Redemption: how the Tigers' quest became unstoppable
Jake Niall | December 17, 2008
IT WAS last Thursday, at the Blackburn South home of a 1960s Richmond player, that Ben Cousins was truly embraced by the Tiger family, setting in train an irresistible momentum for his rebirth as a footballer.
Cousins, who had arrived at 6am from Perth on the midnight "redeye", was secretly spirited from the airport by his manager Ricky Nixon to the home of Barry Cameron, a 96-game Richmond ruckman who also happened to be the father of the club's general manager of football operations, Craig Cameron.
Cousins spent six hours at Cameron snr's home, meeting key officials, senior players, coach Terry Wallace and the club's new general manager of learning and development, Jeff Bond, who served as the Australian Institute of Sport's psychologist for 22 years.
Cousins was interviewed and probed in four separate meetings: first, he spoke with Wallace, Cameron and Bond, then he had a one-on-one discussion with Bond. Next, a group of four senior Richmond players — new captain Chris Newman, his predecessor Kane Johnson, Troy Simmonds and Nathan Brown — spent 40 minutes with the player they had chased in vain in his past life as a celebrated West Coast champion. The players, unsurprisingly, wanted him.
Finally, Cousins met president Gary March and chief executive Steve Wright. March found Cousins to be slightly nervous, but completely honest and forthright in his responses to all the curly questions that were thrown at him. Significantly, this chastened Cousins did not exude arrogance or attitude. He just wanted to play the game again at the highest level.
Later that day, Wallace, Cameron and the football department made the in-principle decision to recruit Cousins. They were counting on the help of the AFL in opening up an extra draft pick — assistance that was ultimately not forthcoming — but the club had crossed its own Rubicon in the sense that it did not object to recruiting a recovering drug addict. It just had to find a way to accommodate him, without losing face or compromising its youth policy.
Last Friday, the Richmond board approved the football department's recommendation. Three days later, the Tigers' late-breaking bid for Cousins would nearly unravel when the AFL commission rejected the club's application to have Graham Polak, recovering from head injuries sustained in a tram collision, placed on the rookie list.
By then, however, the pro-Cousins momentum had become unstoppable — as March had warned officials it might when the Tigers first began to explore the prospect of making Cousins the highest profile pre-season draft pick in history.
Cousins' AFL career had seemed buried after he was finally spurned by sponsor-conscious St Kilda at a late-November board meeting before the national draft; following on the heels of Collingwood's rejection (and soon followed by Brisbane's predictable withdrawal), the St Kilda knock-back seemed to represent the end.
In the days immediately following St Kilda's rejection, Cousins was holed up in his Perth home and unreachable on his mobile. Nixon and others close to him were concerned for his welfare, knowing the potential for such rejection — seemingly by the whole competition — to cause a downturn in his recovery.
Yet, sources insist that it did not, and the Cousins who subsequently presented to Richmond was in a better frame of mind than the player Collingwood, the Saints and Lions judged to be too risky.
Richmond first began to explore the notion of Cousins in yellow and black after the national draft, when the Tigers had passed on their final selection, pick 70, after Brisbane picked the player they wanted, Bart McCulloch. Richmond acknowledges that, if not for Brisbane drafting McCulloch at pick 69, the whole Cousins project probably would never have eventuated.
That said, the Tigers did not want to use their first pick in the pre-season draft on Cousins, and sought to conjure an extra choice via the Polak application — a bid that rival clubs strongly opposed.
The club was clearly surprised that the AFL commission rejected the application and it remains mute about what it believed happened to cause the league to knock back the Polak transfer, which was based on the premise that Polak would have difficulty playing in the first half of next year, and might not play senior football at all in 2009.
The AFL had indicated privately to various parties that it was keen to see Cousins drafted and playing in 2009, league boss Andrew Demetriou having been lobbied heavily by the AFL Players' Association, among others, on Cousins' behalf.
Nixon had planted the idea Cousins could end up at Richmond when, shortly after the national draft, he proposed to the Tigers that Cousins could be made a mature-age rookie, and train with Coburg, its VFL affiliate, earning his stripes, so to speak, at the lower level.
Mature-age rookies, according to the rules, must not have played a single game, so the AFL would need to make a compassionate exception for Cousins for him to be recruited via this creative backdoor.
It is understood that the AFL made sympathetic noises about Cousins then and was receptive to the Nixon proposal. More significantly, however, Richmond began to see that a) the talent pool was running dry and b) that it could pick Cousins.
March says Kevin Sheedy's role in bringing Cousins to Tigerland has been exaggerated at the Richmond end, but that the influence of another Cousins supporter, Brownlow medallist and media commentator Gerard Healy, has been understated; Healy is a mentor to Cousins and was one of the five people Nixon had engaged to protect and advise the player in the event that he was drafted by the Saints.
Healy's major role was not simply to lobby Richmond and the league, but to turn the tide of public opinion through his media outlets, especially 3AW's Sports Tonight, which became command centre of a shameless "Give Ben a Fair Go" campaign. Sheedy's major contribution was to challenge Cousins at a meeting between the pair (and his father Bryan), in effect telling him to get off his backside and phone the clubs that had "live" picks in the December draft. On Monday night, after the AFL flattened the club's plans to pick Cousins via the Polak manoeuvre, Richmond finally came to terms with this truth: that the consequences of not picking Cousins were potentially far worse than the risks of selecting him.
The Tigers had earmarked their pre-season pick on an untried kid. What if this kid — effectively the 80th player in the draft — didn't make it? He would forever be the player whom Richmond picked "instead of Ben Cousins". The Tigers had seen this story before: Aaron Fiora and Richard Tambling had been maligned as players they'd picked before Matthew Pavlich, and Lance "Buddy" Franklin respectively.
Perhaps the most influential body, finally, was that most volatile and unforgiving force: the Tiger army, which has sacked coaches and overturned administrations in the past. The fans, by a margin of at least five-to-one, were for Cousins, who will pack the MCG for the club's round one home game against Carlton.
"Supporters were a major consideration," March said. "There's a compelling argument that this was in the best interests of the unity of the entire football club."
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