Punt Rd needs to wake up fast
09 August 2004
Herald Sun
Trevor Grant
REALISM and coaching football teams don't always sit happily together.
For the most part, a new coach has to be a dreamer who believes he has the answers that others haven't been able to find.
He sees in the stumbling, bumbling ruckman a big heart and imposing frame; in the slow midfielder twice-rejected elsewhere some footy nous that can be used if he's given a chance.
Such self-belief is the life-blood of all coaches. It drives them, and their charges, to keep pursuing the dream when all around there is nothing but waning hope and cynicism.
Coach-in-waiting Terry Wallace is casting his eye over Richmond, and if reports are correct, he favours a move to Punt Rd ahead of Hawthorn.
He has said he sees in Richmond's list a long-term future superior to Hawthorn's team.
No doubt his coaching presentation to the club was filled with positive vibes. If he takes the job, you can be sure his opening press conference will be a tub-thumping projection of great things on the horizon for Tiger fans.
Of course, it has to be this way. No coach comes into a job believing anything but the very best of the bulk of his players and club.
But there is a genuine reason to ask what it is that Wallace sees in Richmond that others, beyond the coaching market, don't.
It's not so much based on yesterday's game, in which the Tigers battled manfully to stay within five goals of a superior, but inefficient, Geelong, but the fact that Richmond has developed the most sustained record of persistent failure in the modern game.
This is a club that appears impervious to the embarrassment of plumbing new depths of ineptitude.
In 2002, just a year after making a preliminary final, it managed to lose nine successive games between rounds nine and 17. A year later, it produced a doozy of a run, losing 13 of its last 14 to send the supporters into summer with as much hope for the future as a convicted Bangkok heroin trafficker.
But yesterday it managed to top all this, losing its 11th game in succession in 2004, its longest losing run in a season in club history.
At a club built on the legend of such fierce competitors as Jack Dyer, Tom Hafey and Francis Bourke, it is a record that should engender a good deal of sadness and, perhaps, even a sense of collective shame in its holders.
But so ingrained is the culture of failure that it now appears there is a sense of resignation; as if there is no way of avoiding the inevitability of another defeat.
This is not to say that people such as departing coach Danny Frawley, and many of the players, do not feel the pain of these extended runs of defeat. Or that they don't try to do something about it. But when minds are as conditioned to losing as they are among this lot, it requires more than an upbeat coach to turn things around.
And this is where Wallace – or whoever succeeds Frawley – comes in. The new coach will be inheriting a group of players who give the impression they have developed an immunity to the hatred of failure that always rescues good teams from form slumps.
As much as they may protest that they hurt as much as anyone when they are beaten, the actions they take on the field to try to avoid defeat suggest otherwise. The new man will have convinced himself, and those who appoint him, that, given time and a gradual injection of new talent, he will be able to banish this fragility, and restore the Tigers' once-famous contempt for mediocrity.
However, his toughest task will be to convince the players.
Given the records they have built for themselves, and the culture that has infected the place for more than 20 years, it is a job of monumental proportions.
Still, as we know, dreaming and coaching are often one and the same.
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/footy/common/story_page/0,8033,10383853%255E19742,00.html
