There is nowhere to hide, no way to air-brush the hard truth. The bottom line in football is that it’s all about results, and the only result that matters is winning. I feel for Dimma, I do, I do, I do.

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Wednesday night is Presentation Night at the Corner Hotel, featuring Cameron Ling and Paul Dempsey, lead singer and guitarist of rock group, Something for Kate. I hope to be there. August last year, when Richmond was winning and the love was being shared, I went to Presentation Night #2. What follows was my interpretation:

It was a night of beautiful nostalgia. Last Thursday at the Corner Hotel, in the bowels of Richmond, they were together at last: Matthew Richardson on stage with Tim Rogers, in a salon of football and music – two forms of creative expression Melbourne does best – hosted by a saint known as Francis, adept at bridging this cultural divide.

It was Presentation Night #2, the creation of music impresario and Pies fan, Andy Kelly, in collaboration with the latter-day ABC Grandstand commentator, Francis Leach. Earlier this season they had assembled player-writer Bob Murphy and musician-poet Paul Kelly together on the same stage, for magical results.

Now it’s standing-room only and the pairing of a Tiger legend with the You Am I front-man – a rackety shinboner – for a long conversation about playing days, and performance, the spotlight, greatness, and the very meaning of life itself. For people like me, who love their football, music and this city, it promised a night of pleasure.

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Richo, Francis and Tim at PN#2. All photos of PN#2 © Tony Proudfoot Photography

Some confessions. In 1994 I was a cub reporter working at The Age newspaper, living with a flatmate on the top floor of an apartment block on the brow of Lennox Street in Richmond (the ‘Loft on Lennox’, we called it), playing sport, drinking with the boys, partying on weekends, often playing a round-robin of squash with two mates on a weeknight, then the three of us running laps of the ’tan’ after midnight. We wanted to push our limits, hold onto the moment.

We fell asleep on summer nights under a glow of neon. We could see the whole city from our living room. It was a time when we thought anything could happen.

I was 24-years-old in 1994, and restless, and often between girlfriends, and unsettled, and was listening to an album called Sound as Ever released by a band called You Am I, with a lead singer called Tim Rogers whose life looked to have the creativity and freedom I desired. He was wild, unhinged, intoxicating. His lyrics had a yearning (“And anyone who’s looking out/Just waiting for tall guys to fall”) that resonated. He could put on a show. He could travel the world.

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Francis with a Bones shirt that was raffled to raise funds for injured footballer Casey Tutungi.

Instead, I wrote little stories for the newspaper. I was good at my job, but never fully at ease. Office life was a chore. I never felt part of the crowd. Looking back now, I think I had bouts of depression that I masked with bravado. I often felt vulnerable. I found happiness in bending words as best I could. I wanted to excel at my craft. In my own way – fearful, unknowing, sometimes reckless – I was careful with what I had.

One of my fondest memories of being at The Age was playing football. One of our games, in the annual media cup against News Limited, was on a Sunday morning at Punt Road Oval. I was young and tall and fit, playing centre-half-back. Rohan Connolly was coach. We wore the Richmond sash.

I’d played sport the day before, been out until the early morning, and had slept in a bed elsewhere. I threw-up in the change rooms before the game, and at half-time. I still have a photograph of me playing that day – all unruly hair and sideburns – lifting up a Herald-Sun player, readying to thump him into the ground. This is how I played football. I was angry. I had no time for pleasantries.

After the game, a colleague, Stewart Oldfield, gave me a lift home to his unit in Northcote where we watched Withnail and I, and I fell asleep on his lounge room floor. Next morning, my name was in the sport section of the paper. I was named a best player.

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Richo with his treasured possession, “The Map”.

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“They’re resilient and loyal, Richmond supporters,” says Richo, up on stage last Thursday night, before an adoring crowd, in a room that hung off almost his every word. He looked a natural performer; tall and handsome, and with an easeful and disarming manner. In a recent profile interview, Greg Baum wrote that Matthew Richardson looks “as if he expects something good is about to happen”, and this is how he is on Presentation Night #2. He tells his story about “getting off the boat” from Davenport with his new Melways – a wide-eyed boy coming to the big city – and all of us want to share in his success.

He is also funny, open, and self-deprecating. “I did like to express my body-language on the ground,” he says, wryly. Memorable anecdotes include the phone call he received from Leigh Matthews trying to coax him from Tasmania to Victoria Park; the day he wore the “map of Tassie” on his jumper in a representative game (“we disgraced the Apple Isle,” lambasted the coach, Robert Shaw); and the afternoon he had tea and biscuits at Denis Pagan’s house in Moonee Ponds, seeing if he might defect to Carlton.

Stories were told about playing against Glenn Archer (an “angry man”, “psychotic on the ground”, all “sharp elbows”, and “once you marked it he fell on top of you”); the fearlessness of the Kellaway boys, especially Duncan running back into the path of Tony Lockett and Gary Ablett (“those guys didn’t miss you if you were in the way”); and the crowd participation behind the Punt Road end goals, most notably from the so-called Grog Squad.

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In 1994, when Sound as Ever hit the charts, Richmond put together a decent team, and I saw Tim Rogers play an acoustic set in a pub in Fitzroy, a 19-year-old Matthew Richardson was in his second-year of AFL football, had found his feet, and showed all what he could do, while promising more. He kicked 56 goals that season.

I watched him play often, sometimes with ‘Yeatsey’, or with other friends who were MCC members, who wangled me in to the old Members’ stand. We walked across from Richmond Hill, stood in front of the stand, drank beer, called out to the players – and all the time I wondered what it would be like running around out there. If I were put on the field, and the ball came to me in space, could I hold my own?

This wondering, I think, must enthral many able-bodied men of an age when they could be a footballer, a contender.

Yeatsey also lived in Richmond, buying a house in Cotter Street, on the flatlands, where our bunch of friends often would end up on Saturday night. He was also a You Am I fan, and through a mutual friend who did occasional night-shifts on 3RRR, got tickets to see them play a prized gig at a club on Jazz Lane. A young Matthew Richardson was also there.

Richmond finished 9th in 1994, missing out of finals by percentage, from Melbourne and Collingwood. In the second-last home-and-away game I went with Yeatsey to see them play Carlton at Princes Park on a Saturday afternoon. We stood in the outer, on a warm day, among a crowd of 32,486 people. It was the Tigers’ last roll of the dice. We needed one win to get in the finals, but were to play Geelong in the last round. We could never beat Geelong.

I had been to a party the night before and had not slept a wink since the Thursday night. Our Tigers got flogged by 114 points. I went home to bed, and slept for two days.

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Tim cranks out Berlin Chair to close proceedings.

I could have stood all night, listening to Tim Rogers talk about football, his childhood growing up in Adelaide, his love for North Melbourne, and the day at the Sacred Heart Mission’s Community Cup, playing for the Espy Rockdogs against the 3RRR/PBS Megahertz, when he took an overhead mark and went back and kicked a goal, in front of his child and several thousand spectators.

I had most recently seen Tim Rogers on stage at the Regal Ballroom in Northcote, performing an evening of musical bohemia during last year’s football finals, and it left me flat. Not so last Thursday at the Corner Hotel. At Presentation Night #2 he was at his engaging and compelling best. He told stories about his father who on weekends was a field umpire; about being a teenager in the Sturt Football Club cheer squad (with Paul Bagshaw’s number on his duffle coat); and about life as a North supporter.

He sang a song about the Paragon Café in Goulburn – a Greek institution where I stop regularly on drives up-and-down the Hume, usually after a booth and lambs’ fry on the menu.

And showman that he is, Rogers provided the night’s two enduring memories. The first was an achingly raw monologue about life in Adelaide as a young man with an ongoing mental illness, and how for him salvation could be found in being passionate about something. “Live a life with heart,” he implored.

And the second came with the night’s final curtain. He picked up a guitar, sat on a stool front-of-stage, the lights dimmed, and he played Berlin Chair. I was 24 all-over again, and I didn’t want the night to end.

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byrne
Before this season began I received an email from Sydney-based Richmond supporter Richard Byrne. It contained this photograph:

His annotated caption: “Rome, January 2014. TOOK THIS WITH YOU AND THE BLOG AND THE TIGER DIARY AND RFC IN GENERAL ALL IN MIND. I OF COURSE TOOK IT AS A (GOOD) OMEN.”
Early last month, Richard emailed again with other tidings I’d like to share. “Been disappointing times for us tiges, battling on with both injuries and a hostile draw against us. None of us thought we’d be sitting 2-5 after Rd7, did we? What a great time for a bye, though…”

 

This present season… you can see us with a mope,

hanging from a rope

if we’re behind then we don’t mind 

we’ll fight and fight and…….. hope…….

So where to from here?

Where is our mythically powerful team?

Who are the characters – The Captain Bloods, The Rolls Royce King of Harts’ ? The Winners?

Who can pull the sword from this terrible stone?

Where are the merry men to lead us out of this dark forest, and who in turn shall lead them?

We need a man who has shed blood on the battlefield. Shows loyalty, follows orders, and leads only by example.

He wears the handsome, scarring near-death glory of a shuddering jousting head clash.

He risks head and skin and draws swoon and envy and respect and admiration at every turn.

Who is this Ace in our deck?

ARISE SIR RANCELOT !

and with him rise the cast of this fabled fairytale forward. 

Sir Ivan of Mullet, David of Astbury, The Jack of Riewolts, The Bacchus of Houli and arise too The Chaplin of Troy.

Arise Edwards The First

Arise Edwards The Second.

Arise the Two Blond Bombshells, Morris and Ellis, the Three Scarlet Pimpernels, Jackson, Vlastuin and Conca, the Four Scotch Guards, McDonough, McBean and McIntosh and Nathan@39Gordon and Nathan @42Foley

Arise The Cotchin of Trent, Sir Tyrone, Shaun of the Grigg, The Noble Batchelor, Doubtless Thomas, Grimes, Big Ben, Biggles, Lucky Pets, T42with SamLloyd, Chris the Elder, Flip Delidio, Service Hampson,  The Martin Lad, 

Intoducing Ben-John Lennon, Todd Elton-John, Bro’Hanlon, The Bigger O and the Matts Dea and Arnot,

Arise(please) Chris The Knight of Knights Knee.

But arise and go quickly good men of Richmond, 

for constant and confusing dangers are alurk.

Awrys things may go, you know, when the Jester is the Jake is the King.

Richard contributes to a blog (thebackpocket.blogspot.com.au) run by Mathilde de Hauteclocque, known well-enough to many Football Almanac readers. His sporadic contributions are filed under ‘The Tiger Diary’ which, he says, are a “slightly loopy look at the riches and routs of Richmond.” 

In these strange days, maybe loopiness is what we all need.

Tiger tiger, burning (not at all) bright

Email: dugaldjellie@gmail.com

Twitter: @dugaldjellie

Dugald 03/06/2014Filed Under: dugald_14, front, Uncategorized

A capital day with Jack & co at the football

27/05/2014 By Dugald 11 Comments

Grin and bear it: 'Richo's' first visit to Spotless Stadium, on the knee of Hanora

Grin and bear it: ‘Richo’s’ first visit to Spotless Stadium, on the knee of Hanora

On the road: a Capital Tiger rest stop at Sutton Forest. L-R Sean Gourlay, Trevor, Ryan Seecull, Denis Boutcher, Justin Heycox (centre), Sandra Brown, Samantha, Cassandra Hall.

On the road: a Capital Tiger rest stop at Sutton Forest. L-R Sean Gourlay, Trevor, Ryan Seecull, Denis Boutcher, Justin Heycox (centre), Sandra Brown, Samantha, Cassandra Hall.

“It’s a passion, and being part of something bigger than you,” says Ryan Seecull, 29, a Department of Finance policy analyst fresh from work on the Federal Budget, but for now a Tigers’ fan on his way to the game. “Singing the song after a big win, really there’s nothing better you could do.”

At 9.32am on Saturday, I caught a bus from Canberra – the country’s political heart – travelling north on the Federal Highway to a game held in the swing seats of western Sydney , and never before have I met such a disparate group of supporters made as one by the game and our club. As with the capital itself, here was an intriguing commingling of ideas, passion and life histories, joined for a single issue, and a cause all of us believe in.

From Northbourne Avenue, passing Lake George, Collector, Goulburn, Marulan, Mittagong, Campbelltown, on our way to Homebush Bay, all on board were stuck on Richmond.

“I flew down for Tommy Hafey last week,” says Seecull, who grew up in San Remo, near Phillip Island, and at school at nearby Newhaven College remembers when Hafey spoke to Year 10 students. “Maybe my support is a sort of homesickness. It’s a desire to belong to something that’s always been a part of my life.”

The Crick boys: Capital Tigers president Darren, with sons Cameron (L) and Nathan (R) - they're younger sister and mum stayed home for the day.

The Crick boys: Capital Tigers president Darren, with sons Cameron (L) and Nathan (R) – their younger sister and mum stayed home for the day.

