The most memorable spray I can rememberMatthew Richardson
Herald-Sun
June 19, 2015 10:55AMIT seems like the good old-fashioned spray is back.
From all reports when the Kangaroos players walked into the changerooms at half-time of their game against Sydney last weekend Darren Crocker immediately gave them a short, sharp burst.
We also saw Crows assistant Scott Camporeale and Patrick Dangerfield engage in a heated discussion during Thursday night’s game against Hawthorn.
In an age where footy has changed so much — it’s so structured and well-drilled and everyone is so measured and professional — it’s good to see a bit of fire and brimstone can still exist in the game.
If it’s used in the right way and you’re not going to it every week as a way to motivate players it can still have an effect.
The biggest spray I’ve ever seen was after we lost to Hawthorn in Tassie in round 12, 2006, when Terry Wallace was Richmond coach.
We were ninth heading into the game and the Hawks were near the bottom of the ladder so it was pretty crucial to our finals hopes to get a win. But it was a bad day for the club, we lost by 41 points and Mark Coughlan — who was a pretty important player at the time — did his knee.
So “Plough” was pretty filthy and in the rooms after the game decided to go through every player in the team one by one and have a crack. Luckily I wasn’t playing that day because of injury but I watched on as everyone took their turn — and most of the messages you couldn’t print.
That season Kayne Pettifer had been playing pretty well and started calling himself the “P Train”. After taking a few big marks he then started calling himself the “P Plane”. So he’d gone from the “P-Train” to the “P-Plane” and it was well established around the club Kayne was fairly happy with himself. He’d actually been one of our best again that day, kicking three goals and having 21 disposals.
But that didn’t matter much to “Plough”. When it was Kayne’s turn he looked at him and said: “P-Train? P-Plane? More like bloody pea brain!”
In the moment everyone was trying to be serious and stay composed but it was that funny seeing Kayne get deflated and you could hear players laughing. I was standing to the side of the room and actually had to walk away because it was that funny. The “P-Plane” had been well and truly grounded.
Some of the best sprays are when players aren’t expecting them. During the 2003 season we weren’t having a great year and entered a round 19 game against St Kilda with only really slim hopes of playing finals.
Before the game our coach Danny Frawley made a real point of demanding we play hard footy that day, head over the ball, all the old school stuff. During the game Tim Fleming laid a big hit on Nick Riewoldt and left him pretty groggy and bleeding from a split chin.
We ended up getting belted by 80 points and in the rooms after the game we all copped a spray. The only person in the room who received any praise was Fleming — at least he had a crack and went hard at it, “Spud” said.
So leaving the ground that night the only bloke who felt half decent about himself was Tim Fleming. The next day we had game review and by then “Spud” had obviously had a good look at the replay of the Riewoldt incident. He’d realised it wasn’t that good, it was actually a bit of an elbow and Fleming was going to miss a few weeks.
So we’re sitting in the review room and the only bloke feeling pretty safe from a spray is Tim Fleming. The first clip “Spud” shows is his hit on Riewoldt and he looks at Flem and screams: “That was s***house Flem!” As well as an all-time spray, Flem also got three weeks.
When I first started playing I was under John Northey at Richmond, who had a pretty simple game plan — kick it long and all that sort of thing. But he would do anything to try and motivate the players before the game.
Every second week he’d have an old VHS tape that we’d watch over at Punt Rd that was some sort of remarkable achievement from somewhere in the world. A guy that ran across America with one leg, another guy climbing Mt Everest with one leg, a father who did the Hawaiian Ironman with his quadriplegic son — every week he’d find something else. It would have taken him a bit of effort too — it wasn’t like these days where you can just pull something off the internet — and we quite enjoyed them.
John also had the “us against them” mentality, especially when it came to the media. He would always use the media to try to fire us up. I remember we were playing Carlton and John told us a journalist from those days, Tony “The Beast” De Bolfo, had written us off and didn’t think we could win. “The Beast” is a Carlton man — he is the historian at the club now — and John knew it.
I’ll never forget one of the last things he said to us was everyone in the press box — particularly De Bolfo — were all just pie scoffers. You’re sitting there half thinking ‘How does this help us win a game?’ but just the way he did it for some reason you’d get fired up.
To be fair, since joining the media I can see where John was coming from. Every ground you go to has a pie warmer filled with party pies and sausage rolls and each weekend I tell myself I’m not going to have any and I end up eating at least four. And I’m normally at three games every weekend.
http://www.news.com.au/sport/afl/the-most-memorable-spray-i-can-remember/story-fndv7pj3-1227405323478
