Tigers talk dollars & sense Michael Gleeson
March 19, 2011DRESSED in dinner suits and natty black and yellow ties, the group of Richmond's rich filed wide-eyed through the club's new gym.
Damien Hardwick suddenly stopped the group. He had something to say and it was not going to wait. His interruption was unscripted as he called on the gathering, fresh from having photos taken with the playing group out on the oval, to turn and look across Punt Road to the Royal Hotel.
The hotel, now more famous for topless women, was where, in more salubrious times, it all began. It was the place that the very idea for the club was born over a few drinks. Hardwick told those assembled that, over a few more drinks, the night ahead would be as significant in the history of the club as that very first one. It would be the night the Tigers decided not just to exist but to win. It was the night those present could make history for Richmond - without having worn the jumper.
When Hardwick addresses a group there is an undercurrent of menace in his speech that stems from his passion. Those before him were on notice.
They had to that point already been delivered what Brendon Gale had described - borrowing from Al Gore - as the inconvenient truths of football. The message was simple. The Tigers had to compete off the field to be able to compete on it and they couldn't succeed without the help of those present.
Gale and more pertinently the club's general manager of football Craig Cameron had presented a sobering potted history of the club. Cameron also offered a chronicle of the rest of the competition that was a cold spoon to the excitement of being in the inner sanctum.
The people present were the Tigers with bite. Many of them being successful in business, they were offered the situation in frank business terms by Cameron. He also recalled for them how, seven years earlier, Brad Ottens told officials he wanted to be traded to Geelong, how pathetically ill-equipped the club had been to deal with it and consequently how badly they squandered the moment.
"We didn't have three of the most important people to make the right decisions. We didn't have a list manager assessing Geelong's talent and the broader list, we had no opposition manager, we had a recruiting manager but he was told in June your services aren't required next year," he said.
"So in the end the club made the decision that we take the two picks at the top of the draft. Now that's not an unreasonable decision. But if we look at the 2004 draft we had five selections in the top 20 in the national draft. Only one of them is still at the club and that's Brett Deledio. He is already a dual best-and-fairest winner, he is 24 and about to play the best footy of his career and he should have his four mates with him from the top 20 of that draft.''
The next year the club squeezed even tighter and cut another $1.2 million from the footy department. A new recruiting manager was put on. He was part-time. His day job was as a phys-ed teacher at Brighton Grammar and he coached that school's first 18 on 14 winter weekends of the footy season, when every other serious recruiter was out looking at prospective players. From that year's draft, no player remains at the club.
"But as an example of what investment can return, the next year we employed Francis Jackson full-time as our recruiting officer that year for the first time. And in that national draft he produced Jack Riewoldt, Shane Edwards, Daniel Connors, and Andrew Collins. Now Andrew has left us to go to Carlton but we got Shaun Grigg in return,'' Cameron said. ''There are four AFL players from that small investment.
"In 2007, Collingwood spent $750,000 on recruiting. Hawthorn $490,000 and we spent $145,000. So we expect the same result from our recruiting area as a club spending five times more than we do. It just doesn't make sense."
These were not matters of ancient history. As Richmond was cutting its budget by $1.2 million its loathed opponent Collingwood moved into a state-of-the-art facility across Swan Street.
Cameron made the case compelling. Only those clubs which have money and means - and invest it in the right way in first finding the right players then supporting them with the right coaches and facilities - can win flags. Richmond was a mile off those clubs. Without a quantum leap in funding the Tigers could never hope to win a flag. The bottom half of the eight would be a good year for them.
In the past five years Collingwood had spent $10 million more on its football team than Richmond, Cameron said. Unsurprisingly then, the Pies had just won a flag after repeated top-four finishes. Richmond, meanwhile, had been in the finals just once in the past 16 years and had not been involved in successive finals campaigns since 1974-75.
The business case alone was convincing but Hardwick, Kevin Bartlett and Trent Cotchin, in strong videotaped pleas, did the selling. Bartlett, a face not just of Richmond but in returning and being the guest speaker and head of the Fighting Tiger Fund, was a potent symbol of the newly re-unified club. He spoke movingly of Richmond's golden era and connected modern players with champions past. He spoke of how Tiger champions had been let down by the club's inability to understand what it needed to be successful but how they had never let the club down.
One of those was Matthew Richardson, the most loved of players who was in the room as an MC. Another was Gale, in the room now as CEO, delivering his plan to deliver a flag to the club he could not achieve from the ruck. Another was Neville Crowe, the man who had done as much as anyone in the Tigers' history to save the club, but who now through an "unscrupulous business deal" found himself on hard times, in the room and shocked to be informed that the club would hold a special fund-raising night to help ease his financial pain. "We look after our own," president Gary March said, which was a welcome change for a club more renowned for eating its own.
These people demanded that the club finally commit to doing what they needed to to win a flag. For once, that plea for commitment was not a demand of the playing group but those who go to bed dreaming of wearing the jumper on the ground.
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/tigers-talk-dollars--sense-20110318-1c0mx.html
