Spitting incident angers Tigers
By Lyall Johnson
The Age
March 28, 2005
Richmond is believed to be investigating another spitting incident involving a fan after the Tigers yesterday fell to a humiliating 10-goal defeat to Geelong.
As the Richmond players were leaving the MCG following their 62-point drubbing, a fan standing at the players' race is believed to have spat at the team.
A former Richmond executive is thought to have witnessed the incident and immediately notified club chief executive Steven Wright in the changerooms.
It is believed the club is trying to ascertain whether the man, who has long grey hair in a pony tail and is known to be a Richmond member, deliberately spat at players when he was hurling abuse at them over the race enclosure or whether spittle merely flew from his mouth as he was yelling. The club is weighing up whether to ask police to become involved.
Last night, former Richmond coach Danny Frawley, who suffered the indignity of being spat at by a Tiger supporter at Telstra Dome last year, said he would find it surprising such an incident would happen again but said if it had, the person should be banned for life from attending the football.
"And they wouldn't want to do it in front of me, I'd just job 'em. I had to be careful as Richmond coach - you can't do or say that sort of thing - but now, it would just be tools down I can tell you," Frawley said.
Meanwhile, coach Terry Wallace said his match committee may as well have spent the summer in the pub. A gutted Wallace did not mince words after his side's pathetic display against the Cats, admitting he told his match committee it had nothing to show for all its efforts over the summer.
"It was a shockingly disappointing game. When you drive into the MCG today on such a beautiful day and you are hoping for something, and really the thing that I was hoping for was . . . that some of the stuff we had done over the summer would show," he said.
"I just wanted to get here so our supporters could see that there's been a hell of a bloody lot of work put into it. But as I said to the guys in the match committee, we might as well have gone to the pub for the summer with what we showed today."
Wallace described the day as a "bit of a baptism of fire" and admitted the players simply lost confidence after Geelong forged ahead in the second quarter. He said he was most disappointed in the performance of his experienced players. "Our senior group let us down . . . I just thought we were very undisciplined," he said.
In contrast, Geelong coach Mark Thompson was thrilled with his side's efforts, particularly given the Cats' mediocre form throughout the pre-season.
"I hadn't seen (such good form) over the summer and, to be honest, I had been a little bit worried," he said. "We hadn't been really intense over the footy and going in as hard as we are capable of going in. Today's effort, it was like they'd just been waiting for it to start again."
http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2005/03/27/1111862256614.html
