Tigers, Hawks face D-Day
By Caroline Wilson
The Age
April 3, 2005
The end of the 2004 football season could not have come too quickly for the Richmond and Hawthorn football clubs. To compare which team's circumstances rated the more perilous - ridiculous even - depended on which day and which bad headline had proved the most recent.
In on-field terms, Richmond hit rock bottom with only four wins and the wooden spoon, snared in a round-22 debacle against Sydney where even the strongest aficionados believed the team had not tried. Hawthorn was less than a percentage point better off.
Off-field, each club lurched from crisis to crisis. The Tigers lost more than $2 million and considered joining the Bulldogs, Kangaroos and Melbourne as clubs requiring special AFL aid.
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Hawthorn's headlines revealed depression, excessive drinking, lying, political infighting, on-field brawls and confused sexual preferences. Richmond's revealed a senior board member had little faith in the coach (before round one), corporate mismanagement, spitting and more political in-fighting.
Director after director resigned. Brad Ottens suggested he had had enough of playing alongside Matthew Richardson. Ty Zantuck told other clubs he had no respect for his Tiger on-field leaders.
Leadership at every level was shaken. Both clubs entered 2004 with newish chief executives. Both were gone by mid-winter. Both captains had firmly decided by the end of the season that they no longer wanted the job.
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Only presidents Dicker and Clinton Casey survived after protracted boardroom manoeuvres and on-going attacks from former players and even club legends....
Casey's opponents, too, failed to convince supporters they deserved the chance to rebuild the club. The Richmond president ran a successful tabloid campaign, briefly and mistakenly enlisting the services of Rex Hunt. Greg Miller, though, proved to be Casey's trump card when he took the unorthodox step of joining the board.
Casey and Miller, after all, had lured to Richmond probably the hottest coaching prospect available - just ahead of Rodney Eade - in Terry Wallace. It is interesting that neither Casey nor Dicker have been seen or heard in 2005 and while Dicker remains determined to depart on a solid note at the end of this year, Casey has suggested privately his tenure is not a long-term one either.
Had the Jay Schulz incident not taken place, it is unlikely Miller would have returned to the media spotlight either, although the impression remains that - if you had to choose between him and chief executive Steve Wright - Miller is running the football club.
Equally interestingly, Wallace - whose five-year appointment marked the 11th coaching change at Tigerland since the club last won a premiership - did not appear at the club on day one of the Schulz drama, despite his having handled, in a media sense, pretty much everything else this year.
Perhaps this was wise. Richmond - or at least Miller - chose Wallace ahead of Eade because it believed that while both coaches were extremely good at their jobs, Wallace was better suited to moulding talented teenagers into elite senior footballers.
Miller also believed that a club that was broke needed an expert salesman. Several board members pushed last year for Casey to approach Kevin Sheedy, but that approach never took place.
WALLACE chose Richmond ahead of Hawthorn not only because the Tigers wanted him more - the Hawks never got around to offering him a job because the deal had been done too quickly by Richmond - but also because the challenge of rebuilding this once-great VFL but decaying AFL club was the most tantalising in football today.
Like so many before him. Over two decades, the Tigers have turned to - and burnt - club legends Francis Bourke and Kevin Bartlett, among other favourite sons, along with premiership coaches Allan Jeans and Robert Walls. The latter pair took an all-too-brief look at the football club before swiftly ending their coaching careers.
Like Alastair Clarkson at Hawthorn, the trade period, drafts, pre-season training and captaincy search for Wallace all seem so simple now. The news that Richmond had lost a major sponsor in the Transport Accident Commission came at the end of an extremely poor week for him.
Wallace is one of the most personable, likeable characters in football, but the significant question mark hanging over him will not be forgotten by the Western Bulldogs who will always state that his departure from that club was duplicitous.
Most people in the industry, including the AFL, believe that Wallace had done a deal with Sydney before he left the Bulldogs - the club at which he had resurrected his playing career and reputation after one disastrous season with Richmond.
And his departure from Hawthorn even after all this time has complicated his relationship with that club, too.
So what possessed him to publicly turn on Ottens before the Geelong game is mystifying. Not only did his words fuel Geelong, but by calling the footballer a mercenary, Wallace turned the spotlight back on himself. Wallace said this week he talked up the game to place his players in a finals-like atmosphere where, quite clearly, they froze.
On the positive side, Wallace helped attract a surprisingly big Easter Sunday crowd to the MCG, but whether the Tiger fans will come back for more today against the Hawks is another matter.
Both Clarkson and Wallace realised quickly one week ago the size of the job at hand.
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If Clarkson remains coaching's mystery, there is a strong impression following last weekend's failure against Geelong that the Tigers remain a mystery to Wallace. He did not see the thrashing and the group's remarkable lack of intensity coming.
Even Brisbane officials had privately complimented Richmond's improved style during the practice matches and Wallace truly believed the change could reap earlier benefits than he had first hoped.
The coach admitted he was a little rusty during the club's Wizard Cup hit-out against Collingwood. His old team of Paul Armstrong and Brian Royal, along with Davids King and Wheadon, grappled with the match statistics and the mechanics of the coach's box.
But last Sunday, all that ran smoothly. It was the senior players and their lack of leadership that threw Wallace. His coaching came under question also. On Triple M, new special comments man Danny Frawley publicly wondered several times during the game why Joel Bowden was shifted from the half-back line, where he won a club championship last season.
After the game, Wallace bluntly told Dunstall, who was also commentating, that Bowden might have won a best and fairest but Richmond had won only four games. Touche.
Today's clash between the worst two teams of 2004 has been heralded as D-Day for the loser. But for Wallace, D-Day will come when he must publicly declare lost faith in a senior group of footballers who have repeatedly failed to take charge on the playing arena, the day he realises that Richmond's future lies in its youth. Then comes Wallace's biggest test.
http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2005/04/02/1112302283327.html
