323 days later, the Tigers find the football
Greg Baum
The Age
April 4, 2005
When the Tigers won at last, they kicked souvenir footballs into the crowd (and hit their targets). When the Tigers won, they signed autographs and slapped celebratory hands with supporters on the fence.
When the Tigers won, their supporters in the rooms burst into spontaneous applause for coach Terry Wallace. No other team's change room fills or empties so completely according to their results. Nor, for that matter, does any other team's grandstand.
It had been 323 days. The wife of a press box stalwart and Richmond supporter was pregnant then; now the baby can walk.
Kayne Pettifer, the unlikely hero who kicked the last two goals of yesterday's match, did not sing the theme song at all last year. Now he stood in the centre of the change room, the cameras upon him. His guernsey was torn, his eye was blackened, but his smile was broad.
When the Tigers last won, he was sharing a house with a couple of teammates who are no longer at the club. He knew it must have been close for him, too.
Richmond is a club that does not recognise half-measures. It lost in a record number of games, money, and respect. It changed coaches, but lost again last week, pathetically.
Then, at this lowest ebb, it lost its major sponsor, so late in the piece that the TAC's name and slogan was still apparent on guernseys and other kit yesterday. This was a club that needed to win something.
Wallace said he thought the Tigers were too focused last week on winning and the redemption it would bring, and not enough on the kicks, marks, handballs and plans that would bring it. But football is about winning, or what's the point?
No fan expects his or her team to win every week, but nor do they expect non-stop defeat and the ridicule it attracts. The head will tell them it is mostly good-natured, but the heart hurts just the same.
It was this verity that made yesterday's wooden spoon rematch perversely as absorbing in the previous night's grand final return bout. For each club, this match carried a premium, because it was a chance to win.
The outcome was a match without much polish, but with another quality that in its own way shines even more brightly: desperation and its spawn, inspiration. It also had the sort of spiteful edge that can exist only when two teams really mean it. It was a grand final of a kind.
Wallace was not triumphal at the end, just pleased that those long summer hours of planning that he said last week might as well have been spent in the pub were not wasted after all.
He will know that for long stretches of this match, Hawthorn looked a likelier team of the future. He, like everyone else in the ground, was in awe of the sleek talent of Lance Franklin, exposed on an AFL field for the first time yesterday, but not likely to be fully realised for a couple of years.
The Hawks worked like navvies, but for a pittance of a reward. But the Tigers worked hard, too. The coach was trying to bring a hobbling Kane Johnson to the bench in the last quarter when the skipper snapped a goal.
Pettifer was on his own admission a spent force, with hands on hips, when the loose ball came his way for the goal that completed the result.
The consensus before the match was the Tigers have a better list at the moment, and it was this that won them the day yesterday. But a year is a long time, and football changes by the minute.
When Darren Gaspar passed truly yesterday after twice kicking the ball astray, the Tiger fans gave him a bronx cheer (which he acknowledged). But by match's end, he was one of the sainted again.
Wallace said these were just games, but he has been part of enough football fairytales to know otherwise. Wallace said that the process was what mattered, but knows that a win by any other name tastes as sweet. No winner in its moment of triumph slaps hands and screams about great process.
In the rooms, no one was singing the theme song. The gaps on the wall where the TAC posters once hung were a reminder that the next twist might only be a week away. But at least the Tigers could look each other and their supporters in the eyes.
When the Tigers won, they rejoiced because victory - however humble, however qualified - beats the hell out of losing.
http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2005/04/03/1112489346434.html
