Loyalty a casualty of timesCaroline Wilson
September 24, 2011MATTHEW Richardson is surely the people's champion. In these brutal football times, where so many others have failed to see the crucial position loyalty still claims among the game's values, the retired Tiger remains living proof that one can actually devote himself to a football club and still come up trumps.
''Richo'' played 282 games over 17 seasons at Richmond and, for him, a finals series came his way only once. Those who sat in the room at the 2008 Brownlow count could not recall one player so willed to win by the audience.
The networks did not fall over themselves to hire Richardson when his body forced him to retire at the end of 2009 - he had stepped into the Ten commentary box while injured the previous season and performed only adequately - so Channel Seven won his services relatively cheaply at the time in a move that now seems inspired.
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Seven says now that Richardson's ''Q-ratings'', a private polling method measuring popularity in simple terms, are phenomenal. As a champion player he knocked back several offers to leave Punt Road - including a tempting bid by the old enemy Carlton - but always resisted, and says he has no regrets remaining at a team which had no success.
Two days ago, at the Melbourne Press Club's annual footy lunch, Richardson joined AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou and Greater Western Sydney coach Kevin Sheedy on the panel. He commented with a wry smile that staying at Richmond and being a one-club player had also proved lucrative after his playing days, while observing that it might take him a while to catch up to Tom Scully's bank balance.
Being Richo he said he bore Scully no ill will and added, as most have, that the money was too much to refuse. But in a sign of how far he has come as a commentator, the famous forward turned to face Demetriou to state that no young player should have been put in that position and that first- and second-year players should have been off-limits to the new clubs.
Demetriou was not immune to Richardson's charm. Over lunch, before the panel had been called to stage, he asked Richardson to consider joining the Giants' board as its football director. It was a serious offer. GWS has no former player on its board and the league chief considers such a position mandatory.
Richardson declined. He is employed in a part-time role at Richmond, he told Demetriou, and did not intend moving. Interestingly, Tom Harley, an AFL favourite who holds a multitude of positions in the industry, left the Giants after showing some brief interest in an administrative role, saying his loyalty to Geelong would prevent him being able to take part in any player poaching from that club. Harley is now the general manager of AFL NSW.
Sheedy, like Richardson, was a one-club player with 251 Richmond games to his name and three premierships. For a time - 27 years, in fact - he worked towards becoming a one-club coach before the AFL chose to resurrect him as its first true salesman-cum-marketing mentor. The competition believed its toughest frontier would require one of the game's biggest personalities, who happened to have four premierships also as a coach to his name.
While the Gold Coast's Guy McKenna coached the Suns for a season in the TAC under-18 competition, followed by a year in the VFL, Sheedy spent most of June in Europe, largely at the behest of a club sponsor, while his deputy, Mark Williams, held the coaching reins in a second-tier competition.
Sheedy addressed the Melbourne Press Club wearing his orange Giants tie and scarf - he became bigger than any one club long ago - but his own brand of loyalty was exposed when he urged every Victorian AFL club to make it their business to headhunt a Fremantle player to pay back the Dockers for knifing Mark Harvey.
GWS had already poached its one uncontracted Dockers player, Rhys Palmer but it would find a way, according to Sheedy, to bend the rules to poach a second. Demetriou, who won public criticism from Dockers president Steve Harris last week for his comments regarding integrity, kept his views more general, simply saying the public had a right to ask questions of the behaviour of some in the game.
The prevailing view among commentators in this climate of foreign rules - which has the Giants' recruiting team approaching and possibly signing players who do not move out of contract until the end of 2012 - is that our game must grow up and act like the rest of the sporting world.
They say it is time to stop the double talk and behave sensibly and pragmatically, as they do in the NRL, where players and coaches commit to new clubs mid-season while still giving their all for the club to which they are contracted.
Last week the coach rated an all-time great in the NRL, Wayne Bennett, chose to spend his day off visiting his new club Newcastle. Bennett flew in to spend time with his new employer while his current club was just days away from a semi-final which it went on to lose. Some in the NRL considered this as nothing out of the ordinary.
In the AFL, such a move would be unthinkable. While Geelong wanted to keep Brenton Sanderson until the end of its finals campaign, Sanderson said his mind could not be in two places, that Adelaide needed him immediately and he needed to be there. Like recently appointed Melbourne coach Mark Neeld, he gave up a chance of being part of a premiership.
Several days after Ross Lyon quit St Kilda and it emerged he had been negotiating with not one but two AFL clubs, commentator John Rothfield (alias Dr Turf) said on SEN that the AFL had to wake up to itself and that jockeys and trainers behaved in this manner all the time. Football, said Rothfield, was simply catching up with the racing industry.
After investigating what actually went on between Lyon and St Kilda and Fremantle, the more realistic conclusion is that football was not catching up with any other sport. It was in fact being dragged down.
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