On the bus on Saturday morning I joined with the Capital Tigers Supporter group, a band of displaced barrackers in a city with no team, and never before have I been among a Richmond crowd with such diverse life-stories, together as one.

“We’ve given Richmond people in the region a reason to gather,” says the groups’ president, Darren Crick, the son a boiler inspector who grew up watching his dad play on Saturday afternoons for the Gormandale Tigers in the North Gippsland Football League. “We’re a new supporter group, so we’re still finding our way and creating a link to the club. We’ve established a small community of supporters that we hope will grow as the word gets around.”

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Jack Riewoldt ought to catch public transport more often. “Journeys are the midwives of thought,” wrote armchair philosopher Alain de Botton on ‘The Art of Travel’. “Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape.”

A good "egg": known otherwise as Richard Bollard ("I picked Richmond because of the diagonal stripe on the uniform")

A good “egg”: known otherwise as Richard Bollard (“I picked Richmond because of the diagonal stripe on the uniform”)

To travel is to reflect, to ponder, to dream of what could be, of how many goals could be kicked.

All Richmond players ought to invest in a Myki. Catching a train or tram in Melbourne is a great leveller. It allows commuters to engage in a public space, to see their city from another vantage, to mingle with strangers. But it creates also a forced think-time, a moment of introspection.
Never before have I seen Jack’s hands so quick and sure. He was beaut to watch on Saturday. All Richmond fans who travelled to Spotless Stadium realised early in the game they were in for a treat. Jack was on. He had been publicly slighted. He was a lightning rod for all last week’s disappointments. And now on the field, he was here to let his football do the talking. It was a pleasure, a privilege to watch. For all Tigers in attendance, it was like a private party. Then in the last quarter, he pulled out a trick. Rather than chasing more records, he kicked backward to his captain.

There you go – whattya think of me now?

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On the road, driving up the Hume, I hear wonderful stories about a love for Richmond, and a connection to a game that knits people together.

020 Impromptu committee meeting: Alison Neil and Shaun, an hour-and-a-bit from Sydney.

Impromptu committee meeting: Alison Neil and Shaun, an hour-and-a-bit from Sydney.

There’s Cassandra Hall, 51, whose father Len played centre-half-back for Melbourne High before kicking 26 goals for the Richmond reserves in 1959, then playing in Oakleigh before his job as a bank clerk took him to Heyfield; a star recruit in the Latrobe Valley League. Cassandra was born in the old timber town, with early memories of away games at ovals in Sale, Maffra, Bairnsdale and Traralgon, returning home for spaghetti Bolognese and to watch the Saturday night VFL replay.
She moved to Melbourne to study medieval languages, lived in share houses in North Carlton, North Fitzroy and Northcote, and for a few years turned her back on football. Still, as a 19-year-old, she bought a $5 standing room ticket to the 1982 Grand Final, and went with her mother and young sis, Kirsten.

All changed in 1995. “I saw Wayne Campbell and I was just smitten,” she says. “Ever since that time I followed Wayne Campbell all the way through, all through those lean years. I just fell back in love with it.”

Contact details: written on the shirt

Contact details: written on the shirt

On the bus our conversation is about Chaucer, pilgrimage, historical fantasy, Celtic heritage, the Orkney Islands, Vikings, the shared and private grief of cancer, and the Cotch Crew. She’s a member. And she reads Old Norse, Old English and Middle English. I think this is wonderful.

Here is a dichotomy in our lives. After years of moving about, Cassandra has found herself in Narrabundah (“Canberra’s a much better size for me”), working as a live-in nanny (“after years of looking after a lot of children it’s just lovely to be one-on-one”), for friends who cannot understand our game. “Allan calls it barracking for footy,” she says.

For her, here is a belonging and something with a deep connection to family. “Once you get really devoted to a team, that’s your tribe,” she says. “You have something in common with other people, even though you might have nothing in common with them. I don’t watch any other games. It’s only Richmond.”

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Five-star companionship: Greg Watt (yes, he knows its a good name for an electrician), on arrival at Homebush.

Five-star companionship: Greg Watt (yes, he knows its a good name for an electrician), on arrival at Homebush.

All about Saturday afternoon was a fabulous novelty. The balmy weather, a carnival atmosphere, spectators in shorts, one wearing a Hawaiian shirt with pink flamingos. Demountables doubled as ticket booths. The Giants theme song played out before the game, sounding like Russian marching music. There were children’s jumping castles within the ground, and motor-cross riders doing stunts on the ground afterwards. The Richmond banner was raised. The cheer squad, bless them, misspelled ‘Deledio’ on his 200th game. His vowels, they get confusing.
Steve Morris lined-up in a forward pocket (kudos to Hardwick for the switch, bouquets to Morris for making it work). Jack kicked goals. Martin and Thomas were like bulls at the ball. Griffiths led hard, taking strong grabs. Jack kicked another. McDonough gave run off the backline. Jack kicked more six-pointers. Vickery was in good positions. Jack slotted another. Rance mopped up across the back half, Chaplin found touch. Jack marked, and kicked straight. Ellis was everywhere, Conca was lively. And Jack was at the end of everything.
At half time I ate a kebab. Never have I watched a Richmond game feeling such relief, with such insouciance. Never have I seen Richmond play before such a small home-and-away crowd. In this boutique stadium, it added to the occasion. There was a sense of intimacy, a refreshing informality.
After so many weeks of disappointment, this felt like a party. My breath, it smelled of garlic.

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Smiles in the crowd: a section of the Capital Tigers at the GWS game.

Smiles in the crowd: a section of the Capital Tigers at the GWS game.

I swap seats on the bus. I sit beside Sean Gourlay, 37, born in Adelaide, schooled in Tasmania (“I used to follow the Hobart Tigers”), and then moving to Duntroon. His dad played the tuba in the Army band. Sean’s a school teacher, but for now mostly a stay-at-home dad to Bella, 5, Evie (“turning three next week”), and Vivienne (“almost 11 months”). We share notes on house husbandry. I do more cooking, Sean has more children, our youngest were born on the same day. He joined as a Richmond member last year, and takes an active role on the Capital Tigers’ committee.

I meet Sandra Brown, who after years away working government jobs in indigenous affairs in Darwin and Canberra has taken a redundancy and is going home. “We’re driving down to Tasmania next weekend via the Dreamtime at the G game,” she says. “Our whole life revolves around the football.”

Encouraging half-time scoreboard.

Encouraging half-time scoreboard.

For her, Canberra was always a stopover, although after 12 years in the far north she says she’s come to love the city’s civic nature and its whereabouts. “We can do things like drive down to Wangaratta to watch the pre-season game against Collingwood,” she says. “And being part of this group has been really good value.”

I have a long chat with Richard Bollard, 54, a Canberra native who studied philosophy at La Trobe University, lived in a share house in Rowena Parade on Richmond Hill, and works now for the Australian Mathematics Trust. Out of hours, he’s a moderator on the Yellow and Black Richmond fan forum, where he’s known otherwise as “egg”.
“I tend to spend a lot of time on the site putting out fires,” he says. “Some see me as a cheerleader for the club.”

Local support: Sydney Tiger Fran Doughton, and baby Hattie, in the crowd.

Local support: Sydney Tiger Fran Doughton, and baby Hattie, in the crowd.

He explains terms such as “lurkers” (people like me who often read such sites but don’t post) and “spiders”, and we discuss “Gimme”, a much-appreciated regular correspondent with TTBB who has an occasional diary on yellow and black, and recently posted a heartfelt tribute to Tommy Hafey (among other things, it noted he was paid a record $25,000 wage in 1977 to coach Collingwood).

Also on the bus is Denis Boutcher, 57, born in Yass and now in Queanbeyan, who started following Richmond in 1969 (“one of my favourite players was Royce Hart”) and says he tries to get to Melbourne at least once a year for a three-game football weekend. And there’s Carol Anderson, a retired librarian, born in Bealiba near Dunnolly in central Victoria, who explains her Richmond affiliation thus: “I had this very nice head master at primary school”. A Tigers man, no doubt. And Greg Watt, 52, a ‘sparkie’ born in Brisbane to Melbourne parents (“mum lived up the road from Geoff Strang”) who’s a self-confessed sports tragic with a team in his chosen competitions (South Sydney, Brumbies, Manchester United, Oakland Athletics, Boston Celtics and the Pittsburgh Steelers, “because of the colours”).

But of all connections to Richmond, the story told by Justin Heycox, 41, I find the most intriguing. Born in Forster, on the central-north coast of New South Wales – rugby league heartland – he came to know about Richmond through one of his mother’s friends, who she played squash with. They were relocated Melbournians, Richmond people, and as a boy Justin found himself at their house watching the broadcast of a single VFL game on a Saturday afternoon on the New England Network channel. It was 1982. He was seven years old.

At school in Taree, he played soccer and like all his classmates had a league team. “But I also used to enjoy watching this black and gold team.”

Fast-forward to 1995 and he joined the Navy, and for four months in training was posted to HMAS Cerberus in Crib Point, and was associating with trainees from the southern states who spoke only of one sporting language. Soon after, his rugby league team, the North Sydney Bears, were subsumed by Manly in a lop-sided merger, and the die was cast.
He became a convert, and a Richmond fan, and his wife and three daughters know when his team is playing he is hardly worth talking to. “It was the passion of supporters and the size of the crowds that really opened my eyes to what sport is all about.”

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Go Jack: Rory ("His arms got a workout"), Neve and Darcy at the ground, with their homemade banners and a pleasing scoreline (pic sent via Twitter by mum Kelda Murray).

Go Jack: Rory (“His arms got a workout”), Neve and Darcy at the ground, with their homemade banners and a pleasing scoreline (pic sent via Twitter by mum Kelda Murray).

Some points of interest about the game (apart from the Jack Riewoldt show – a denouement on this past week that just may rewrite the season’s script). Credit where it is due, Shaun Hampson showed he can play. We all knew he could tap-ruck, but at last he took marks around the ground. They were overhead, one was contested; they made a world of difference. Good on him for turning it around.

Matty Dea, the gloved-one, came into the team and looked immediately to belong. He is composed, has quick hands, is creative with the ball, and linked-up well with team mates. A spot in the back line is all his for the taking.

Here was a game that buoyed the confidence of the team because all got touches, all were involved. Bumps, tackles, blocks, bounces, punches – all the little things were done well, to create the bigger picture. Foley, Edwards, Houli, Lennon – all were busy, all were industrious. Stevie Morris got the fewest touches, but it doesn’t matter when you see how he mans a mark, arms flailing about, creating a spectacle of himself, a distraction, with loose strapping tape on his shoulder looking like an epaulette.

It was good also to see Deledio raised on shoulders and carried from the ground. He is a champion of ours; and this need be acknowledged. When this happens, I always note the bearers. It reveals playing group dynamics. On Saturday, the lift was orchestrated by the team’s oldest player, Nathan Foley. Under one leg was his good friend, and business partner, Shaun Grigg. Under the other was a player who most Richmond supporters have come to empathise with because, rightly or wrongly, he’s the one who most displays his emotions on the field, who most looks as though he cares. He’s also a greatest advocate for public transport.

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At the game I spent time sitting with Cheryl Critchely, a keen Tigers woman (see http://www.footyalmanac.com.au/my-son-hates-footy/ for explanations) and ask about her advocacy work with the recently-formed AFLFA. I call by the cheer squad and buy a fund-raising pin badge, and ask about the whereabouts of Trout. I bump into Fran Doughton and her daughter Hattie, from the Sydney Richmond Tigers Supporter Group, and she says their pre-game function with Kevin Sheedy was a success. And by complete happenstance, I sit in front of Sean Ross, who also blogs about Richmond (see http://rfcramble.blogspot.com.au/), and who I looked up when I last watched Richmond play in Sydney.

And I spent half the game sitting with a friend who in school days was captain of Xavier’s 1st XVIII, a long and lean fellow – the Dylan Grimes type – who has half-back flank written all over him. The thought of his playing days I find of equal interest to his academic career in architectural history. With his young family, they’ve just moved up to Sydney for a plum job. He’s a Tigers’ man, married to a Tiger woman (also with a PhD, in history and medieval religion) with their two young Tiger children. Their eldest, Hanora, brings ‘Richo’ to the game, a handmade bear knitted by a great aunt.
It’s ‘Richo’s’ first trip to Spotless Stadium.

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Big thank you to Darren Crick and Alison Neil (I wrote about her in a blog post last year) for the seat on the Capital Tigers bus. In coming weeks I’ll mention more about the quiet and generous work their committee does. They’ve been great supporters of TTBB. It was a marvellous way to get to the footy (although my note-taking was very much distracted by the replay on the bus TV monitor of the 1974 Grand Final – “many rate this as the Tigers best ever side,” says Ron Barrassi, in the introduction – and part replay of the 1969 Grand Final).

