Break out the Roar Meter
Murray Middleton
Written on Tuesday, 06 March 2012 07:04
I was studying the faded bumper stickers on a friend’s car last week and I noticed a Richmond Football Club promo from 2011. The slogan read: The Tiger is Stirring.
"Did the Tiger stir in 2011?" I asked.
"I suppose it did," he replied.
I’m willing to accept my friend’s summation of the Tigers’ 2011 season. Richmond won eight matches and drew one; an improvement of two and a half wins from Damian Hardwick’s first season in charge.
In my conscious life the Tigers have remained largely in captivity. They’ve only played finals twice (in 1995 and 2001). However I’ve had glimpses of what the world would be like if Richmond were to return to their so-called ‘Big Four’ status.
A game between Richmond and St Kilda in 1996 has always stuck in my memory. The Tigers were ‘up and about,’ to use awful football parlance.
The infamous (and short-lived) Roar Meter was in circulation on the MCG scoreboard. The device was designed to measure the decibels of the Tigers’ faithful every time their team kicked a goal.
Nick Daffy - one of a handful of long-haired, rock ‘n’ roll Tigers footballers - was in his prime. He kicked five goals that afternoon. One in particular exemplified his flashy moxie.
Daffy swooped on the ball on the half-forward flank and got channeled into a tight pocket. He ignored the leading forwards to take a shot from a near-impossible angle. I was sitting right behind the kick. Daffy knew it was a goal off the boot.
He saluted the yellow and black crowd in the Southern Stand and the Roar Meter reached its summit, thus inducing a short snippet of a roaring tiger.
Daffy’s goal remains the finest moment of aesthetic delight that the Richmond Football Club has granted me. In that moment I got a glimpse of what the world would be like if Richmond were to revert to the Kevin Bartlett years. It was a little scary.
Last season I got another glimpse; another fleeting excretion from the prosaic feline.
In round seven Richmond took on Fremantle at the MCG in a match they were widely expected to lose. The heavy conditions seemed to suit the Tigers. They played a blistering third quarter in which they kicked eight goals straight.
Tyrone Vickery took a mark in the forward fifty just prior to the three quarter time siren. He’d already kicked two goals for the afternoon, but this shot was to give his side a crucial three-goal buffer.
Vickery calmly slotted the set shot at the Punt road end. As the ball sailed through the driving rain and into the crowd there was a deafening roar. Although there were only 34,090 people at the ground, it sounded as though the Tigers had finally saluted in September. Unfortunately there was no Roar Meter.
Two moments in two decades hardly counts for much. I’m sure there’s been a lot more. Hardwick’s first win as a senior coach at AAMI Stadium in 2010 was greeted with a rousing rendition of the club’s theme song (and what a contagious song it is).
To date Hardwick has done a solid job.
As a football lover, I have great trust in his relaxed, jovial demeanour in front of the cameras; in his outwardly affectionate relationship with ‘Jumping Jack’ Riewoldt. One thing’s for certain. Hardwick would make a bloody great bartender.
The problem for Hardwick, as his predecessor discovered, is that the Punt Road faithful can become a little cagey when their team fails to make the progress they expect.
What is a pass mark for Richmond in 2012? Is it simply obtaining more wins than last season? Or is a finals appearance the bare minimum?
Last season Dennis Cometti cheekily remarked that Matthew Richardson liked being a boundary rider because it ensured that he got to set foot on the MCG turf during September.
It would be good for football if the Tigers finally had a tilt at the finals in 2012. The leather jacket-wearing brigade of old rockers who meet at Bridge Road pubs and wear their hair like Richardson, Campbell, Harrison and Daffy might finally emerge from hibernation to roar like it’s ’74.
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