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.

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.

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰

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.

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰

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.

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.

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰

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.

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰

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.

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰

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.”

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”.

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰

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.

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰

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

“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.”

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.

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰

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.

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰

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.”

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰

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.

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.

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰

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.

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