Two things: I would like to make this road trip an annual affair (they have another for the Swans game). And if all Richmond supporter groups – Ballarat, Geelong, Gippsland, Hobart, North Central Victoria, NW Tasmania, the cheer squad, Queensland, SE Melbourne, South Australia, Sunraysia, Sydney and Western Australia – were ever to gather at Punt Road for a big night of trivia, I know which table I’d join. This is of no disrespect to the cheer squad.
But, Delidio?

Tiger Tiger Burning (again) Bright

Email: dugaldjellie@gmail.com

Twitter: @dugaldjellie

Punt Road End alias: grubberkick (I’m a ‘lurker’)

Yellow & Black alias: tigertigerburningbright (again, ‘lurker’)

Has Trout spawned a love-child with the Mullet? No, it's Sydneysider Hugo McKay, 8, at the game.

Has Trout spawned a love-child with the Mullet? No, it’s Sydneysider Hugo McKay, 8, at the game.

The drive home: Scott Plunkett and his father leave Homebush all smiles, in style in their canary-yellow 1981 mini Moke.

The drive home: Scott Plunkett and his father leave Homebush all smiles, in style in their canary-yellow 1981 mini Moke.

Dugald 27/05/2014Filed Under: dugald_14

A lament for Richmond (& how the club broke my heart)

22/05/2014 By Dugald 17 Comments

tommy_alanSchwab

Tommy in the race at Punt Road Oval with a young Alan Schwab, 1969. Reposted from Cameron Schwab’s blog.

A dead man cannot win a game of football. A dead man cannot save a club.

A Collingwood fan told of the news. On Twitter, @jimmythedragon sent a message: thinking of you tonight. If ever the Tiger needs to burn bright, it’s tonight. We shared the great man with you. #respect

Late last Monday night I was alone and driving through the stilled city and thinking of Tom Hafey, of the person I imagined him to be, and thinking of church bells on Richmond Hill and flags at half mast, and thinking how this city already seemed lonelier. Tommy had died. An era was over.

I thought also how his death might galvanise a club. It might be the catalyst for a club to find something within itself – a resolve and fortitude – that’s been absent all season, and for too many years. I thought his death might mean something. It could be a turning point.

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Three weeks ago, after the Hawthorn loss, I wrote about trust. “Trust and belief seem to have broken at our club, so quickly and readily after the dream of last season. Trust between players. Trust between coaches. Trust between fans. Trust within the club. Trust in football. Trust in something we hold dear.”

Saturday’s defeat left Richmond supporters raw with loss and disillusionment. Ideas of trust and belief, loyalty and patriotism, were questioned among fans. Most called for changes. Some called for heads to roll. Many called for unity, to stand firm behind the club and its chosen path.

What’s gone unsaid is that trust begins at the top. When Caroline Wilson confirmed Richmond boss Brendon Gale gave an hour-long presentation for Andrew Demetriou’s vacant position, this trust was loosened. My disappointments aren’t about Brendon, but for Richmond fans with blind faith and loyalty to him, who stand unquestioningly behind him.

Brendon Gale was a courageous Richmond player, and is recognised as a successful and popular CEO of the club, and I believe him to be a fair-minded and astute manager, and I would not deny him his private ambitions. But what does his pitch for the top AFL job say about his duty to Richmond? For us outsiders, it can be read only as duplicity.

He is Richmond, until a better offer presents. Rightly or wrongly, it is a signal that percolates down. And in a time of crisis, his wavering of trust resonates beyond its circumstances. If his heart is tempted by another offer, why should ours remain true?

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THclub_montage

Left: Glory days: The Pickering brothers (Michael and Justin), on stage with Dale Weightman and former Jack Titus medal recipients Trent Nichols, Craig Smith and Michael Mitchell, with MC Jon Ralph, at the Tommy Hafey Club lunch.
Center:
On the couch: The three playing recipients of the Jack Titus medal (who’ve not won the Jack Dyer medal) – Nathan Foley, Dustin Martin and Chris Newman.
Right:
Tigers of old: Mike Perry, Richmond’s 1967 Premiership centre-half-backman standing before the ready smile of his coach, at the recent Tommy Hafey Club lunch at Punt Road.

The sky was crying.

Three weeks ago, on a Friday, I knotted a tie and caught a train to Richmond and with a broken umbrella walked to Punt Road for a luncheon held by the Tommy Hafey Club. Along the way I met a man getting wet and shared with him my brolly. We introduced ourselves. His name was Gary Arnold, and he once played for Richmond. Thirteen games in the 1963-64 seasons. Five wins, seven goals.

He played in the second-last VFL match ever held at Punt Road Oval.

The day before the lunch, news was that Tommy Hafey was back in hospital after complications following surgery to remove a brain tumour in early March.

“Tommy’s not too flash,” said the straight-talking Mike Perry (53 games in the yellow-and-black, including the 1967 Grand Final coached by Hafey, and now president of the Richmond Former Players’ and Officials’ Association). He said he had visited Tommy in hospital and his message was simple. “Make sure we all get behind the players, the coach and the club.”

I was invited to Richmond’s business network club by Sonya, a committee member, a passionate Richmond woman, and someone keen to contribute to the betterment of our club. Sitting beside her, at a table with her friends, it’s inspiring to see how an organisation can bring people together, and help look out for its own.

As she said in an email this week: “When the Committee gets together again (next function is July 11), I’ll be motivated to make the Tommy Hafey Club grow and fly now that he’s gone – uphold Tommy’s values and support the past players and history of the club. All I can do.”

For anyone Richmond, it was a wonderful luncheon. The day’s theme was Jack Titus and his eponymous medal as the club’s best-and-fairest runner-up. Football journalist Jon Ralph was MC, and guests included current players Chris Newman, Dustin Martin (“Got some more skulls tattooed on my arms”, “I just love being out there with the boys”), and Colac-boy Nathan Foley.

Warm nostalgia filled the room when past Jack Titus medal recipients Craig Smith (1986), Michael Mitchell (1988) and Trent Nichols (1990) joined the stage, sharing stories variously about KB, the General, the Flea, TJ, Matty Knights, U19s coach Doug Searle, and “tough times at Richmond”.

Sandy Bay recruit Trent Nichols, who played at four league clubs and was traded from Tigerland to West Coast (“We were so well-funded over there the players used to call it Hollywood”), had only fond memories of his Punt Road days. “I think without a doubt this place is unbelievable,” he said. “This place would just rock.”

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Rightly or wrongly, in times like this, our football club is all about the “four walls”. Those on the inside create a siege mentality. It keeps barrackers at arm’s reach. It separates those within the club from disparate outside voices. It constructs a dichotomy; “us” versus “them”.

Last year I wrote a weekly blog about what it means to be a Richmond supporter that for much of the season was published on the club’s website. It was a wonderful opportunity that gave much pleasure, mostly from fans who shared their stories that in turn I shared with others. It was an exercise in community. It was about building trust. I was open and honest in who I was and what I was trying to do. Most of all, I wanted to help and contribute to something that for so long has given me so much pleasure.

But the exercise ultimately was soured by disappointments, all which came from my dealings with “the club” and in particular with Simon Matthews, its general manager of media and stakeholder relations. Maybe I’ve lived a charmed life, but rarely before have I encountered someone so brusque and overbearing. At every turn, he put my nose out of joint.

Matthews is a football bureaucrat. He’s part of an industry gotten fat from corporate dollars. He faces none of the intense public scrutiny borne by players and coaches. He came to Punt Road from Essendon. His brother is GM of the GWS Giants. He’s part of the boys club culture that David Koch, chairman of Port Adelaide Football Club, remarked upon after his first season in the AFL system.

Simon Matthews is well-renumerated for his work at the Richmond Football Club. My contributions were voluntary.

Of all the missteps between us, two stand out. One came after I introduced myself to a players’ partner at a game, and asked whether I could sit beside her at a game and write about it from her perspective. She seemed receptive to the idea. She gave me her business card. I said I’d be in contact.

Two days later, on a Monday morning, I received a terse phone call from Matthews, admonishing me for approaching this woman and accusing me of putting her in an uncomfortable and awkward position. He said she had felt “ambushed”. He said if ever I wanted access to anyone at the club I need put it in writing.

This partner was not a club employee and, anyway, all previous emailed requests for club access (say, for contact details of long-serving members, or for past players) were routinely ignored.

Regardless, I wrote a 609-word request asking for access. The reply was five words: “XXXX is unavailable for interview”.

I was happy to let the matter rest – our second child was imminent – although out of courtesy I emailed this players’ partner apologising if I’d caused her any distress, and assuring her it wasn’t my intention.

Her reply was immediate: “I want to apologise for what the RFC has said to you. As I never once said that I did not want to be interviewed by you, they said it would be best if I did not. I am quite annoyed that they have tried to put this on me as I never said that you put me in an uncomfortable or awkward position. As I said to you I would have been more than happy to do it for you aslong as it was OK with [XXXX]. So please know that none of this has come from me.”

Months later I asked Simon Matthews why he lied to me. I said there was no need. If the club didn’t want me sitting at a game with one of the so-called WAG’s then all it had to do was say so. He didn’t need to berate me. All I was trying to do was be inclusive, to spread goodwill.

Then several weeks later, returning from Sydney and the game at the SCG, I knew I could no longer offer my services to the club. It was all prompted by a whiteboard.

In a video episode of ‘Inside Tigerland’, Matthew Richardson was filmed in an office with a whiteboard on a wall behind him. The board charted the weekly routine of the club’s website. On Fridays, under “Dimma’s presser” was written “Dugald’s flog”. I learned last season the word ‘flog’ was a derogatory term, much used in football. One letter – blog becoming flog – caused much hurt.

All last season, I spent many hours and days – and my own resources – compiling unpaid words about the players and supporters of our club. I was trying to create something that would enhance its social capital. I wanted to try and help the club in the best way I knew how. And yet within the club’s “four walls”, among the security of its paid employees, here is what they really thought.

It was tactless and unfair, but also revelatory.

I told a friend – a tiler by trade, a Hawthorn member – and his immediate response was if the club thought this about me, imagine what they privately thought about those in the cheer squad, or other passionate fans. It was disrespectful to me, but more pointedly, it was disrespectful to all fans I had written about; all who were willing to share their Richmond stories.

I write this as a salutary warning; for the club, and to any who might also knock on its door, wanting to contribute. A fish rots from the head. I could never again be a member of a club that condones this sort of message; that’s not open and truthful, kind-hearted to its own.

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We could be heroes: An image of Richmond before many of us were born – coach Tom Hafey chaired on the shoulders of others, on the MCG, after winning the 1969 Grand Final.

In a week of Tommy Hafey eulogies, and our public humiliation before a swollen crowd at the MCG, all eyes were on Richmond. This was to be our week of celebration, and recognition of honest and hardworking values that once made our club from a hard-luck suburb an organisation to be feared and admired. We were proud to be Richmond. Our associations with the club meant something.

Of all the words written about Hafey last week, stories by Matt Zurbo in The Footy Almanac and Rhett Bartlett in The New Daily ring the truest. Both illustrate the character of the man, his loyalty and generosity.

Tributes penned by Greg Baum place his legacy beautifully into the tapestry of this city. On Saturday, in a single sentence, he recalled a story that’s the pith of why so many of us have loved football types like Hafey. “Bob Rose once told of arriving at Victoria Park during the reserves match on his first day down from Nyah West, seeing the terraces packed with people despite the soaking rain, and thinking that he would always owe it to them to be dedicated.”

In Sunday’s paper, Tim Lane quoted from Elliot Cartledge’s ‘The Hafey Years’, recounting an era that “..echoes parts of a long-gone Melbourne, whereby champion sportsmen owned milk bars or pubs or worked nine-to-five in offices or in a trade. The city lived for football and stopped for football.
“And with four flags in eight seasons, soaring crowds, headline after headline and a host of football names, the Tigers – for a moment in time – ruled the land.”

Of Richmond’s on-field loss on Saturday, Sean Ross’s weekly blog is a must-read. Here is the voice of the exasperated fan. His is the visceral emotion, the silent betrayal, all of us felt on Saturday night. It is also a personal expose on an emptiness a generation of Richmond fans must feel. For those of Ross’s age, there have been no golden years at Richmond, no grand finals, no true champions, no lingering success. For his generation, the story of Richmond is a story mostly in failure.

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First memories often are the truest, and my first awareness of Tommy Hafey was in the late 1970s as Collingwood coach; a stoic figure of manliness, all torso, in his tight t-shirt with its trio of shoulder stripes in the chill of the three-quarter time huddle, among players in black and white dressing gowns emblazoned with the word ‘YAKKA’. To a boy, he seemed an embodiment of strength and masculinity. He looked a leader of men; a hero.

Thinking about Tom Hafey now, he was a footballing identity in our city who for many was a household name, and probably will be for years to come. His death was front page news. Jack Dyer, Lou Richards, Bob Davis, Tom Hafey, Ron Barassai – time will one day catch them all, these footballing men who have inspired so many others with their feats, with their examples of how life could be lived.

