Whenever his great Richmond sides were struggling, Damien Hardwick would get his runner on the line. “Get them to raise the fight!” he would scream. Tom Lynch’s meltdown against Adelaide wasn’t a case of following the coach’s instructions. It was the act of a frustrated man. His team was totally outclassed. He hadn’t touched the ball. He was being held. He was being double-teamed. He couldn’t buy a free kick. He’d lead to the right spot and the ball would go sailing over his head. He was trying to be a leader, trying to be a physical presence, trying to bring life to a dull game, and hope to a lost cause.
The Tigers’ spearhead ended up taking out his frustrations on the closest bloke in the vicinity, Jordan Butts. If his roundhouse had connected, Butts would have been on his way to the Epworth hospital and Lynch wouldn’t have played again this year. “I didn’t want to cause harm or anything like that,” he told Seven afterwards, not entirely convincingly. As it stands, Lynch is still looking at a hefty suspension.
Lynch has always been a physical player, a footballer who’s liberal with his elbows and not shy about barrelling anyone in his path. On the rare occasions he’s been able to get on the park in recent years, the Tigers have looked a much better team. He’s exactly the sort of player a rebuilding team needs – the type who can protect the kids, give a bit of lip and straighten them up structurally.
But when you’re bottoming out, you’re going to have days like Lynch and the Tigers had at the MCG on Sunday. You’re going to have days where opponents who weren’t fit to polish your boots five years ago are mouthing off and running rings around you. You’re going to have days where the forwards up the other end of the field are strolling into open goals while you have three or four defenders hanging off you. You’re going to have days where you feel old and slow and angry and pretty much useless. And when you’re wired like Lynch, you’re going to lash out. He apologised to his teammates at half-time but there were shades of Jock Riley in the film The Club: “She apologised later, but by then the damage had been done”.
Richmond’s champions were at the right age to bow out without copping the worst of the rebuild. They got their testimonials, book deals, laps of honour and media gigs. It’s not so simple for the likes of Lynch, who is 32 and presumably has some good footy left in him. But his job is to stay physically sound, to protect the beanpoles around him and not let the inevitable frustrations of a rebuild get to him. He failed on that front against the Crows. He’s awfully lucky – or more to the point, Butts is awfully lucky – that his haymaker didn’t connect.
A slightly better advertisement for the game was the Western Bulldogs and Sydney clash on Friday night. Right through the history of this sport, there are certain teams that fall short of winning a premiership, but which are tattooed in your memory for the way they played. Mine are Fitzroy in 1986, North Melbourne in 1993, Geelong in 2008 and Collingwood in 2022. They were attacking teams that neutral observers were drawn to, but which were invariably figured out and neutralised. Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal were that team for about a decade and a half in a different sport. It looks great, it quickens the pulse, but it doesn’t guarantee titles.
The Bulldogs would be that team for many this year. They are a terrific team to watch, and they’ve played four or five of the most entertaining games this year. But they always leave the door ajar. The Swans made them go down the well, and probably cost themselves with a few Ian Baker-Finch shanks. The turf was a lawsuit waiting to happen, but it was a match of the highest quality. The Dogs’ challenge now, as their draw gets considerably easier, is to not stuff this up, to not toss away a double chance with some bird-brained performance against the 16th or 18th placed team. They’re too good, and we’re enjoying them too much, to waste another season like that.
And then there’s Carlton. There’s always Carlton. There’s so much more to be said about what’s gone wrong, and what is to be done, and there’s nowhere near enough space to do it justice here. You could set your watch to Mick Malthouse and Denis Pagan being collared for comment and being only too happy to blame it on everything but their own coaching. But you know things are really bad when Bruce Mathieson crawls out from under his pokie machines to say how crap they’re going. “One of the great Australians,” Sam Newman called him recently. I reckon I could find 25 million better ones. And I reckon I could find a few million solutions to the hot mess Carlton currently finds itself in.
