I am as excited about Richmond making the finals again, as I am terrified of what will happen on Sunday. We have made steady progress on 2014, sealing finals to all intents and purposes a few weeks early. Last year we stretched the definition of mathematically to new dimenions to edge West Coast out of the finals. We are now in the Regular Finals Club, have 70,000 members, some first class young players coming through and Cotch, Lids and Jack near career-peak form. We beat the benchmark side twice; Fremantle on their patch and later Hawthorn who had looked to have the rank brown and yellow ribbons on the cup already. We are the duck’s guts.
But having been there when North Melbourne tore us a new air vent in Hobart; I fear and loathe them. In fact I might watch the game on Sunday through the bottom of a Chivas Regal bottle for the full Hunter S. Thompson experience. The patched-together combo they threw out against us on Friday kept us to two goals in the first half. We got serious and belted them in the last quarter but the game was a mixed bag of portents and dry-runs.
Ziebell and Lindsay Thomas are chances to miss, and 3-goal Kayne Turner is sure to be sidelined for a week after concussion; his elbow-to-head + head-to-ground incident looked bloody terrible. Ziebell gives me the willies; he and Goldstein together were driving the bus that ran over Richmond in Hobart. I worry less about Goldy; we have stitched up sides with a dominant ruckman before. Dusty is our barometer; he took too long to click into gear (I am murdering this metaphor) on Friday. Once he was going it was glorious, but I want him going before quarter time on Sunday or he DOESN’T GET AN ORANGE.
Tip for Sunday: Tigers by 11 points. If we can get past the Bananas In Pyjamas then look out, pretenders from the west and the leafy east. Tigers are impatient and unpredictable animals and may not follow anyone’s ‘premiership timetable’.
I’ll give Dusty an orange unconditionally chris. such is my love. I know you would too.
Zeibel is a tough little prick, but Dusty scares him. Nothin wrong with that.
My superstitious tiger foundation is crumbling. Weve got these sooky pricks covered.
Please let us beat North and beat them pretty well. I paid $70 for tickets to the game last Friday night, for three seats, and two of us are already Richmond members. And i bought tickets so we wouldn’t get stranded outside the ground like we were the last time we went to see the teams my daughters and I barrack for.
And on the night the ground was barely two thirds full. I simply didn’t believe the official attendance of 40,000. We had an entire row of seats to ourselves and felt quite lonely.
And what did we get for our $70? A game that one club was not trying its best to win. Thank you North Melbourne.
We owe them for dis-respecting us and for dis-respecting the paying public. And we owe them for beating us too easily for too long. I can’t remember when we last beat their senior team.
And i believe that if we can beat them we can do anything. Possibly even beat West Coast.
Please let us beat them…
Yes Corbo, I would not really deny the man an orange.
Brendan, it must have been profoundly weird, especially at half time when we had only two goals on the board. The buying-extra-tickets things is appalling. There has to be some way members can be compensated when they try to do the right thing and respond to RFC scaremongering. The same happened with the Dreamtime game. I was nearly spooked into paying again but Dugald told me to have some spine and just turn up with my membership, it all worked out OK.