Richmond fans see some hope after long Grand Final droughtPATRICK CARLYON,
Sunday Herald Sun
20 August 2017I CONTACTED an old girlfriend from Geelong the other day. I was desperate and needed to know: could she pull tickets for the Geelong-Richmond game? She told me I was cheeky. So I used an intermediary and contacted her husband. He must have been busy. He didn’t return calls.
I drove home that night, INXS blaring. New Sensation, This Time, Tiny Daggers, each 1980s track like a portent to a strange awakening.
Then Stay Young came on. It’s a tease, this song, all shimmies and saunter, a throwback to sunburn and pretty girls. The music video is a tribute to short jeans and big hair. Now the tune, so insistent and simple, seemed to double as a theme song.
A Google search supported the idea. Stay Young was recorded in 1981, when Richmond was last a reigning premier.
I wanna see in the dark
I wanna win with you
Was this journey backwards also a tiny step forward? Was this a glimpse of the other side, where hope and possibility collide? Is this why people hit up ex-girlfriends for favours? Or ponder wearing that old beanie with pride during Grand Final week? People do that, don’t they?
Travel plans in September suddenly seemed overbearing.
They might intrude on footballing priorities, a problem for some, though unknown to this Richmond supporter.
Richmond players celebrate the 1980 Grand Final win over Collingwood.
I’m glad I missed that Geelong match. Richmond was sloppy, yet it wasn’t the choke of recent finals matches. You may scoff, you cruel non-Tigers people and of course you will, because bagging Richmond hopes, despite comparisons with the thrill kill of fluffy deer, offers its own sport.
But the notion of a Tigers flag still flickers.
Most clubs have appeared in a Grand Final at some point since Bob Hawke was elected prime minister. Western Bulldogs fans got there last year, Geelong in 2007, a triumph celebrated afterwards in Moorabool St with a raised middle finger to the world. Not Richmond, which has won two finals since 1982, the same number as Fitzroy, which ceased to exist in 1996. Only the Demons share the foreignness of the Tigers’ experience.
Doubt has defeated every Richmond launch since 1980. And so Richmond fans have stayed young, in my case since the age of seven.
We’ve been stunted by failure and crippled by apathy, because to hope has been to hurt. Last year, the belief of Bulldogs fans lifted the team and the game above the modern myth of football as mathematical sums.
The Bulldogs showed that logic doesn’t have to win. That is good news for the Tigers. We don’t need to be bound to states of mind and rituals of defeat.
Yet with the audacity of hope comes responsibility, as the above examples show. For some Richmond fans, it requires learning. We’re like little children grounded in compass points of Evasion, Whininess, Sadness and Narcissism. We are not conditioned because there has always been one team — or 12 — which has been better.
It’s been this way since ET went home. The tempering of win and loss has passed us by. To assume disappointment is miserable, but it is also safe, like preadolescence before the temptations of booze and sex.
Now, we are compelled to graduate. Richmond could win a Grand Final. Let’s not get carried away. On form, it probably won’t but if it is no longer “Richmondy” to expect the worst, nor is it “Richmondy” to assume the best.
But defensive flippancy will no longer do. It is OK to smile in wonderment when Richmond and Grand Final are joined in the same thought, instead of citing one of the many examples when the Tigers shrank.
Think of a wardrobe and the equivalent of 37 years of Hawaiian shirts dumped on the floor. They’ve been bought, year after year, but we dared not wear them.
Perhaps it’s time that they came out of the closet.
Richmond and its fans face a daunting prospect. Staying young can be the anthem of a new era.
Yet greater joys beckon — as well as higher falls. It’s time to grow up and embrace what we’ve been missing.
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