Unlike Sean Ross’s generation of Richmond fans, I have the 1980 premiership and 1982 grand final to cherish. I attended both games, not yet a teenager, with hand-made floggers and a boyish enthusiasm for my club and its team. I have Francis Bourke, Jim Jess, Kevin Bartlett and Michael Roach to remember.

A generation before mine has the glory days – the Hafey years – that cast still a distant shadow. After so many years of mediocrity, four premierships came, and a lineage that saw 20 of his former players go on to become coaches, three of whom won premierships elsewhere.

The aura of Hafey is in the numbers. For all in the crowd at last year’s elimination final, think about this. In 1977, after Hafey switched from Richmond to Collingwood after learning of disloyalty in the Punt Road boardroom, the Round 4 game between these two clubs drew a crowd of 91,936. They came for the love and respect of Hafey. Collingwood won by 26 points, and from a wooden spoon would play in a drawn grand final. No wonder his players were ‘Hafey’s heroes’.

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On a Friday night last year, in round two, sitting alongside Troy Chaplin’s parents, I unwittingly found myself seated in front of Beverley March, wife of then club president, Gary. She was generous company – good natured – and introduced me to her companions for the night. One was Brendan Gale’s wife, the other was Maureen Hafey. I was struck by an abiding sense of respect. When introduced to Maureen, my immediate response was to comment that I was seated before Melbourne royalty.

In a society that at least pretends to be egalitarian, to offer a fair go to all, Tom and Maureen seemed the sort of people who rightly could be put on a pedestal. Not that they’d want to be. In days before the corporatisation of football, before television turned it into a mass entertainment and flooded it with money – before all the middle-men and their vested interests – there were people like

Hafey on modest wages with modest expectations who were servants to the game. They acted with dignity. They respected their standing in society. They had no need for aggrandisement.

On that Friday night last year, I did what any civil person does. I introduced my two companions for the night – Gary and Kathy Chaplin – to the three women sitting behind me. It struck me as odd. The parents of the club’s star new recruit from Port Adelaide had never met the wives of the club’s CEO and president. A divide stood between them.

Looking about the section reserved for the WAG’s and the players’ parents, there seemed no unity of companionship. No shared sense of purpose, like you might get among parents on the sideline of a junior football game.

Maybe I am overly social among strangers. My thought at the time was that a strong club and a happy club would engender a strong sense of belonging among this group. There would be camaraderie. There would be inclusion. If a player and his immediate social circle are happy off the field, they’re more likely to be happier on the field.

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Football is a brutal business. All the goodwill created by the club last season is now a distant memory. Fans feel disillusioned, cheated. Talk this week by some of the players and the club hierarchy of still playing finals football feels only like an insult to our intelligence. It feels like denial. We knew after the Footscray game, something was wrong. Heavy losses to Collingwood and Hawthorn did nothing to change this perception.

Our coach after last weeks’ game looked like a man on the edge of a breakdown. Never before have I seen him look so despondent. He looked like someone who had come to realise that something he had built and believed in – something he had trusted – was no longer true.

I only hope Dimma can work through it. I worry his insular viewpoint – the “four walls” – cannot help him in a time of crisis. I wonder how he can find it within himself to turn this around.

I think this week about loyalty and patriotism, and dissenting views, and frank criticism, and think each of us need find our own path through this collective disappointment. I think of Sonya and the role she plays in the Tommy Hafey Club, and her resolve to double her efforts to try and make the club the best place she can. I think also of 24-year-old Sean Nestor, from near Berwick, who sent me a heartfelt letter he wrote (I will publish it next week) about the despair he feels about his club. I think of all the Richmond fans I’ve met this past 18 months, and wonder how they’ve responded to this adversity.

I think all I can do is show my colours.

I will go to the next open training session in Punt Road, to show the players I care. And this Saturday morning I’ll catch a bus from Canberra to the GWS game with the Capital Tigers, to report on a supporter group who show they care.

It is all I can do. It’s a thing about Richmond; it gets into your marrow.

Tiger tiger burning (far from) bright.
Email:  dugaldjellie@gmail.com

Twitter: @dugaldjellie

Dugald 22/05/2014Filed Under: dugald_14

Round 7: On playing Geelong, and other things.

08/05/2014 By Dugald 12 Comments

howson

Football cultural expression #985: A long-sleeved Tiger (an olden-day Brett Deledio, with no elbows?) painted by artist Nick Howson – a Pies man – on a public wall beside the Swan Street entrance to Richmond Station. His unauthorised artwork is titled ‘Tiger Legend’, and Melbourne is all the richer for Nick’s audacity.

dimmeys

Our hour of need: the timepiece on the yellow and black Dimmey’s (or is it Dimma’s) clock tower is either broken, or reads one minute to midnight. It seemed an omen before Sunday’s game.

The season’s narrative shifted last Sunday. After six games filled mostly with disappointment and resignations, in the scrim of cold rain at last there was hope. This is what the business of football is about. Our everyday is suspended for two-and-a-half hours each weekend during the football season, during which our trust and dreams are carried by others.

Alex Rance and Brett Deledio, we thank you. For your contributions last Sunday, and we hope it’s the beginning of a run of games that brings collective fulfilment to all who’re Tigers.

On Sunday afternoon, I had expected a narrative of despair. I chose not to attend the game. I had challenged my team to win (a pact really, only with myself), saying if they did I would walk from Punt Road to Kardinia park in a pair of Richmond socks bought recently from the Tigerland Superstore. They cost $18, are a half-size too small, and for me were a purchase charged with symbolism. The shop assistant, she looked underwhelmed.

gulls

Birds on a day of cats: the crowd is inside the ground, the game has started, the seagulls gather outside.

But then the game arrives and I cannot stand still, so under heavy clouds I ride through Richmond because I know in my heart I want to be at the game. Football makes us like children. I stand outside the MCG in the rain as the game begins. I listen to the crowd inside. I see people I know. I take photographs of seagulls. I find a keyhole where I can look down the ground’s spine. And then I turn my bicycle for Brunton Avenue, for the ride home in the rain.

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A game’s narrative can be deceptive. On the television, late in the second quarter, Richmond are yet to kick a goal and are down by 30-odd points when I pick up the telecast, and it looks as if all my imaginings were to come true. Then late on Sunday night I watched the replay, and it’s obvious we weren’t nearly as bad as the score-line suggested. Football needs context. For most of the first half, we held our own, but they took most of their chances.

And then Jack did what Jack does best; he ignited the spark. And then Brett Deledio (oh how we’ve missed him, and oh how dashing he looked in those long sleeves) did what he does best; he started the fire. Two goals in two minutes, and how us Richmond fans love a little passion, a little emotion, a little feeling in our footy.

Anything seems possible when the Tigers are up-and-running. Hope spreads among the crowd; it’s shared like wildfire.

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In these recent dark hours, these past few days I’ve felt the Tiger love, and all I can do is reciprocate. Last Friday, a keen supporter of TTBB had me as her guest to a Tommy Hafey Club luncheon at Punt Road, which was a treat in so many ways. I’ve never been to the Maurice Rioli Room before. Dustin Martin was interviewed on stage. Former players offered fond and candid insights into their days at Richmond. I met Joel Bowden. I felt a connection with my club.

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Glum skies, bright lights: a view from outside the MCG as the game started on Sunday.

I will write a report on the luncheon, and the fundraising activities of the Tommy Hafey Club, shortly. It was an occasion made all the more poignant with the ailing health of Tommy; with lingering thoughts another generation is soon to pass, and with it go all its dreams and memories.

On Monday I was in contact with the Capital Tigers supporter group who are running a bus from Canberra to Sydney on Saturday 24 May for the game against GWS. Darren Crick is the man to see, for a seat. One of the highlights of my season last year was catching a bus with the Gippsland Richmond Supporter Group, from Morwell to the MCG. I wrote a story about it. Before the Round 10 game I will get to Canberra, then catch the bus with the Capital Tigers. A story awaits. If you live in the district, why not join in?

I met Darren briefly last year at a Sydney Richmond Tigers supporter group function, before the game against Sydney. He said it’d been a quiet trip up; he’d forgotten the DVD of the 1980 Grand Final. What would be your favourite Richmond game to relive on a road trip?

The Sydney Tigers are hosting a pre-game function at the GWS game, starting 11.30am at the Horden Room, at the Olympic Park Showgrounds. Tickets are $35, which includes food and entertainment. Nick Daffy is the special guest. Their function last year was a beauty – and a full house! See their website to book tickets. I hope to wangle my way into the room; for the purposes of investigative journalism, to document all the ways us Tigers express our attachment to our team and to our club.

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Alex Rance thrilled us all on Sunday afternoon, with his passion, mongrel, deep overlaps, and run off the ball. We all knew he was a good player – fearless, daring, quick, creative – but somehow in this past month we had forgotten he was that good. We saw Alex Rance on Sunday through new eyes, and gained a new appreciation of what he can do and what he adds to this team. My lingering memory of the game was his concession of a free kick on the Members’ wing, for a full-frontal assault on Joel Selwood. This act would likely not be included in ‘Dimma’s Dissection’ on the club’s website, but for me it was an act that could well mark the season’s turning point.

It was a one-man show of defiance, of retribution.

Alex Rance decided he was no longer to be bullied and pushed-about by Geelong. We are no longer their whipping boys. He was willing to give away a free-kick and I for one was happy for him to do so. There was venom in what he did. It was a statement of intent. It was a considered gesture that I think showed leadership and pride in who he is and what he does. Missing for so long because of an off-field mishap, Rance played like someone seeking forgiveness from his teammates, his club, and us supporters. His absence was sorely missed during our time of crisis.

The time has come for him to put his head down and play hard and committed football. He again won our respect on Sunday. But this is not yet the end of the deal.

Brett Deledio looked as slippery as an eel on Sunday. Notwithstanding his indiscretion (an errant elbow, which he should rightfully be shameful about), his silky runs on a heavy ground, his long kicking, his running goal, were a delight to behold. I’ve often thought our club need bottle his DNA. Of all Richmond players, for so long he’s been the most gifted, the most athletic, the most pleasing to watch. He makes the game look easy, which is the hardest thing to do. We are lucky to have him. We need to hold him dear.

Sam Lloyd has the knack, and if he can keep apace of the game, there are goals aplenty waiting for him, and a wonderful story he can share for years to come around the campfire. Playing Geelong at the MCG is a long way from playing Tocumwal or Moama at Hardinge Street Oval, and long may he hold onto this opportunity. Goals, Sam, keep finding those goals!

Matty McDonough, during the pre-season, was like a fresh and new wind. He is light-footed, and sprightly, and seems not afraid to take the game on. We need his spring. Never mind he makes the odd mistake; he is learning the game, and he looks full of endeavour. All we can ask is that our players strive and try as hard as they can, and he looked to be doing this on Sunday.

Reece Conca was our everywhere-man on Sunday, hacking the ball forward from scrimmages, lifting it lightly from the ground and sending it into attack, setting up plays from deep in defence. I love that he and his brother now play for the club. I love reading recent dispatches from the VFL team that list Luke Conca among the contributors. I went to watch Luke play for the Surrey Park Panthers in the Eastern Football League last year, and am thrilled for him he has this opportunity to be part of a big Melbourne football club. There is an old Italian motto rarely used that rings true: two Conca’s are better than one. The Richmond Football Club knows all about this.

Dave Astbury again stood tall in defence and is having a stellar campaign. The Dave Astbury Appreciation Society (#daas, on Twitter) is in full swing. At the start of this season, I sent out a tweet asking for Dave Astbury stories or photographs from fans. I want to write an essay about Dave, because I want him to know how us fans appreciate what he has made of himself. I want to know also if our group appreciation can help make him a better footballer, make him a better leader among men.

Please feel free to email me any correspondence to weave into my #daas story. Details of our fund-raising ‘Tiger’ t-shirts will soon be announced. All proceeds will go to (a) reimbursing the start-up and running costs of TTBB; (b) on a fact-finding trip to Dave Astbury’s home oval at Tatyoon; and hopefully even (c) on a bus ticket to the West Coast game, which coincidentally falls on my birthday, that I’d like to celebrate afterwards with a large margherita at Conca’s Pizzeria in Perth.

Plaudits to Damien Hardwick for switching the sub so early. Nathan Gordon had had only one possession to half-time, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Sometimes, the game runs around you and you simply cannot find the ball. Gordon was having one of those afternoons. But to his credit, he kept harassing and laid tackles that didn’t go unnoticed.

And Shane Edwards had a half-a-game out of the box. Could we not keep him in the forward pocket permanently? He springs about like a constant threat, he lays lunging tackles, he knows how to sniff out a goal. He has also one of the great attributes of a good forward: he’s hard to pin down, hard to put a match-up on.

