Richo dares to dream
06 February 2005
Sunday Herald Sun
By JON RALPH
MATTHEW Richardson surveyed all he had accomplished individually at the end of 2004, ticked off most of his pre-season goals, and realised it left him slightly cold.
After a dozen years as Richmond's excitement machine and flawed genius, the thrill of the big bag or high leap started to dull when it didn't come hand-in-glove with team success.
Richardson won three-quarters of Richmond's victories off his own boot -- there were only four -- and still kicked 65 goals from 18 games.
Despite all that, his Tigers were further than ever from competitive.
As "Richo" puts it: "Who wants to play well and lose every week? No one."
As if sensing the frustration of Richardson and so many Tiger fans, the football gods have finally done a momentous backflip.
Not only has it presented the Tigers with a raft of young goers, but Richardson has the chance to put team above self in a new forward-line role further away from goal.
Finally, Richmond has some hope again -- even if it is the long-term variety.
And, finally, as Richardson closes in on his 30th birthday, he is daring to dream.
"This is my 13th year and I can't remember a stage where I have been more excited about some young guys coming into the club. It's true, when you get young guys coming into the club it makes you excited and it makes you want to try to lift your performance as well," he said.
"If you can see these guys are going to be around and playing good footy, you would like to think you would be around for four or five years and maybe still playing with them when they are at their best.
"The day you are not thinking of premierships, you shouldn't be playing."
It wasn't that Richardson had lost any of the competitive fire that bubbles so close to the surface, rather it was that team success became the only real way to quench that need for football satisfaction.
There was the respite that those four wins brought but, by year's end after a 14-match losing streak, Richardson would label it his most disappointing year in football.
Even his best couldn't keep the Tiger ship afloat, despite five goals against Collingwood in Round 1, seven of Richmond's 10 against Sydney at the Gabba and a sublime 10 of 15 that sank the Western Bulldogs.
But as new coach Terry Wallace says: "We can't be going into matches needing Matthew to kick eight goals for us to win.
"When a side is averaging 11 goals, it says something to me about just where the direction was."
This year Richardson will move further out from goal or, as Wallace puts it, "we will put a barbed wire fence across the 70-metre line".
It is all part of weaning the Tigers off Richardson as the sole target and building a multi-dimensional forward line where five players can kick at least 30 goals a year.
"I guess the full-forward would always say if they can kick a goal a quarter for the year they have had a pretty good year, so it's probably a good way to look at (2004), but at the end of the day if you are not winning much it doesn't matter," Richardson says.
"We are aiming to have a forward line where we have multiple options. There isn't much point one guy kicking 80 or 90 goals and the next player kicking 20.
"I am still not moving around too much, probably playing 40 or 50 metres out. There will be days when it doesn't work out like that, but that is the way we will be starting off this year."
Wallace says he wants Richardson to play a similar role to Sydney's Barry Hall or Port Adelaide's Warren Tredrea -- leading out then working back hard.
"We don't want him up on the wing. If he is marking the ball at 50 or 60 metres he is extremely dangerous. His ability to take a mark at 55 metres or 60 metres, reel and kick, is probably a better kick for him than perhaps a 30-metre kick, where it is more set and over the top of the ball."
Richardson knows his club's resurgence will take time, but all of a sudden Richmond has a host of talented youngsters the like of which it has not seen for decades.
If his body can hold up long enough, he might just be able to join the party when it arrives in the future years.
Rather than lose pace, the new focus on leg weights sees him as quick as ever despite the extra bulk.
The prospect of pushing inevitably up the ladder leaves Richardson excited.
Suddenly the idea of playing finals regularly and considering premiership footy is not as dim as it had seemed as recently as last year.
The desire for a premiership is as strong as in any veteran closing in on 30, but Richardson has also seen first-hand the benefits of Grand Final success.
He sees it in the way father Alan "Bull" Richardson proudly attends his premiership reunions, and also in the way a player's perceived worth can be vastly increased.
He says it, not in a selfish way, but more as an observation of how football followers elevate successful players to a different plane.
"I have never played in one, so it is still the burning ambition. I think if you play in a premiership down the track you are remembered as maybe a better player than what you are at the time," he said.
