Wallace still sick of hearing 'well done' to losers
Rohan Connolly | April 29, 2007
The Age
THERE'S a memorable line uttered by the then-Footscray coach Terry Wallace in the compelling 1996 documentary Year Of The Dogs after his team had given up an eight-goal lead to lose a game it clearly should have won.
Wallace, livid at seeing his players being applauded off by their long-suffering supporters, cannot take any more, and bellows at his men: "If I see one bloke walk out of here getting a pat on the back for a good effort, I'll spew up."
It's more than a decade on, and the team he is coaching has changed, but yesterday, as Richmond lost another game it might have won, the deja vu for the coach must have been overwhelming.
The Tigers had not led West Coast by anything like eight goals, but so good are the Eagles that Richmond's lead, at one stage 21 points, might well be considered the equivalent.
And its eventual 23-point loss, one that has left the Tigers 0-5 without once having played too badly, was in the circumstances every bit as galling. Wallace gave his troops a fearsome bake when they came into the rooms afterwards, and while he had calmed down a fair bit come his news conference, it was clear his message had been pretty similar.
"I'm just about fed up with honourable losses," he said. "What we spoke about at the end of the game was that the guys can't be accepting of that.
"If we get to that stage, when all of a sudden the arm wrestle's on in the last quarter and the game's there to be taken, if our blokes start thinking they're going to get a pat on the back whether they get the result or don't get the result … that's not where we're going as a team."
It was a stance echoed by emerging Tiger star Andrew Raines, just one of 22 whose ears were still ringing from the coach's spray. "Getting clapped off for good efforts is a bit frustrating. We're sick of that," he said.
Fair enough, too, given Richmond has been in a realistic winning position in every one of its five defeats, two of them now at the hands of last year's grand finalists.
And more galling still when it's been hard to question the Tigers' commitment in any of them. Indeed, were the the AFL ladder determined by effort alone, Richmond would be a lot closer to the top than the miserable position it occupies now.
Sadly, though, it's execution that ultimately counts for more, and the gap between the elite of the competition and the strugglers was never better demonstrated than in West Coast's ability to make its chances count, and the Tigers' inability to do the same.
West Coast is going to stumble on the field at some stage this season, and yesterday could well have been that day. The Eagles kicked the first two goals of the game, then looked as though they thought they could cruise through the next couple of hours.
It was a touch arrogant, and Richmond had the mind-set to make them pay, completely dominating the rest of the first quarter. Richard Tambling's four straight goals, and another to Daniel Jackson, gave it a buffer of close to three goals.
Even then, though, with their tails up and the crowd smelling the upset of the year, the Tigers butchered too many chances to make that lead far more imposing.
The behinds that should have been goals, and the mounting clanger count was always going to come back to bite Richmond, and the errors continued to hurt even after Joel Bowden put the Tigers within four points midway through the last term.
A poor choice of option from Nathan Foley, a missed target by Tambling, and the failure of anyone to get front and square as Jarrad Oakley-Nicholls popped one up to the goal square were just a few key examples from a multitude.
The clangers and missed shots cannot help but have a cancerous effect on morale, Raines conceded later. "It does (deflate the group). It shouldn't but it does. I think it's just natural instinct that when you've got a teammate lining up for goal and he misses an easy one, you sort of go into your shell a bit."
The normally reliable Jay Schulz was the main culprit on the kicking front, missing three gettable set shots on goal, four by the end of the day, and was suitably chastened when he faced reporters with his coach and captain Kane Johnson.
"I just didn't kick them right today, they just came off the side of the boot and I kicked four points, and it probably cost us a real chance of winning the game," he said.
"I always go through the same routine and always do the same thing when I kick for goal, they just weren't coming off right today. I'm not sure why, and I'll go back and work on it during the week.
"It's disappointing for me, and disappointing for the group as well, because they can usually rely on me to kick goals. That's what I'm there for, and I cost us today."
If Schulz's comments and the demeanour of his fellow Tigers offered at least one positive for their coach, it was that they, too, were every bit as sick to death of this losing caper as he.
And that, like Wallace vowed a decade or so ago, it was going to get pretty messy outside the rooms were any Richmond fans going to offer a "well done" on the way out.
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