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Joel Selwood in the last quarter was streaming blood from a gash in his forehead (Alex Rance, anyone?) and all watching the game on television – if not at the ground – were faced with a moral dilemma. What would you do? Would you alert the umpire to his open wound, having him spelled to the sideline?

My initial thought was to scream at the television. Selwood is bleeding! Get him off! Head wound! Health and safety issue! Stop the game! Blood rule, blood rule! Bye-bye, Joel!

I couldn’t understand why Brett Deledio wouldn’t quietly let any of the field umpires know that his opposite number had an open gash and spurting blood would most likely mean his fetching long-sleeved top would need a cold cycle wash. When Selwood kicked a goal that looked to put the game out of our reach, I quietly seethed. Have our players not been schooled in the art of gamesmanship? Wasn’t Dimma one of the finest practitioners of it, in his day?

Slow the game down when it’s running against you, speed it up when you have a run-on – and banish Joel Selwood from the ground when he’s a mobile billboard for the Blood Bank.

After the game, my only rationale is this. Players like Brett Deledio play the game to a different set of rules and a different code. For players like him, it’s all about the challenge, and the contest of testing your abilities against those of another man. He didn’t care that Selwood was bleeding. By his code, blood didn’t matter; he wanted to beat his adversary with all things being equal. He knows of the traditions of Francis Bourke, streaming blood from a gash above his eye and sent to the forward line to win a game of football at Arden Street, and how it’s been enshrined in football folklore.

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A professional football club should be a meritocracy. When Chris Newman limped from the ground late in the game, my guess is that many Richmond supporters could see an upside. There is unwritten callousness in football. One man’s injury is another man’s opportunity. And so Chris Newman’s calf goes, and we are sorry for him, but a blessing is it forces the hand of team selectors.

Late last year, Fairfax journalist Emma Quayle, in an engaging multi-media series titled Five Seasons, followed the debut season of Richmond’s 18-year-old Nick Vlastuin. One of the ideas in her compelling story has stuck with me. “He [Vlastuin] wasn’t playing as well as he wished he was and he hadn’t forgotten what Brett Deledio had told him not long after he got to the club: if you get a spot in the team, don’t give it up easily, because somebody else will take it.”

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Outsider’s clipped perspective: a goal-to-goal, cheer squad to cheer squad view of the game, as seen from a peephole outside Gate 4, soon after Geelong kick the opening goal.

There is crude social Darwinism in football; it is a dog-eat-dog world.

Our first third of the season has not gone to script. We lost to Gold Coast and the Bulldogs. We were walloped by Collingwood and Hawthorn. We have looked slow and stilted, hesitant and unsure. Our confidence has waned. A core of players are not contributing to the level they were last year, or the level we had come to expect of them.

Chris Newman was one of those players; Troy Chaplin another. Chappy was a keystone of our defence last year. This season, his game has been mired with errors. How can the coaching staff justify his inclusion when perhaps others for now might offer more for the greater cause of the team? Why not swing Ben Griffiths into his role, rewarding him for his solid game in the reserves? Set the younger man a challenge.

By relegating Chaplin to the VFL, it also sets him a challenge. I’ve never met Troy, but I have met his parents, and I know he has a young family, and I know he is a man of fine character. I would expect him to fight his way back into the team, and for this, all us fans would respect him. Overcoming adversity only endears us to players. It is the classic story of resurrection. That is why we hoped for the best for Tyrone Vickery on Sunday, and were pleased he made himself a target and kicked two goals.

I am still uncertain Shaun Hampson offers the team as much grunt around the ground as Orren Stephenson. A few weeks ago I saw Hampson standing over a contest and before the umpire had blown his whistle, he removed his mouthguard. It was a gesture of concession. Was I imagining it? I never want my Tigers to give up before the whistle is blown, before the ball crosses the boundary. As our song says: “we’ll fight and fight and win”.

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Chris Rees’ Virtual Duffel Coat, found elsewhere on this site, was featured this week in an article in The Guardian about six missed traditions of Australian Rules football. The story can be read here. If you haven’t seen the duffel coat, please have a look, and share it among Richmond fans.

What he is creating is something that should be cherished by all who have an affiliation with Richmond. It is an artwork that blurs the boundaries between players and fans, and club employees/volunteers, and which knits together the continuum of Richmond players from all eras. Names like Stuart Maxfield and Tony Jewell are pinned to the duffel coat alongside property steward Giuseppe Mammone, former life member Alice Wills, celebrity fan Waleed Aly, and boot studder Ilmar ‘Drac’ Tilterns.

I love the inclusiveness of this project, the way it brings fans and players together, putting them on the same billing. I also love its deep nostalgia and sense of shared history. I hope Chris’s Virtual Duffel Coat becomes a cultural phenomenon, I hope it is embraced by the current custodians of our football club and shared among a wider audience. From little things, big things grow.

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The hollow business of losing: with the game on, the membership stall at the ground stands as an empty shell, but hopefully not a metaphor.

Sunday’s game must be a turning point. Under leaden skies, there was hope for this season’s future. As the cheer squad’s banner illustrated, our backs were to the wall, and our team came out fighting. As so many supporters articulate in online fan forums, and by gate attendance numbers, it’s not the losing that matters – but the way in which the losing happens.

There are scales of defeat, and on Sunday afternoon it was universally registered as ‘honourable’. Rarely on a Monday morning after a loss have I felt so buoyant.

But the hard fact remains: 2-5. Our team have little margin for error. The good ship needs to be righted. Grievances need be buried. All hands must pull as one. We must start winning games, and stringing them together as a daisy-chain, and as if this where always expected. The well-being of our fragile team and our fragile club depends on it. A football club, really, is only as strong as its playing list, and only as strong as its supporter base. In this, Hawthorn and Geelong and Collingwood are doubly-blessed.

We have been playing catch-up for the best part of 30 years.

Cometh the hour, let’s see who are the young men who will stand up; who are the men for a crisis; who are the men we’ll forever honour; who are the players who will “fight and fight and win”.

Do us proud, Tigers! Make us roar!

Tiger tiger burning bright

Email: dugaldjellie@gmail.com

Twitter: @dugaldjellie

Dugald 08/05/2014Filed Under: dugald_14, Uncategorized

R6 v Hawthorn: A long day’s journey into night

28/04/2014 By Dugald 16 Comments

“That’s a lot of fanfare, it’s putting the pressure on,” says Katrina, a Hawks fan and one of my football companions on this day, as the sound of jungle drums echoes around the cauldron of the MCG before Richmond enters the fray. “Still, guess it’s better than the Collingwood break dancers.”

Eight minutes into the game, and with the Tigers pulled-apart so demonstratively by the Hawks, her appraisal is no less succinct. “This is starting to feel like Hawthorn-Richmond.”

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Warm-up before the bounce: the much-maligned Shaun Grigg (who I thought played a fair enough game on Sunday).

Forget the anomalies of the past two seasons; in the first half of the first quarter with the sum total of our forward inside 50s being a ball kicked along the ground by Jack, here was an afternoon shaping as an embarrassment. Hardwick had spoken midweek about a need to play big in big games. Here we are again on centre stage at the MCG, and again all our hoped-for lines are fluffed. All that flattered us was the score line, courtesy of their missed chances.

David Hale (“the oldest looking 29-year-old guy you’ll ever see,” says Katrina) out-marks the younger Troy Chaplin, and a pattern is set. They look to have more players in their backline, and their forwards look looser and to be running everywhere.

The Richmond crowd – like our players – falls silent before such a lopsided equation, with its ring of familiarity. Oh, how it’s unravelled so quickly, how the house of cards has tumbled.

Such a beautiful autumn day, it seemed ruined by a game of football.

And then hard in a pocket, Jack taps one back, and Dusty picks up the loose ball and fends off two of them and kicks a goal around his body – into the crowd at the Punt Road end – and he’s a blaze of tattoos in the glistening sunlight, and all this misery for this fleeting moment is worth it.

Soon after the siren sounds – like a bell to relieve a punch drunk boxer – and Andrew, another Hawk and another companion on this day, turns and says: “I’d take that, two goals down.” He’s being generous. The balance is two goals, seven other scoring shots, the weight of possession, and all the hope.

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The halo effect: our man Dave, a fund-raising effort for the Dave Astbury Appreciation Society soon to be announced.

Earlier in the afternoon, I had seen the colours on the station platform – so much gold glimmering in clear autumn sunshine – and I had known there was someplace I needed to be. I enjoy this delightful prospect before the game. The rituals of dressing. Leaving home. The stride to the station. The standing huddle of disparate supporters on the platform, the teasing anxiety; all up one end, readying for the exit ramp at Richmond station.

The train arrives, the day’s principal activity beckons. Young children clutch and spin footballs. Fathers are noosed in scarves, in anticipation for the late afternoon chill. Women have packed rugs in team colours. All of us know the air will cool. Winter is coming. All that is uncertain is the outcome of this day.

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At 4.25pm during the halftime break, the sun thankfully tilts below the Members’ Stand and the afternoon can only get better. ‘Selfies’ are screened on the scoreboard – it’s a commercial imperative (“post a photo of you and your Bingle sticks”) – and I wonder at all the ways a football club can commercialise the experience of being barrackers. Never have I seen so many iPads at a game; I know we are playing Hawthorn.

Cyril Rioli kicks a goal in the first 30 seconds of the second half, then Hale marks in front of Chaplin (again), and they have two goals in less then two minutes and the afternoon is gone.

How many marks has Shaun Hampson taken?

I see by the day’s end the rude answer: none. The team’s tallest player, a touted gun recruit over summer, and for the second week running he manages to take not one mark in two hours of football. We have a problem. He is paid good money to play football, but it’s hardly a performance to pay good money to see. It is a statistic that should rightly haunt him: two games, zero marks. How can a club justify this return on investment?

Troy Chaplin doesn’t even look as though he wants the ball. He’s out-positioned and out-marked all afternoon by Hale (eight marks, one contested, two goals) and Ben McEvoy (six marks, one contested, one goal). His leads when we move the ball so painfully slow from defence look, at best, half-hearted. The ball slips through his hands. But worst of all, his shepherds don’t even make body contact with opposition players. He is playing with no conviction. His confidence is in ruins. How long must we wait until he turns it around?

Cyril makes us look like fools. As does Bradley Hill. And I wonder why our recruitment of Aboriginal players has for so long been so lacking or mired by failure. I’m pleased for Shane Edwards when he kicked our first goal. But the long view is that Richmond – unlike Port Adelaide, unlike Hawthorn, unlike Sydney, unlike Essendon, unlike Adelaide, unlike West Coast, unlike Fremantle, unlike others – seems not to have created the culture, or chosen to have created the culture, where young footballers from other cultures can grow and thrive.

Thank goodness for Bachar. Thank goodness also on Sunday for Dave Astbury, who stood up again in the contest, and stood up in tackles, and stood up to the onslaught.

“Think it’s all downhill from here,” says Katrina, late in the third. “Like really downhill, like the handbrake’s off.”

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General admission: Hawks and Tigers mingle with delightful anticipation, squinting into a warm sun.

The three-quarter-time promotion of the Tigerland Superstore sounds hollow. Blah, blah, blah. What an inopportune advertising time-slot. Why must football clubs insult our intelligence like this, and why must they seek to so loudly occupy and commercialise the cherished quiet time in football? Do they think we cannot amuse ourselves with conversation and catch-ups? Is our attention span that short? Any vacancy, and they choose to sell the space.

At least the so-called ‘Cuddle Cam’ offers a communal laugh. It pans in on two bearded Hawthorn supporters, grizzly old ZZ Top types, holding plastic cups of beer, and they duly oblige. Good sports.

The day’s inequality does not abate in the last stanza. A farcical score review helps only to prolong our agony, and embarrassment for Steve Morris. We all get to see his error again, in slow motion, on the big screen, paused. He was incapable of rushing a loose ball across the goal line. It encapsulated his afternoon. Plenty of desperate acts – all flailing arms – that seem as papering over cracks. He’s caught too far from the contest, from his man. He looses his footing. He clutches at his shoulder, grimacing.

How the fairytale turns sour so quickly. As with Chaplin, his partial defence might well be that the ball was so often and regularly found in our defence.

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Sitting on the fence: Two Tigers and a Hawk, at quarter time.

I get up to leave early, just as a Richmond pitch invader also makes a run for it. It is a moment that’s both comical and saddening. In my Book of Feuds for this game against Hawthorn, I said I would streak naked across the MCG if I thought it could rid us of the curse of Helen D’Amico that seems to have afflicted our club since the third quarter of the last game played in the 1982 season. But never did I expect this.

We needed an extra man in the backline, but not this bloke. He made a lead, then stopped, crouched, surrendered. He gained not one possession. Then he was tackled, and carted off the ground like a sheep.

Dave Astbury, forever the gentlemen, and I think maybe the son of a shearer, fetched his belongings and put them aside. He could read the situation. He could understand the frustrations, however misguided.

