Too easy to just blame Tigers for their downfall amid equalisation pushRohan Connolly
ESPN
Jul 5, 2024Discussing AFL football isn't like prosecuting a court case. There's no legal imperative to get the detail spot on. People are happy to run with a half-truth if it suits their passion for their team or loathing of a rival.
There's also not much nuance. And plenty of outrageous statements, wisdom in hindsight and misplaced cause and effect relationships. Particularly when it comes to powerful clubs on the wane. Like Richmond.
There's no doubt 2024 has been a shocker for the Tigers, on several levels. On the field, where they've won just two games. In the medical room, where there's been an unprecedented string of injuries to key players which has rarely abated.
And surrounding the administrative offices, where chief executive Brendon Gale is soon to depart to run the new Tasmanian team, and where the "no more Dustin Martin" speculation centres. First-year coach Adem Yze, particularly, has copped the proverbial you-know-what sandwich.
But much of the media "should haves" and "must dos" about where Richmond is and where it's headed are in my view, not unusually in these cases, way too definitive.
It's too easy to say Richmond was too complacent after winning its third premiership in four years in 2020. Too convenient to say the Tigers have tried to cling on too long to a great era. And too presumptuous to assert both that the uncertainty about Martin's future is destabilising and that Gale should have left the club immediately his new gig was announced.
We see the same narrative pushed about clubs who stay at the top attempting to overstay their welcome the moment the signs of decline are apparent, even sooner in the case of, say, Collingwood, which was being written off earlier this season after losing its first three games.
Facts are Richmond was hardly at the bottoming out stage after winning that third premiership. There were three other clubs headed into the 2021 season both older and more experienced. It has made finals once in three years since and in the other two years at least won nine and 10 games. That's far from definitive rebuild territory.
And even if you were to argue that it was, is it as though Richmond didn't make changes to the list? Or begin to blood younger faces like Maurice Rioli, Rhyan Mansell, Hugo Ralphsmith, Josh Gibcus, Tyler Sonsie and co.?
Have a look at the Tigers' best and fairest results from that 2020 flag year. It's hardly "Dad's Army" stuff, winner Jayden Short and top 8 finishers Shai Bolton, Liam Baker and Noah Balta then aged 24, 21, 22 and 21 respectively.
To think Richmond, with those names already established and the likes of Martin, Tom Lynch, Dion Prestia, Trent Cotchin and Nick Vlastuin still playing great football couldn't seriously continue to have a crack at success, is rubbish, and a re-writing of history.
Richmond hasn't done anything much wrong. Its decline is about nothing more than football's evolutionary cycle, simply expedited a little more these days thanks to equalisation measures and natural attrition. But fortunately, so too can the rebound be quicker.
We constantly dip our lid to the clubs who can seemingly defy nature's laws, like Sydney and Geelong, but for every Swans and Cats there's an example like Brisbane or Hawthorn, with whom the cycle eventually caught up.
Even Sydney, by the way, did spend two years out of the finals in 2019-20, a finish of 16th the year Richmond won its last flag the club's lowest finish ever. Proof enough given how the Swans are travelling now, that you're never too far away from a potential resurgence.
It's always beyond the immediate on-field performances, however, that cause and effect myths are at their worst. Would Martin's future be nearly as big a talking point were the Tigers winning a few more games? Very unlikely.
And it's not as though the club has been caught by surprise at the fact a 33-year-old champion is coming to an end and there's speculation someone else may be able to squeeze one or two more years out of him.
Think Luke Hodge at Brisbane, Sam Mitchell at West Coast and Jordan Lewis at Melbourne. In fact, think back further to Doug Hawkins at Fitzroy or even, heaven forbid, Peter McKenna at Carlton. It's been going on a while.
As for the Gale stuff, it always makes me laugh when football media starts opining about good and bad chief executives. It's purely coincidental of course (sarcasm), that the most lauded always just happen to work at clubs whose fortunes are on the up, and vice versa.
Really, how does anyone other than Gale himself know whether he's still working as hard as he can to help the fortunes of the club he's soon leaving? Would the suggestion that his continued presence in the CEO's chair at Punt Road isn't helping be made if Richmond was winning games of football? Of course not.
But when it comes to AFL and convenient theories, two plus two can often easily be made to somehow add up to 5,738.
Richmond has made mistakes. Every club does. But it could have nailed every tiny detail of the inevitable transition from king of the heap to just another club and still be going through the sort of pain it currently is anyway, simply because the march of time and good fortune haven't been on its side.
That's football. Sometimes you win, and if success is measured only in premierships, far more often you lose. But after nearly four decades of misery, Richmond fans got to taste that sweetest of success three times in short succession.
What's going on now is an inevitable consequence of that. But do you think Tiger fans would swap any of those beautiful moments for a little less pain now? You're joking, aren't you?
https://www.espn.com.au/afl/story/_/id/40493248/afl-rohan-connolly-richmond-tigers-adem-yze-dustin-martin-equalisaton
