A romantic comedy never begins with the lovers in a joyful embrace. And on a dark August night in 2016, Richmond and competence, let alone success, were a long way from being even odd bedfellows. The Tigers closed a horrible season with meek 113-point surrender to Sydney – a wide-open flogging with their lack of spirit and effort all hanging out.
“There’s always a kick in the backside at some stage,” said Richmond coach Damien Hardwick. “This is our kick in the backside.”
But if anything, Hardwick pulled his punches. He sensed his players were a little too cautious and maybe weren’t given enough licence. If a comedic analogy is to be drawn, it is perhaps with Meatballs and Bill Murray’s Tripper Harrison, a counsellor at a summer camp for… well, for losers.
The advice? Forget the rules, let’s have fun and give ourselves something to remember.
“We’ve embraced imperfection this year, haven’t we?” said Hardwick to his players before last year’s grand final against Adelaide. “We all understand we’ve got strengths, and we all understand we’ve got flaws. The game today is going to be based on imperfection. We’re asking you to embrace those moments.”
And just like Murray’s charges in Meatball’s, Hardwick’s men ran around and pantsed their opponents, as they had done all September. Talk about something to remember.
In Yellow and Black: A Season with Richmond, Konrad Marshall takes the high culture road, and reveals Hardwick to be an admirer of the author Nicholas Dawidoff. Dawidoff, who once spent a season with the New York Jets, writes that coaches have much in common with great artists: “Cezanne slashed the paintings that dissatisfied him. Giacomettie gasped, swore furiously, and descended into melancholy or anguish as he painted James Lord’s portrait, often screaming in rage at the canvas and then scrubbing it and beginning anew.”
But for present-day Richmond, it is Picasso who sums up the reigning premiers best: “A great painting comes together, just barely.” That is to say, excellence has a fine edge, and it only gets harder to preserve. Success can beget more success, but it can also breed self-indulgence. Hunger and the desire to improve will largely determine where this season will fall for Richmond.
It has been said many times and in many ways that for every good one enjoys, they shall be sullied with ills. Thankfully for Richmond the reverse is also true, for it is in contrast with immense sorrow (and for such a long time) that they last season experienced great joy. The Tigers will grip it for as long as they can.
In contrast to last year, Richmond enters season 2018 with a stable and united administration. “Unity is strength. Unity is power,” says CEO Brendan Gale. “It takes a club to get to a grand final.” But Gale also knows that it takes players to win premierships: “we’ve unlocked something that teams can’t compete against,” said Gale in the rooms after the grand final. “And we’ve got a massive upside, massive upside.”
That upside can be seen in the success of Richmond’s VFL side that finished runners-up to Port Melbourne last year. Players such as Paddy Guinane medallist Anthony Miles, the speedy small forward Shai Bolton, and midfielder Connor Menadue should help guard against complacency and ensure there remains a healthy competition for spots each week. Craig McRae, Richmond’s VFL coach, attributes a big part of his side’s success to recruiting “really hungry players”.
Meanwhile, Jack Higgins, who the Tigers took at pick 17 in the national draft in November, may not see much of McRae. Described by David King as a younger version of Greater Western Sydney’s Toby Greene, Higgins should soon be pushing for a spot in Richmond’s best 22. If fantasy football is your thing, the small forward/midfielder was ranked the draft’s No 1 player, averaging 145 Supercoach points. To put that into perspective, Dustin Martin, who won everything there was to win last year, averaged 121.9.
That Martin will again be pivotal to any success the Tigers enjoy this year is so evident it scarcely needs saying. Having Alex Rance, David Astbury, Nick Vlastuin, Dylan Grimes and Bachar Houli behind him, allows Martin to play the lead in arguably the league’s most attacking midfield. None of these men have yet turned 30, so barring injury, only an idiot would suggest this will change in 2018.
On idiots, this time last year, Damien Hardwick was described as having the air of a man who never lost the appetite for discovery, but kept discovering the same thing: his team was not good enough. But as Hardwick said on Fox Footy’s On The Couch last year: “They’re waiting to write the story, aren’t they? Well we get to dictate that story. And the story is the heart.”
Hardwick went on to write one of football’s most heart-warming tales, one that still has Richmond fans laughing. A sequel won’t be quite as good, but having seen the intense pressure applied by the Tigers during this year’s pre-season, who would write it off?
