Richmond's maddening road to redemption is beautiful to beholdFans usually resent their rivals’ success but the story of the Tigers’ unexpected winning streak is easy to love.Russell Jackson
theguardian.com
Thursday 4 September 2014 There were a good few days of despair for Richmond supporters earlier in the year. In the immediate aftermath of the death of the club’s spiritual leader and four-time Premiership coach, Tom Hafey, the current crop of players folded to Melbourne in a manner that seemed a display of treachery. Even after all the false dawns and pain of the preceding decades, that muddied boot to the stomach was just too much to bear.
Not only had they disgraced themselves on a day that meant so much to so many but their season was in ruin. The Tigers had two wins from eight games at that point and within a little over a month sat a diabolical 3-10 with their coach’s head on the chopping block and the excitement and promise of the previous season a distant memory. This was Richmond capitulating as they always did.
In truth the friendliness and goodwill extended to Tigers supporters in the last couple of seasons is also a kind of implied insult. After all, what type of club as big and vocally-supported (66,245 members and counting) could engender such heartfelt good vibes from the same opposition fans who loathe Collingwood, Hawthorn, Essendon and Carlton; Richmond’s only true Victorian equals in a historical and financial sense? Only one as shambolically unsuccessful as Richmond have been in the last 30 years, that’s who. All those botched drafts. And false prophets. And sacked coaches. And five-year plans. And ninth-place finishes. And the ninth jokes - the ceaseless and hackneyed ninth jokes!
As the mid-season crisis reached its crescendo this year, Damien Hardwick maintained that while his side wer still a mathematical chance of playing finals football he’d continue to prepare them accordingly. It made him look delusional and tragic, traits with which supporters could at least partly identify.
The coach wasn’t the only one in the gun. Hands on hips as he left the ground after that dismal display against Melbourne, Tigers skipper Trent Cotchin looked up into the stands with a haunted sorrow in his eyes. He probably couldn’t believe how bad things had gotten. Not only did the finals appearance that seemed a cinch in the pre-season look a sham but even the ignominy of a wooden spoon wasn’t out of the question. It brought to mind the lament attributed to New York Mets manager Casey Stengel during their disastrous 1962 season: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
It turns out that the Tigers could but in typical Richmond fashion they took a maddening path to redemption, winning nine successive games to light up the finals race and books themselves an Adelaide Oval date with Port Adelaide this Sunday. Even in the dying minutes of Richmond’s heart-stopping mini-final against Sydney last week though, it seemed that the Swans were still destined to stomp on Tiger hearts. Alex Rance kept marking everything though, even when his legs had succumbed to cramp and he looked like he needed to be carried off the ground.
Every Swans forward entry felt like that moment. “Surely Sam Reid will mark at least one of these?” you thought to yourself. The fatal blow never came so, as is often the case in great sporting encounters, inactivity on the scoring front was what we hoped for. Nothing was everything. Despite the premature obituaries and after all that mid-season navel-gazing the Tigers scraped through.
To what can we attribute the revival? Firstly it’s a pretty good advertisement for sticking with your coaching regime until the end of the season and the trust placed in Hardwick can’t be underestimated. A mid-season sacking would have been classic Tigers, so their refusal to panic can also be seen as victory for the club. It also pays to remember that this was, after all, a very good side last season and certainly not one that should have lost its first final to Carlton. The platform was there.
GWS Giants discard Anthony Miles has been pointed to as one of the primary catalysts for the Tigers’ resurgence and not without reason. One thing that keeps fans going in troubled times is the arrival of a fresh face, someone whose presence upends the shape of the team and provides a point of difference. “Now this guy could be a player,” you tell yourself. Asked to earn his stripes in the VFL in the early part of the season, Miles must have wondered what he had to do to get a game in a side as bad as that Richmond one.
Miles came in against North Melbourne in round 12 – just after Essendon had trounced the Tigers – and offered something compelling, not in a way that would fill highlight reels or sell new memberships but in a way that forced the Tiger Army to embrace him as one. His arrival also freed Hardwick to send Dustin Martin forward and provide awkward match-ups. Fittingly it was Martin who scored the match-sealer against Sydney last week. Without Miles he might have been diving into the bottom of packs rather than rattling around inside the forward fifty like a hand grenade.
So all of this brought us to the unique and unlikely situation we had last week when having qualified to take part in September (no side under the present finals system has won the lot from where the Tigers stand), the eighth placed team in the league celebrated like heroes while the team they’d narrowly beaten trudged off in mild disappointment having finished the season as minor premiers.
Despite all of the emotion and jubilation, Port Adelaide at the Adelaide Oval is no small task even for a side in the kind of form Richmond have displayed in the last few months. Last week in Fremantle the Power showed that they’re reclaiming a little bit of the magic they had in the first half of the season and in that sense it’s perfect that both sides should meet in a final.
For Richmond supporters it’ll all probably end up in heartbreak again but certainly a better kind than they’d imagined a few months back. For them, heartbreak is the only proper way of doing these things.
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2014/sep/04/richmond-afl-finals-redemption-port-adelaide