"There have been plenty of great players who didn't play in a premiership, and you get other guys who did and they seem to be held in the same regard, whereas they probably weren't as good a player."
After trying for so long to manage public opinion, Richardson has come to the realisation some supporters will throw barbs his way no matter what he does.
He knows he sometimes lets himself down, but expects the same fair hearing as any other player.
Even last year, amid a full-blown crisis, he was encouraging and cajoling teammates, and those famous dummy spits were limited to a handful.
"I have been criticised in the past. I do know that I do have that in my nature, in that I wear my heart on my sleeve and sometimes my body language can look a bit negative. I know that," he said.
"I even saw Greg Norman in the paper talking about that. People have got that in them and it's not easy just to totally switch it off.
"I thought I controlled that a lot better last year and I thought I was a lot more positive even when things weren't going as well.
"I am not going to say I am not going to show emotion because if I don't show emotion I don't play well.
"The criticism thing, I used to take it to heart early in my career but a lot of the criticisms that have been levelled, a lot of them aren't going to change.
"You could finish your career off with no negative stuff, but I bet in 20 years they will remember the negative things anyway, so it doesn't worry me anymore."
Does it anger him that his negative traits are highlighted so relentlessly?
"It is funny; you can do the right thing 10 times out of 11 but the one time you don't, then all of a sudden they say you have done that every week. They forget about the 10 weeks before that," he said.
But for Richardson, the petulance that has been a feature of his game at times is hopefully in the past, even if others continue to harp on it.
Now there is too much to look forward to with a new coach and new kids who look like potential champions.
"A lot of those St Kilda players who are there now, like Robert Harvey and Justin Peckett and Andrew Thompson, five years ago they might have had a few bad years and be thinking, 'Where are we going to go?' " he said.
"Then three years later they are a couple of goals off a Grand Final: this year they are looking to go one better, so hopefully that might be the case at Richmond."
Matty on . . .
THE FANS: I think I have always got along well with the Richmond fans. I was a Richmond fan myself, so, I know what they are like. I would be flat as a tack when Richmond lost, and go to school filthy for a few days. And I know they just want the club to go well. So, I have a lot of empathy for them, and I know what they go through.
I remember having a sook when we lost (the Grand Final) in 1982. I remember being filthy that day, because we were supposed to win, and my best mate was a Carlton supporter and he did rub it in, so, I think I did have a moan that day.
BEST FOOTBALL MEMORY: I have only played in one winning final. I have only played in one finals' series. I missed out in 1995. I would have liked to play in that, but we beat Carlton in 2001, and that was a good feeling. Then, unfortunately, we copped Brisbane up there. It would have been good to play a preliminary final at the MCG. We might have got in, but it was always going to be tough going up there.
SHOULD RICHMOND HAVE PARTED WAYS WITH JOHN NORTHEY?: Geez, that was the best year win-loss ratio we have had, so, for him to leave after that year, it was disappointing. Yeah, it would have been good if he was still there. I never really knew exactly what happened there, but it was disappointing he didn't stay on after that year. Whose fault? You never know. You always hear different sides to the story. For our team at the time it was perfect, because we had a team of real goers, and that sort of stuff (us-versus-them rivalry) seemed to get us going at the time.
THE LIFE OF A FOOTBALLER: I wouldn't say there is a lot of negatives. We have got a pretty good lot, I reckon. I was driving to the airport the other day and thinking, "We're either up early and miss the traffic or we get home before the traffic". Seeing all the people in their massive traffic jams, I was thinking we have got it pretty lucky. I don't think we have got too much to complain about.
THE MEDIA: Yeah, I don't like all of them, there is no doubt about that. I won't name names here and start any wars here, but they are doing their job and have opinions. A lot of the people who have the big opinions, I have never seen them at training, so, I always find that amusing. They should come down. I invite them to come down and spend a week at the club and have a closer look at what does happen, and it might change their minds occasionally.
BEST-CASE SCENARIO FOR 2005: The best-case scenario is pretty obvious, to be playing in a Grand Final. But let's be realistic, that would be a bit of a fairytale, bottom to top. I just think if we can be consistent, it is something we haven't been. We need to give a good effort and be in games with a chance to win. Last year we weren't even in games. We want to have a chance to win games and then just see what happens from there.
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