They came in with quite the reputation. They were welded to the top of the ladder all year. They played a clean, crisp brand of football befitting their beautiful home ground. They’d laid waste to their two finals opponents. If you barrack for the story, there was none better than theirs. “We’re right there,” their coach told them following their preliminary final win. “We can almost touch it.”
On Saturday, as a Eurovision contestant belted out the national anthem, they stood like men modelling for their own statues. They looked positively cyborgian. At the coin toss, their captain, with his Errol Flynn moustache and his South Australian swagger, made his opposite number wait.
At that moment, and for the first 10 or 15 minutes or so, everything screamed Adelaide. Their ruckman was dominating. They looked the more composed side. Besides, this was Richmond, a club that’s known nothing but failure for three decades, a team they’d torn asunder earlier in the year. Someone even neglected to press play on the Tigers’ song as they entered the arena, a treasonable offence in these parts.
Seven unanswered Richmond goals later and Tiger fans were dancing on cars in Swan St. So what happened, exactly? How could the highest scoring team in the competition scratch together four goals in the last three quarters? Why have so many highly rated interstate teams – Fremantle in 2013, Sydney in 2014, West Coast in 2015 and Adelaide this year – stunk it up on footy’s biggest stage?
The fact is, this year at least, Richmond happened. Yes, the competition is inherently skewed towards Victoria-based clubs, particularly MCG tenants. And yes, many of Adelaide’s best players, their tall forwards especially, didn’t fire a shot. But this Richmond side, the one Grant Thomas reckons is the worst to ever win a premiership, caught the wave and rode it to football immortality.
So much ink has been spilt when it comes to Dustin Martin that there’s pretty much nothing more to say. As a footballer, he’s completely without precedent. Seven years ago, Dermott Brereton predicated that he’d end up a “waddler” – in other words a guy who reaches his physical peak prematurely and is shot by his mid-20s. With his Brownlow medal, Norm Smith medal, premiership medallion and 22 contested possessions in the one week, he presents compelling evidence to the contrary.
Derm was a little more on the money last week when explaining Richmond’s point of difference – it’s frenzied, suffocating forward pressure. On the eve of the finals, former coach Danny Frawley questioned whether such a small forward line could stand in September. But it was their superior endurance, Brereton wrote, that allowed them to run and bludgeon their opponents into the ground. They had deliberately targeted good middle distance runners, players like Jason Castagna, Daniel Rioli, Dan Butler and Kane Lambert. Throw Jacob Townsend and Jack Graham into the mix – guys we’d barely heard of six weeks ago – and you have an irresistible and strangely intimidating force.
Both the naked eye and Champion Data’s “pressure gauge” confirm they’re one of the few teams who can up the ante and apply more pressure in the second half of games. Hence, why their three finals opponents were eventually worn down to a nub. The Collingwood side of 2010, the Fremantle side of 2013 and even the three-peating Hawthorn all built their game around intense forward pressure. But none of them flew in the face of footballing orthodoxy quite like this Richmond forward line. And none of them managed it with such bargain basement buys.
As Craig Little noted on Sunday, this represents another shift in how the game is played. It’s another example of how, in an ostensibly even competition, success comes to those who innovate, who play to their strengths and who catch the competition on the hop. Someone will work Richmond out. There’s a cottage industry of assistant coaches whose job it is to pick holes in the reigning premier, to scupper the trendsetter, to etch their own mark on the game. One of them might even figure out how to stop Martin.
The footy world moves on quickly. This time last year, we were toasting another perennial hard luck story, another team built around manic pressure, another team that peaked to perfection. It feels like so long ago. But last week, a documentary screened that brought it all back. In it, their star forward, despite a lean year and an even leaner grand final, kicks one of the defining goals in the history of the club. On the weekend, a gossip columnist chronicled how his life has since unravelled. Jake Stringer’s name is mud now and the Western Bulldogs are yesterday’s fairy tale. The dogs keep barking, as the saying goes, but the caravan moves on.
