As Richmond limped out of finals contention during their wretched 2016 campaign, the furrowed brow of their coach, Damien Hardwick, betrayed a club in crisis. Following one defeat, an 83-point drubbing at the hands of Greater Western Sydney where the Tigers could muster just 23 points, Hardwick lauded the Giants as the “Lamborghini” of the AFL while conceding his battered troops were unlikely to win another game for the season.
That same year a petition started doing the rounds calling for Hardwick’s head. The document argued Hardwick “does not have the instincts or tactical nous to be a full-time coach in the AFL” and concluded in no uncertain terms: “The Richmond Football Club MUST remove Damien Hardwick as coach if it is to actually become a genuinely good football club.”
At the time Hardwick himself might have agreed. Having led the Tigers to three straight Septembers, he presided over just eight victories in 2016 and was as good as broken. “I felt I segregated myself from players, I was working harder than I had to, I was trying to find the solution myself but in effect I was the problem,” he said. “I wasn’t in a good spot, there’s no doubt about it.” And it was affecting his personal life. “You are not the man I married,” Hardwick’s wife told him, seemingly a dead man walking both at work and at home.
What happened between seasons 2016 and 2017 is now the stuff of Australian football lore, the transformation of a club, and an individual, that owed as much to rediscovering a love of the game as it did on-field strategising. The result was the unification of an apparently disparate playing group and the reawakening of a club whose best days were long gone.
Saturday’s obliteration of the Giants was one for the ages; the third-biggest winning margin in AFL/VFL grand final history. Richmond’s form since the bye – 11 straight wins heading into the decider - meant we should have seen something like this coming. But while Hawthorn’s 2014 win over Sydney was masterful and Richmond’s own dismantling of Adelaide two years ago was clinical, Saturday’s landslide ranks alongside Geelong’s demolition job on Port Adelaide in 2007 as an all-time masterclass.
Quite what defines a dynasty in sport is open to discussion, but, after enduring a 37-year premiership drought, the Tigers now have two flags in three years. This 2019 vintage looks a more assured, complete lot than the one that came from nowhere two years ago to ride the crest of a wave through September. If there was an element of surprise to that triumph there was none this time around. From July onwards Richmond were comfortably the best team in the competition and are without question the club to beat in 2020.
It’s an exercise in futility to pick holes in their game. They have their stars, the brightest of which, Dustin Martin, is now entrenched as a great of the game with a Brownlow and two North Smith medals to his name. They have their unsung role players, the likes of Shane Edwards and Bachar Houli epitomising the fashionable, but hard to find, team-first ethos. They have a gameplan that evolves to suit their environment. And they have X-factor. Heck, they can even play a first-gamer in a grand final and make it work.
The Giants will no doubt be wringing their hands over what they could have done differently. Phil Davis, their captain and defensive sheriff, played but was still wounded from his club’s bruising preliminary final win over Collingwood. The likes of Jeremy Finlayson and Lachie Whitfield might wish for their time again, but this match could have been played a dozen times for much the same outcome. The fact is, and coach Leon Cameron conceded as much, GWS players suffered from a monumental case of stage fright.
They will cling to the wisdom that you have to lose one to win one, yet on this evidence they have a way to go to prove their game is suited to the cauldron of the MCG on the last Saturday in September. Cameron, his players, and the entire club are hurting and will carry this pain into 2020. But they are closer than most, and a sight closer than Richmond at the end of 2016.
In a season that has seen five head coaches spat out by the system, Hardwick stands as a beacon of hope. One of those to perish, Fremantle’s Ross Lyon, recalled a conversation with former St Kilda president Rod Butterss when he took helm of the Saints back in 2007. “Senior AFL coaching takes grown men to places they should never go,” Butterss told Lyon. The words sound foreboding but in the case of Hardwick, who’s been to those places and come out the other side, they’re a reminder that adversity is nothing when you believe in yourself.
