Blood feud ROHAN CONNOLLY
May 1, 2010 Rivalry generally implies a history of fierce battles with the highest of stakes on the line.
There's a slight air of menace that surrounds games like tonight's. The issues are personal as much as about team. There's an expectation of physical confrontation. And a mix of excitement tinged with anxiety about just how nasty things could become.
To that of a much-hyped return bout between Richmond and the Western Bulldogs in 2001 after Tony Liberatore had previously tangled with the man coaching Essendon tonight, Matthew Knights, sparking a war of words between the two clubs.
It's football on an emotional knife-edge. And try as those involved might to keep things as normal as possible in the lead-up, they can't escape the fact that this one game is very different.
It's a feeling Danny Frawley remember(s), Frawley coaching Richmond at the time of the Liberatore-Knights incident.
Frawley knew “about five seconds” after uttering his immortal press conference line that “every dog has its day” in 2001 that there would be considerable fall-out from a clash that left his former captain Knights bleeding heavily and sparked angry retribution from his skipper Wayne Campbell.
And there was. Frawley was fined $6000 (half suspended) for those comments, and for marching Knights, his head bandaged, over to the umpires' quarter-time huddle. There were angry words post-match by Campbell. Then club presidents Clinton Casey and David Smorgon entered the fray.
By the time the teams met again in round 17 that year, both desperate to maintain spots in the top eight, the expectation and tension was palpable. “If it didn't become personal, it wasn't far off it,” Frawley concedes today.
“The build-up was huge, and I was trying to keep it as low-key as I could, but you could just tell when the players walked in the Monday before that game there was something different. The whole joint was a little bit prickly, including myself.
“I was pretty emotive, which I thought was my strength as a coach but was always a weakness as well. I had to get away from the club a lot. I desperately wanted to win that game for a whole range of reasons, but I knew the best way to do that was to show a lot of calmness, so I did that ... until the final siren.”
Richmond's nail-biting, two-point win preceded an explosion of triumph from the Tigers' coaching box, the release, Frawley says, of "a week's worth of steam". "I was carrying on like a pork chop," he confesses.
"I'll never forget walking down to the rooms after the game. I said to one of the assistants: 'I don't feel good about this.' I'd had this sick feeling in my guts all week. I actually apologised to the players after the game about the comment I had made last time which led to a whole range of stuff and put undue pressure on them going into the game."
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/blood-feud-20100430-tzft.html