The station platform at Richmond is filled with yellows and blacks, with our colours, that now look so dull in dusky light. Many had thought better of the day. There is something to be salvaged in making it home for the evening meal.

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Sunday night and I am disturbed by what has happened. Trust and belief seem to have broken at our club, so quickly and readily after the dream of last season. Trust between players. Trust between coaches. Trust between fans. Trust within the club. Trust in football. Trust in something we hold so dear.

Are we living a lie?

Long into the night I make a mental list of those players of ours who on Sunday I know I trust.

I trust Trent Cotchin, and was pleased to see he was first to disparage Josh Gibson for crudely cannoning into Reece Conca. I trust Brandon Ellis, because he is our future. I trust Dave Astbury and Ben Griffiths, because of what they’ve shown this year. I trust Nick Vlastuin because everything about him says outstanding citizen (courage, leadership, humility). I trust Jack Riewoldt because he hurts, and shows passion, and gives us a spark, and kicks goals, and has pride in his performance. I trust Bachar because I love Bachar. I trust Ricky Petterd because, despite the errors, he looks always to put his body on the line. I trust Daniel Jackson because he has mongrel in him. I trust Dylan Grimes and Reece Conca because they are still finding their way.

It’s not that I don’t distrust all other players, but for whatever reasons the contract between this fan and those players is not watertight. It is still to be proven, or to be re-established, or re-configured. I would delight in being shown to be wrong.

A good Hawk: I sat with three dear friends on Sunday, all Hawks, including Katrina, a good wit with an open love affair with Luke Hodge (despite her partner, Dave, being an anguished Tiger, and a good man in a crisis).

And for me, the unwritten social contract between a fan and our coach, and a club and its administrators – the custodians of our shared history and communal passion and common dreams – has been strained also.

Performances like that offer so little confidence, so little reason to believe. Again, I would delight in being shown I have misread the situation.

Nothing much has worked this season, despite all the false bravado. We have been shown to be pretenders, again. Ours is not the football club we hoped it to be. Look at how Hawthorn goes about its business of recruiting, and nurturing and getting the best out of its players. Look at how Port Adelaide has lifted itself from its mire with an honest work ethic, and now is taking Matty White along for the ride. He kicked two goals against Geelong on Sunday night.

We’ve missed his run-and-carry. We look so slow and ponderous and uncertain. We look a shadow of the team that beat Port last year, that ran rings around West Coast away, that worked over Fremantle in an arm wrestle.

When Brett Deledio, mid-way through the last quarter of this season’s first game, against Gold Coast away, kicked the ball away in anger and frustration, after a loping Tyrone Vickery pass, the result was more than a free-kick against. It looked as if trust among the playing group was broken. There was discord. There is nothing more damaging to team morale than disunity. Our season has looked as good as broken ever since.

Our dreams are broken also.

Tiger Tiger Burning (not so) Bright

Email: dugaldjellie@gmail.com

Twitter: @dugaldjellie

Dugald 28/04/2014Filed Under: dugald_14, Uncategorized

R5 v Lions: Faces in the crowd (selfie night)

21/04/2014 By Dugald 4 Comments

What is a game of football without the crowd?

An abiding pleasure of match days is in the gathering – in the journey from home, the stride to the ground, in seeing the shape of massed people finding their way to the arena and to where they need to be. In a crowd there is democracy. In a crowd there is belonging. In a crowd there is a common interest – and on autumn afternoons at the MCG mostly it is to do with football.

Last Thursday night I hardly saw the game against the Lions. The first quarter was listened-to on the car radio, with two young boys asleep in the back. The second quarter was spent mostly unpacking, and greeting friends, and getting children to bed. The second half was watched on television with the volume muted, in a rental holiday house on the heel of the Mornington Peninsula; my support for my team consciously subdued in accordance with the company kept for this evening.

I was not at the game, I was not in the crowd, I was not watching alone, I was constrained by social pleasantries. Worst of all, in the rush to pack and leave, I had forgotten to record the game.

On Thursday morning I sent out tweets asking Richmond fans to send me a photograph of themselves – a ‘selfie’, if they liked – of them watching the game. In an age of technology we celebrate connectedness, but a digital world encourages also retreat.

I am fascinated by the idea of the crowd. Who are we? What brings us together? What does being in a crowd do to us? Are we empowered or do we lose our sense of self?

I think often of the numbers in the crowd, and the celebration of its size – an enduring theme in the history of sport in Melbourne. Only four other domestic sporting competitions in the world have higher average match attendances than the Australian Football League. For all who attended the Elimination Final last September, a lingering memory was in being in such a large crowd on a day in which our team played. How often does an individual get to count themselves among more than 94,000 other heads? It is more people than live in all of Ballarat, or all of Bendigo, or all of anywhere else in Victoria apart from Geelong (143,921) or Melbourne (3,707,530). A big football game is a small city.

Often I think what players must think when they play before such audiences.

Seeking motivation, do they think of their parents, who might be sitting in the crowd? Or do they think of their partners and wives – or friends – who might also be there to watch, or be watching from elsewhere? Does Sam Lloyd think of his mates watching at a pub in Deniliquin? Does Jack think of his extended family in Tasmania?

Players cannot really know us – the anonymous crowd, the barrackers, the groupies, the supporters – like how we know their every on-field move. The idea of other Tigers sharing images of themselves from wherever they are, watching an away interstate game, is to build an abstract image of who we are.

And what a beautiful crowd it is! Thanks to all who sent photographs that in some way represent who they are and how they were watching the game on Thursday night. Some were at the Gabba, some where at their home, some were at another’s house, some where on holidays, some were on the other side of the county or – as with our very own Andy Fuller (see A Tiger Abroad) – on the other side of the world.

I hope every Richmond player comes to see this: a small but true sample of an off-field team who support their pursuits on the field. Here are the faces in the crowd. We are the barrackers. We are proud to display our support. We belong. Together we are a streak of Tigers, many of us bleeding yellow and black.

If the players ever need motivation, they can always think of us. Here we are, hear us roar.

 

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Big Tiger thanks, again, to Chris Rees for creating this becoming montage during his Easter break. If you haven’t already, please look at his Virtual Duffle Coat elsewhere on this site, and offer suggestions. I love that his duffel coat has come to include some from the other side of the fence, including Trout, Alice Wills and boot studder Ilmar ‘Drac’ Tilterns, among others. His is a shared space, where the demarcation between players and fans is blurred; where all are Richmond.

I encourage all TTBB readers to look at the comments left by others on other match report posts. Here are the voices in the crowd. I really appreciate the shared narrative, and other opinions and viewpoints. All are encouraged.

I had intended to include my selfie from Thursday night, but I was having a bad hair night. And from whatever angle, my nose looked big. Below is one from earlier this season. It was taken from a European plane tree on Punt Road on the Friday afternoon Richmond played Essendon in a practise match at Punt Road Oval. The game was a sell-out. I had no ticket. I am a barracker. I needed to watch, however I could.

While others were in a hospitality box, on the other wing, I was in the limbs of a tree, beside three lanes of north-bound traffic, very much on the outer and loving it all. With autumn leaves falling, the view now would only be better.

Tiger tiger burning bright

Email:  dugaldjellie@gmail.com

Twitter: @dugaldjellie

Dugald 21/04/2014Filed Under: dugald_14

R4 v Collingwood: On not having to kiss Trout, and other disappointments.

14/04/2014 By Dugald 5 Comments

04_feature

Friday night love in M3 of the MCG: Shelly Connors (aka @DameTassiemum) sent this pic at 9.12pm (“what a pleasure it was getting this smooch from @TroutWoodend”)

Best thing about Friday night: I don’t have to kiss Trout.

Early in the afternoon I sent a Tweet: 'If we win tonight I will…'

Replies were revealing.

''Not sleep all night' said Sarah.

'Be singing the song with 60 thousand other members' said Jacob Schonafinger.

'Breathe a sigh of relief' said Adrian Moy.

'I will not be surprised said' Mick P.

'Forgive them for the near heart attack at 1am last week (watching online in Canada)' said Sarah Rose.

'Sleep well for the first time in 2 weeks' said Duncan Waterman.

'I will enjoy the ride home with mum who is a pies supporter' said Jessica Hansen.

'Be happily surprised (and down a tip)' said Rory Gibson.

'Watch the replay over and over again and fall asleep on the couch with the dog' said Bree McAullay.

'Let the @Richmond_FC theme song blaze out of the car down Punt Road' said Mr T.

'Get the club badge tattooed on my person' said Louise.

'Buy my dog a club membership' said Ando.

'Me too and I haven’t even got a dog' said Slade Alive.

Emboldened, I said if we won, I’d kiss Trout.

'Nothin’ but the lips' demanded Glen Weidemann (the man who coined the ‘Conca Cudddle’).

My reply: 'If we win by ten goals, it’s all lips!'

Truly, if we had beaten Collingwood by ten goals on Friday night I’d have happily gotten a hotel room with Trout. The missus is away. I have no shame. All through Richmond, it would have been a Tiger love-in.

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 Best thing about Friday night was Sam Lloyd. On debut, he kicked our first two goals – our only goals for half-a-game of football – and ended with three majors, and 22 possessions, and five tackles, and on the wide expanses of the MCG, under lights, he looked to belong.

Lloyd is a Deniliquin boy. Each Easter of my childhood, our family camped with others on a sandy bank of the Edward River upstream of ‘Deni’. Dad listened to the footy on his transistor radio; us kids floated down the muddy river, and saw local hero Simon O’Donnell play in the town’s annual grass tennis tournament, and caught carp, and built cubbyhouses among river red gums. On the way home, we always stopped at Echuca and bought a box of tomatoes. Dad cooked them up for his annual batch of tomato sauce.

Four years ago, Sam Lloyd kicked 105 goals for the Deniliquin Rams. He continued playing for his hometown’s team while living and studying in Melbourne. Two years ago he moved to Mt Eliza, playing in the Mornington Peninsula Football League, from which he was enlisted into games for Bendigo Gold, Essendon’s VFL feeder team. Last year he played 17 games for Frankston in the VFL, kicking 38 goals.

He is 24 years old. He has travelled further than most to find a game in the AFL. The Richmond Football Club gave him an opportunity, and on Friday night he never let himself down.

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Best thing about Friday night was Dave Astbury. He kept Travis Cloke goalless. He beat his man, who in this game last year beat us comfortably. He attacked the ball with his fist. He held his feet. He made himself an outlet. He looked composed. His game wasn’t faultless – a kick across goal to Dylan Grimes could have been more to the recipient’s advantage – but he stood tall when so many around him lost their way.

JD tweeted on Saturday: “Dave has been fantastic and on top of that he’s a ripping bloke, very happy to see him playing well.”

Cruelled in past seasons by injury, here is a young man whose moment has arrived. He looks a polite footballer – a fair footballer – but he looks also a footballer who realises now is his chance. There is no looking over his shoulder, no turning back. He knows he must attack each contest as if it were his last; to release burdens, and to show all what he knows he’s capable of.

Dave is our man this year. Already the Dave Astbury Appreciation Society (#daas) has been formed, and fund-raising activities will soon be announced. All proceeds will go towards a study trip to Tatyoon. We need to find out about where he grew up, and his old footy team, and local farming practices, and talk wool prices, and learn of which way the wind blows.

It is only by looking back that we can truly know of how far he’s come.

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Best thing about Friday night was our Stonewall Jackson. He was good all last year, he was good in his return last week, and he was good again on Friday. He speaks French. He gets power in his kicks off a step or two. He has mongrel in him, a commodity that this season looks to be lacking in many of his teammates. Dusty has mongrel, and that’s why we love him. Thomas has mongrel, and that’s why he’s earned our respect so quickly despite his limitations. Morris has mongrel, and that’s why we fear for him. Biscuits has mongrel, and that’s why we were thrilled for him when he came on and in the last quarter made his own goal.

Dan Jackson, without fuss, wracks up contested possessions each week. Throughout his stellar football career, he can mostly always walk off the field with his head held high.

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Left Alan and Chloe Woody: she’s from Brunswick East via Brisbane and it was the first game of AFL she’s attended [Ed’s note: it does get better].

Middle Caz flying her flag: Caroline Mallett, a Tiger benefactor, a loyal supporter, a lover of sport, and good company on Friday night.

Right Roar? More like a whimper on Friday night, and whose (who’s) responsible for the spelling mistake?!

Best thing about Friday night was that it didn’t rain, and the air was warm, and I sat beside Caroline Mallet who generously had given me a ticket – and who was sitting beside her work colleague Lisa, who barracks for Collingwood. Caroline came to the football full of passion for her team – at least 10 badges were pinned on her scarf – and kind words for her players. “Go Dusty, c’mon darlin’… That’s rude, that’s really rude, that wasn’t called for… Dusty was standing there with nothing to do… C’mon, be nice boys.”

