Elite clubs don’t let roadhumps divert them from purpose The Australian
May 26, 2014 THIS will be the season when the AFL community finds out whether Richmond is a good club heading towards elite, a status it once held way back when Kevin Bartlett had hair. So we are talking yonks.
Whether a club is good, influential or indifferent is only partly defined by what happens on the football field. Successful and elite can describe two very different clubs.
Brisbane in the early 2000s was a successful club, winning three premierships, but we all know, just a decade on, that it was not elite.
The AFL administration has been forced to take Brisbane by the hand this year after promising to stuff millions of dollars of cash in its pockets. Brisbane, the three-time champ, is a recovering rabble.
Calibrations other than a win-loss record are just as meaningful as points and percentage.
Under Eddie McGuire’s chairmanship, Collingwood took 11 years to win its premiership. Once he took control, the club gained lost credibility. Because of his professionalism, Collingwood almost immediately looked powerful even though it finished 15th in his first year and ninth the next.
McGuire put together a board that both found and attracted sponsorship. A debt-ridden club had money in the bank and all of this led to respect within the league itself and in the community too. You might not have liked the Pies but you had to acknowledge the turnaround.
Clubs improve their status, as well, by the manner in which they handle internal issues. West Coast have, for instance, not fully recovered from the Ben Cousins era, where it was judged to have put victory ahead of virtue. Geelong lost everybody’s champion, Gary Ablett, to the Gold Coast and won the premiership the very same year.
Richmond beat the Western Sydney Gnomes by 113 points on Saturday to boost its percentage over the 100 mark. In a stand-alone sentence, they look impressive stats but when put into a paragraph that notes it is just the club’s third win in nine matches, the story might not have a happy ending. It is a miserable position to be in for a club that promised its fans consecutive appearances in the finals.
Yet Richmond’s reputation has been enhanced through the first half of the season. Firstly, the administration has handled grim performances on the field as best as anyone could. President Peggy O’Neal has spoken calmly of Richmond’s bumbling football and dismissed any suggestions that the position of coach Damien Hardwick was under any sort of squeeze. O’Neal is the AFL’s first female president and, sadly, has been seen more as a curiosity than a club boss by some media commentators.
The club remained composed as on-baller Dustin Martin was flogged by his manager to every club, including Borussia Dortmund. Richmond also remained calm under an unfortunate and unexpected attack by outgoing AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou over its handling of forward Jake King, a tough little critter whose friendship group is a broad church.
The only visible wobble has come with Jack Riewoldt, who was hurt by his removal from the leadership group. So frank was the media coverage of Riewoldt’s demotion that the forward instigated a personal media ban. It was lifted last week and, so unaccustomed had Riewoldt become to microphones and cameras, words fell out of his mouth in a most random pattern.
His observation that the Richmond game plan had gone one way while the game itself went another puzzled coach Hardwick so much it turned him purple. Hardwick gave Riewoldt a public mugging and inexplicably threatened to drop Riewoldt for the match against the Gnomes. The club would have been wiser to dismiss Riewoldt’s comments as rusty-tongue entanglement. Riewoldt did not seek to humiliate Hardwick but the coach made certain he shamed his player.
Such an overreaction was perhaps the best insight yet as to how much the pressure was building within the club to its miserable form. That will have been relieved slightly by the shellacking the Tigers gave the Gnomes but it is hardly a strong form line. Richmond’s other two wins have been over Carlton in round two and the lamentable Lions in round five. The previous round the Gnomes had lost to West Coast by 111 points.
The club has had much to confront this season. It handled the tribute match and funeral for its famous coach Tommy Hafey with dignity. The tone of a celebration of Hafey the man and coach was softened perfectly with sensitive protocols. It was the mark of a mature club, fully aware of its responsibilities.
These are markers that eventually count for much more than winning seasons. They are the building blocks of a strong culture within the club, a philosophy that in turn informs the supporters.
It is best exemplified by Hawthorn, Geelong, Sydney and Collingwood.
These clubs don’t twitch.
When two-time premiership coach Mark Thompson walked out on Geelong to join Essendon, the club replaced him with Chris Scott. And won the flag straight away, its third in five years.
Paul Roos left the Swans; John Longmire coached the club to a premiership in his second year.
Hawthorn lost extroverted president Jeff Kennett and his replacement Andrew Newbold saw the Hawks into the grand final in his first year and took the premiership in his second.
At Collingwood, Nathan Buckley has proved that premiership coach Mick Malthouse could be replaced seamlessly.
These clubs are like flying Formula One cars that can replace a burnt-out part instantly without affecting performance.
They are elite. It is where Richmond wants to be. For that it needs driving principles and standards that are non-negotiable and driven by excellence. That way the wheels never come off.
The Tigers wobbled last week. It was Riewoldt and his personal contribution of 11 goals that kept them on the track when some experts had predicted they were vulnerable, even to the Gnomes.
Richmond has set out on a never-ending race to excel.
That takes a lot of petrol and a big engine. It won’t get there if it blows a tyre over little humps in the road like a forward with a flapping tongue.
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