In a break in play, she tells me she’s barracked for the Tiges since she was five years old. “The rule in our house was you picked a team at five,” she says. “Dad’s Collingwood, mum’s the Cats, but I’ve always like tigers so I went for the Tigers.”

At quarter time we talk about her old duffel coat, and Michael Roach, and games she went to as a young woman, and the many years she spent abroad with her partner – a material physicist – in the UK and America, and returning to Melbourne in time for ‘Richo’s’ last season. “I love the game, it’s always been there,” she says.

Caroline works in education at the Melbourne Museum, in charge of the 560 volunteers who assist visitors. They do a sterling job. I know because I was at the museum last Wednesday, sheltering from incessant rain and entertaining three young boys on school holidays. They made masks, they rolled hoops in the playground, they looked at dinosaur bones, they loved playing on the rollercoaster carriage.

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A classic Tiges duffle in the Melbourne Museum, of the kind that inspired Chris’s Virtual Duffle Coat.

I told Caroline how upstairs near Phar Lap, I had found a small display of Australian Rules football memorabilia. Behind glass there was a duffel coat, with Jim Jess and Mark Lee on its front, and name plates for David Cloke and Greg Strachan on its chest. “This young Tiger fan was obviously an admirer of tough, tenacious wingman Bryan Wood to whom he [sic] gave prime position on the back,” said an information panel. It was from the early 1980s. A distant dream.

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If you have blind faith as a Richmond supporter, read no further. If you’re a fan who runs only one way, please close this page and log-on to the club’s website and see how to sugar coat a loss like this on a night like that. Last week I wrote that the season looks long and filled with shadows. After Friday night, this winter looks only longer, and the shadows colder and darker still.

“C’mon Richmond, be consistent, a goal a quarter,” goaded a Collingwood supporter late in the third, and we had no retort.

On a night when a corporate money-lender had offered $1000 to breast cancer research for each Richmond goal kicked, it looked an equation offering maximum publicity to the donor for minimum return for the recipient. To their eternal credit, they later doubled their benevolence.

For now, perhaps it’s time our football club forget about the pre-match jungle drums at the MCG and forget about the half-time ‘Cuddle Cam’ (I feel partly responsible), and get on with the hard-nosed business of playing football. It is a novel idea, but winning matches is mostly what excites us. Failing that, it’s the idea of offering robust competition, of succumbing gallantly, of having a fair dinkum go.

Fans like us generally don’t mind the losing – my goodness, it’s become part of our story this past 30 years – but we want to be proud about the losses. We want to walk from the ground with dignity and hope – never mind that it’s the hope that kills you.

For most of Friday night, we fans at the MCG had nothing to barrack for, nothing to give us voice, nothing to bring us together, no reason really for being there. Moments of sublime football from our players were so few, and so fleeting, they became meaningless in the game’s context. Chris Newman’s tackle on Luke Ball. Sam Lloyd’s first two goals, and Matt Arnot’s snap. A Dylan Grimes punch in the last quarter, a couplet of Steve Morris tackles in the back pocket, a long-range strike from Jack, Matt Thomas’s first goal for his second club.

I do not doubt the effort and courage and commitment of our players, but this group needs a circuit-break. Maybe they should join me on a sightseeing trip to Tatyoon? Maybe they need to spend a day cutting firewood and offering it to us fans, as a gesture they really do want to warm our hearts? Maybe their trip to Brisbane cannot come soon enough?

I think it a good thing they’re playing far away from us on Thursday night, and they spend as much time together as possible. In the dying minutes of the game – in a comical moment that encapsulated our night – Matt Arnot and Nathan Gordon collided with each other, in space, unopposed.

The ball spilled free. Neither could gain clean possession.

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In the game’s first two minutes, there was a whispered chorus around the ground. The word on everyone’s lips was ‘slippery’. The Collingwood supporter sitting to my right had also a few other words to bark out. “Mark it you goose… Is that friggin’ Cloke who dropped a sitter… Look like a footballer, Jack… Mark it you idiot… This is as boring as bat shit… This game is the worst game of football I’ve ever seen… What’s this rubbish… Why didn’tya make a lead, Cloke!”

For an entire night he was the most boorish of accidental companions, yelling into my right ear. The only consolation: at the football you pay your money at the gate, and within reason, you’re able to say whatever you like, and to whomever you want.

Turns out he was from Perth, was once in the Navy (he drank like a sailor), and had come over to Melbourne for the weekend, for the football. His wife sat beside him, quietly in Richmond colours. She grasped a white cane between her legs. She was blind to what was going on.

Seven minutes into the game and we had three goals kicked against us and the contest looked as good as dead. A whole week’s work from the club’s football department – opposition analysis, team plans and objectives, those hackneyed ‘structures’ – had all unravelled and turned to nought.

On night’s like these – after three days of unbroken rain – a team unwilling to put its body on the line gets found wanting. And on Friday night we were found wanting.

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cwood_montage2

Far left Dressed for the occasion: Angie Froude, from Heidelberg, is all smiles at half-time despite the hot pies and cold Tigers.Middle left Can a Tiger change its stripes? Jill Goode, 77, at the football with one of her sons and wearing her colours on a poncho she bought at a $2 shop.
Middle right Russell ‘Rusty’ Deppeler (“born in the 1973 premiership year”), from Morwell and a member of the Gippsland Richmond Supporter Group, at a break from his usual game-day duties of brandishing a flogger in the Richmond Cheer Squad.
Far right Rusty’s forearm: for some, being a Tiger just gets under your skin.

“Easy Richmond, slow it down, slow it down, ice the clock,” baited a nearby Collingwood supporter, early in the last quarter.

We had had our chances, but mostly we botched them. Troy Chaplin let Jesse White skip around him too easily for a goal. Shaun Grigg’s ill-advised shot for goal stifled momentum after Cotch had won a free kick. Tyrone struggled in every marking contest, and looks as if his shoulders are giving him grief. The output of at least a half dozen of our players is considerably down on last year, and this is telling.

We had no run off the half-back line – the most creative space in football. We’re static. We look tired, slow, unsure; low on confidence. We were embarrassed around the stoppages. Their players moved the ball quicker, got boot-to-ball quicker, found a team mate quicker. Collingwood played with more passion than us, they had more pride, and that is the most damning of all of it.

Mostly, I believe in Damien Hardwick, and I believe in individual players, but in the past three weeks I am losing belief in this team. They are not playing selfless footy. Some are doubting others. There looks to be discord. There is nothing pretty about it.

If only I could get into the rooms I could tell them the story of Richmond fan Philip Jupp, and the sacrifices he makes in getting to the football with his son, and what it means for them both, and what hardship really is. Sometimes we have to look deep inside ourselves – and at the sacrifices of others – to better who we are.

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Caroline Mallett sent me a long and heartfelt email early last spring, in the week before the elimination final. “I have an extra ticket for Sunday that I would like to give you,” she wrote. “Your writing this year has been wonderful and reintroduced me to the fans of RFC.”

I remember her email most distinctly because of a particular story. In her words:

 I became a member when I was 21 then a couple of years later met the man of my dreams and we moved overseas for what felt like a millennia. I missed most of my fave Tigers career, that being ‘Richo’. One of the last games I saw before going o’seas was 1994 at Princes Park or whatever they call it, against Carlton. I saw the many supporters leave before the siren, we lost by I think 120 pts – can’t remember the exact score but it was devastating. I waited for the boys after the game. I don’t do autographs, I just wanted them to know I was there. Many didn’t want to talk which was fair enough but I got to give Matthew Rogers a kiss on the cheek, he was so sweet.

After that game I despised Richmond supporters, I swore I would never leave before the team left, I would never put or bring down a player. I was never going to be a typical football supporter. Reading your stuff this year has changed my mind… You have introduced some great characters and stories scarily of which I can relate too. There are people way more loyal to the club than I am, that is for sure, which sometimes I feel guilty as I missed most of the shocking years of the 90’s – only got what news I could from mum or friends, which none really cared about footy let alone my Tigers.

I remember this story because I, too, was at that game at Princes Park (and wrote recently about it in Our Book of Feuds # 2, on Carlton). We lost by 113 points. I was one of those who left early.

But dear Caroline, there are extenuating circumstances!

I was a young man in 1994, working as a journalist at The Age, confronted with the stresses of public scrutiny and daily deadlines, and on the Friday before that game I’d gone out with friends after work and simply forgotten to go home. When the game started I hadn’t slept for about 33 hours. I was exhausted. Leaving the ground during the last quarter, I encountered a domestic dispute between two Richmond supporters. It was a day of ugliness.

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Monday morning, and I received an email with an attached photograph from Paul ‘Tommo’ Thompson. He’s a Richmond supporter, and proud member, based in Nairobi, in Kenya.

He attached notes to the photograph. “There is still room and time for the car to make a sharp right and head back on the road to the 2014 finals,” he wrote. “[But] it will need some brilliance though.

“I am still hurting from Friday’s loss. Had the game live, knocked off work early and ended up turning it off at ¾ time. I have never turned a game off early and never have I left a game early. I suppose there is a first for everything.”

Tiger tiger burning (not so) bright

Email:  dugaldjellie@gmail.com

Twitter: @dugaldjellie
freeway

Dugald 14/04/2014Filed Under: dugald_14

R3 v Western Bulldogs: A lament, for us Tigers

08/04/2014 By Dugald 21 Comments

R3Footscray 074

Whitten Oval, Saturday, high noon: one of these football fans enjoyed their weekend, the other not so much.

“Barracking for the Bulldogs has always demanded a certain unique perspective,” says Roger Franklin in Sons of the ’Scray, an essay about place and identity, and a football club in Melbourne’s west. “A good clubman will look into a room packed with manure and know, just know, that there must be a lovely pony in there somewhere.”

Early Saturday morning I caught a train to the west. A Sudanese woman sat opposite – barefoot, hair braided – as we passed railway yards, grain silos at North Melbourne; the broad shoulders of cranes at the docks. We crossed the Maribyrnong, we left the city behind.

I was off to see a game at Whitten Oval – the first-round match between new stand-alone VFL teams Richmond and Footscray – and under bright skies it felt like a return to something cherished that’s long since gone. Football was back at the old Western Oval. The Tiges were playing. I had to be there.

footscray montage 2

Far left: Blue skies, big crowd: local Bulldogs fan Phil Jennings makes it to the ground
in a jumper his seamstress neighbour made for him.
Center left:
On song: the Hyde Street Youth Band (since 1928) outside the traditional home of the Footscray Football Club.
Centre right:
First steps: Richmond’s new VFL team entering the arena for the season’s first game.
Far right:
Dog day afternoon: not all were bulldogs in the EJ Whitten Stand.

“There used to be a pub there,” said a man in red-white-and-blue, at the newly-developed West Footscray Station, with the excitement that comes before a game, and returning to a place redolent with fond memories. Talk is of past games, the length of quarters, goals kicked. “He was a big man,” says one. “He could run like the wind.”

A brass band greets barrackers at the stadium. A tour coach arrives, offloading Bulldog supporters. For away fans, it’s a gold coin entry donation. Gates are open for all to walk onto the ground. Food vans – gelato, pizza, smoked Kransky sausages – are parked in a pocket. A crowd gathers, dressed in colours of identity, pleased to be here. It feels as festive as a school fete.

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If I could ignore the game between these two clubs on Saturday afternoon – indoors and televised – I would. But in good times and bad, til death do us part. Consolations must be found in loss, to give it meaning. We hit the front with three-and-a-bit to go. Jack lifted our spirits. Our souls soared. Then in a heartbeat, all was lost and for now the season looks long and filled with shadows.

Brandon Ellis panicked at the death, clutching at falling knives. There is gallows humour in being a Richmond supporter. We have our unique perspective also.

A last-gasp misplaced tackle on Dan Giansiracusa – the game’s oldest player, its wiliest, and now its match-winner – did not of itself lose the game. If only Troy Chaplin hadn’t turned-over the ball in the game’s third minute. If only Bob Murphy didn’t shimmy around our Reece on the wing in the second quarter. If only Ryan Griffen didn’t beat us in a two-on-one in the goal square. If only Dave Astbury’s errant handball to Chris Newman in the last 20 seconds of the first half found its target. If only Trent kicked straighter. If only their prodigal teenager, Jack Macrae, had been opposed when marking clear in front. If only the ball wasn’t cleared from our forward 50 so easily and swept down the other end so effortlessly. If only Shaun Grigg didn’t kick inside to Nathan Gordon, and if only our debutante had stood firmer in the tackle. If only Bachar hit one of our targets on the last play of the third quarter. If only the third quarter ran longer. If only we could have the last quarter all over again, especially the last three minutes.

It was death by a thousand cuts, none of which makes defeat easier.

But watching a replay late Saturday night, it was the welfare of Nick Vlaustin that concerned me more than the loss. On returning home from Footscray on Saturday afternoon, the game was underway and our gun teenager had been subbed-out as a result of a head knock in a marking contest in the first quarter. The telecast showed a replay. It looked brutal.

What I didn’t know until late Saturday night is that Vlaustin stayed on the field after the knock. A club has a duty-of-care to its players; it failed in its obligations.

Having incurred a head injury in amateur football – playing centre-half-forward for Sydney University, head over the ball, bang, cleaned up by a malicious opponent, six weeks on the sidelines for me – I know about concussion. I know of the sensation of losing consciousness. I know of the shock. I know of the nausea. I know of the recurring headaches. I know how it knocks you about.

I know also that one knock to the head causes swelling in the brain, a physiological response to protect the organ. And I know that a subsequent knock – while the brain is trying to cushion itself from further harm – can cause irreparable injury. That is, a second blow can cause permanent brain damage.

Watching the replay well after the game had gone and the result known, every time Nick Vlaustin went near the ball my heart was in my mouth. What was he doing out there? He shouldn’t have been on the field. He shouldn’t have been in harm’s way. The AFL has a contingency for such a scenario. Our club’s medical and coaching staff should have known of the dangers.

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I had gone to the old Western Oval for reasons of nostalgia. I had gone also to support Richmond’s fledgling VFL team, to watch a game of footy in the suburbs, and to meet on the terraces with two men – John and Craig – each of whom write blogs about football and its place in Melbourne culture that in these past two seasons I’ve come admire and enjoy. Both live and work in the west. Both are Tigers.

At season’s beginning I again found myself at theholybootsfootballemporium.com and lost in one of John’s blog posts. It was his musing on Punt Road Oval, filled with his inquiry and archival photos and personal anecdotes, and family snaps of him as a child with Barry Rawlings. At the end of the post is the reason why his stories about football seem so much richer than all the white noise offered by much of the corporate football media industry. It is a photograph of a brick. He souvenired it when the Cricketer’s Stand at Punt Road was demolished. It is a memento of place and identity and shared history, and I think it’s wonderful.

Then last week I found myself immersed in a two-part history of football at the Western Oval, compiled by Craig on his popular The Footy Maths Institute (see footymaths.blogspot.com.au). As these things do, it lead to a 37-minute Youtube clip of the last quarter of a 1978 game between Footscray and St Kilda in which the home team kicked 12 goals to tally-up a then record score of 33. 15. (213), to St Kilda’s 16. 10. (106). Commentated by Geoff Leek and Peter Booth, it’s compelling archival footage.

Then as is my way, I was diverted by a Youtube clip of Peter Landy on Channel 7’s Big League, crossing to Scot Palmer for his ‘Palmer’s Punchlines’ segment. It was from the early 80s, and had Herald and Weekly Times sub-editors in the background wearing cardigans and pouring the kettle for a cuppa. Here was pre-digital football, before all the big money and the preoccupation with marketing and spin, and it seemed honest and raw and real.

whitten_oval

Far left: Three (football/blogger) amigos: (L-to-R) Craig from The Footy Maths Institute,
Kenny from Considerthesauce.net and John from the Holy Boot Football Emporium.
Center left:
Red, white and blue: how seating at the football once was (splinters included).
Centre right:
Ed Barlow, ex-Swan and Bulldog and Scotch Old Boy, kicked the first goal for Richmond’s new VFL team.
Far right:
Bill Andrew: “I tried to barrack for Collingwood, but it didn’t stick.”

Old wooden seats at Whitten Oval, painted blue and red with white numbers, speak of this bygone era. Canary Island date palms at the ground’s Barkly Street end add to the day’s aura of festivity.

I start the game on a bitumen terrace down the railway end, and our Ed Barlow kicks the game’s first goal, and the weekend begins nicely. Barlow played 26 games with the Sydney Swans, then eight with the Western Bulldogs, and was recruited to Tigerland from Old Scotch last year. He’s a 26-year-old tall utility, and wearing the team’s yellow strip with a black sash, he looks a footballer.

Footscray kick the next two goals, then we kick two, and a man walking along the terrace hands me a sticker. It reads: “We are Footscray – fly the flag”. I ask whether he’s from the supporter lobby group, Footscray Not Western Bulldogs, and he says no. His name is Bill Andrew and he was born in Hobart, where he lives still and runs a café at Salamanca Place. “I tried to barrack for Collingwood, but it didn’t stick,” he says of his football allegiance. “I guess I went for the underdogs.”

Now he’s in Melbourne for the weekend for the footy, and to hand out his stickers. “We’ve lost our identity when we lost our name,” he says. “We’ve extended our nickname but it’s made no difference with membership. There was a mystique about Footscray.”

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The Richmond Football Club, I’ve come to realise, is burdened by its history. Reading about Footscray last week – about its abattoirs and glue-factories, and how the Great Depression scoured the west of its jobs and hope – there is a truism that when you’ve got little, you’ve got not much to lose. When the Tricolours – the Bulldogs name was not officially adopted until 1938 – beat Essendon in a special game played on 4 October 1924, pitting the premiers of the VFA and VFL against each other for a first time, it heralded the arrival of Footscray, North Melbourne and Hawthorn into a new 12-team league.

A family heirloom: The Tricolours' 1924 Victorian Football Champions pennant, behind glass at Whitten Oval.

A family heirloom: The Tricolours’ 1924 Victorian Football Champions pennant, behind glass at Whitten Oval.

After that historic game, a local newspaper said “no Footscray player would ever again need to buy shoes, as they were carried everywhere shoulder high.”

Visiting Whitten Oval on Saturday, I see this famous pennant in a hallway. In the 90 years since, the club has won only one piece of silverware; the 1954 Grand Final, when a team comprising a market gardener, plumbers, a couple of carpenters, storemen and a butcher, were twice as good as Melbourne. They won 15. 12 (102), to 7. 9. (51).

Those with the heaviest pockets build the highest fences. They fear outsiders. They guard jealously what they have.

Like all Tiger supporters from my generation, I’ve known of glory days. I was a child at the 1980 and 1982 grand finals. I was raised on a diet of Francis Bourke and Kevin Bartlett and Michael Roach. I was aware of a greater legacy, of names like Royce Hart and Jack Dyer, and of golden years that filled my club’s trophy cabinet with premierships. There was a culture of hard-nosed success. Failure wasn’t considered.

But these past 30 years have offered a counter narrative, and it’s shaken belief and confidence for most supporters. We have had something – or we’ve heard the stories of when we had something – and now it’s long gone, and truly none of us can tell if ever we’ll get it back.

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Trent Cotchin on Saturday afternoon was like Atlas, the primordial Titan who in Greek mythology held up the celestial sphere. He has the weight of our club on his shoulders. Already, he looks stooped. I worry it’s a burden too great. He was at the bottom of packs, he kept running and contesting, he who kept willing the play. For how much longer can he do this, if few others are to follow?

All things being equal – as they are in the controlled environment of Etihad Stadium – on Saturday afternoon there were some rays of light.

Halfway through the second quarter, the Channel 7 broadcast displayed a graphic that looked like a box of donuts. Jack’s stats; a column of zeros. Nothing could be more damning – and humiliating – for a professional footballer. His first touch came with 40 seconds to go in the half. It looked to be a handball, although none could really be sure.

To Jack’s credit, and our blessed relief, he turned the game’s course in the second half. A goal assist to Tyrone, a fearless leap for a one-handed mark, and he was in the contest and up on confidence. Gordon’s deftly crumbed running goal soon after had the blood pumping. Football is a game played in the head, but it’s a game also of the heart. What is football without passion? When Jack shows that desire, it can lift a stadium. It can carry our hearts. It almost won us the game.

Steve Morris was, again, fearless in the clinches. Orren Stephenson battled manfully in the ruck, breaking even with his All-Australian counterpart (and again showing how far a big heart can carry you). Dylan Grimes was elegant in defence, with his sweetly-timed fist. Ben Griffiths has proved the season’s revelation. We all knew he could kick a country mile, and had a graceful leap, and now he’s put the two together. His belief is back. He’s been our most consistent focal point up forward. His long-range goal in the last quarter was a beauty.

It concerns me that again we relied on the brawn of Matt Thomas for much of our grunt work. It was good having Jacko back, but it was Thomas who mostly put his hand up and head over the ball. Last year he won the Magarey Medal in the SANFL, was delisted by Port Adelaide, and until a few months ago was on our rookie list. Good luck to him. But what does it say about our list that these past three games we’ve so much depended on his strong-willed body work?

It concerned me also that when Brandon Ellis was dumped unnecessarily hard over the boundary line by Jake Stringer midway through the second quarter, no Richmond player remonstrated. Here was an opportunity for gamesmanship. The Bulldogs led 47 to 22, had a run-on, and here was a Doggy showing his muscle. Ellis had a right to be aggrieved with a tackle that continued once the ball was out of play. It was a chance to square them up, show we’re not to be bullied, and support one of our youngest players. More importantly, it was a chance to halt momentum.

Push and shove and wrestle, and let Jake Stringer know about it. In the umpire’s mind, perhaps we had the high moral ground. Did his tackle go too far? Here was a perfect excuse to try and out a pause on play. Instead, the game continued, they kicked another two unanswered goals; it was a match-winning lead.

Where was Jake King when we needed an enforcer? His arms shadowed in fresh tattoos, he looks a shadow of his former self.

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R3Footscray 055

Banner headline: young dogs proud of their identity.

After quarter-time it was one-way traffic at the Western Oval. Guttural chants of “Foots-cray” rang around the EJ Whitten Stand. Their players were too big and too strong and too fast. We fumbled. Dropped marks in the forward half, and at times looked second-rate. It could be a long season for this new venture.

“Hit a target, then belt someone, ya peanut,” yelled a spectator to Brad Helbig, after his turnover in the forward pocket. Jake Batchelor got reported. The team lost by nearly 20 goals.

I made my way to the players’ bench to read the body language near the final siren. We were outplayed all day. We got smashed. “Finish this off boys,” called an assistant coach. There seemed a lot of strutting, a lot of false bravado.

After the game a middle-aged woman joined me at the fence and I asked if she was the mother of a player. Turns out she was an acquaintance of Aaron Davey – out injured – who she knew through friends who had spent time in the Kimberley. She was a Dees supporter. I asked her appraisal of the game. “If this is what the seconds are like,” she said, “you can only hope the firsts don’t get injured.”

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰

Walking down the railway ramp, I strike a conversation with a seventy-something Bulldogs supporter decked out in her club colours. She’s off to the game. I wish her good luck, but not too much luck. We agree her team needs the win more than mine. “West Coast, first round, thirty degree heat, we didn’t stand a chance,” she says. “They handpick it, the AFL. We don’t put bums on seats.”

Richmond Football Club had an operating budget of $44.8 million last season, the Western Bulldogs ran on $34 million. Our club has more than twice as many members. Nearly six months ago, we beat them by 60 points under the roof. On Saturday afternoon, we lost by two points.

R3Footscray 069

Chained off: Tiger fans kept at a distance from players they’ve come to support.

In all my time visiting Punt Road these past two seasons, never have I felt as welcome as I was at Whitten Oval on Saturday morning. Partly, it’s because of the design of the stadiums. Whitten Oval’s redevelopment invites people into an open foyer, from which they can freely access the playing arena, a large reception area, a bar, a shop, and numerous other facilities. It invites curiosity. It feels open to all.

At Punt Road, the most obvious entry-point is into the Superstore. There’s a mouse-hole entrance – manned usually by security – to the social rooms. And there’s a separate entrance to the club offices. It feels like the architecture of exclusion. There is no space where visitors feel as though they can freely walk-in and assemble.

At three-quarter time in the VFL, our boys getting a roasting in the fierce sun, the pack gathered around the Footscray huddle. Tiger supporters had dwindled. Well-meaning Richmond staff cordoned off the players with a yellow chain. Footscray had no such encumbrance.

For better or worse, on Sunday morning, it was this barrier – real and imagined – that for me came to epitomise the difference between these two clubs. Theirs was deliberately open to its community, to its faithful, where those who came could mingle and feel a sense of inclusion. They could smell the sweat of their players, and listen to the rousing voice of the coach. They could be a part of something, and participate in a great football ritual.

Our mentality was to put a chain between the players and us fans. We had come to barrack. What we encountered was a fence of fear.

Prove me wrong, Richmond. Rebut this criticism. I love my team and would do almost anything to see it succeed and play regular finals football. I want our players to reach their full potential. Turn my appraisal against me – and Collingwood – this Friday night. And if you do, your feet will never touch the ground. I’ll be the first in line to lift and carry you through the streets of Richmond, high on our shoulders.

Tiger tiger burning bright

Email:  dugaldjellie@gmail.com

Twitter: @dugaldjellie

EJ Whitten

EJ: the spirit of Teddy, flying outside Whitten Oval after his old Footscray had the better of us Tigers.

Dugald 08/04/2014Filed Under: dugald_14

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