The Tigers' silent treatment
16 July 2005
Herald Sun
Trevor Grant
TERRY Wallace couldn't believe his ears when he walked into Punt Rd to begin his challenging five-year assignment as Richmond coach late last year.
It was as if someone had flicked the mute button. The place was full of people but you couldn't hear a thing. It felt more like a library than a football club.
For someone as driven, as direct and as demonstrative as Wallace, there was nothing golden about this silence. Rather, it was positively eerie.
The clubs he'd known in his 27 years in the game Hawthorn, Footscray and Richmond of the 1980s, were loud, boisterous, vibrant places bristling with male ego and edgy humour.
"I just couldn't believe how quiet this group of players were," Wallace said. "It was so strange. At the clubs I'd been there were quiet types but there were always plenty of larger-than-life, vibrant characters making plenty of noise. Here, there was none of that."
There were many reasons for it, not least recent history. "I think it was partly because they were shell-shocked and, as well, they were a bit wary of me, wondering what I'm thinking and what I'm going to do," he said.
What he was doing was beginning the long, detailed job of preparing a pathway to long-term success at a club so gutted by systemic failure that it managed to find a way to lose its last 14 games in 2004 and 13 of the last 14 in 2003.
His first task was to try to get inside the shattered minds of the players who had compiled this astounding record of capitulation.
"I had individual meetings with every player. With some of the guys it was very much a cry for help. It was a matter of, `I don't know if I can do this any more. I don't know whether I'm able to offer what you want'," Wallace explained.
Fourth-year player Chris Hyde was one who harboured considerable doubts about his future. He'd always played with a defensive mindset, mainly as a tagger, and couldn't conceive of himself playing the attacking style of game the coach demanded of his team.
"He came to me and virtually said: `I can't play this type of football. That's not what I do. I'm fit, I go with my opponent and I take him out.' He just didn't believe he could run, carry and take people on," said Wallace, who had a swift answer for him.
"I said: You've got one of two choices. You either try to play our style, which I believe you can, or you start looking for another place."
For different reasons, Wallace believed veteran full-back Darren Gaspar, whose form had sunk to a career-low in 2004, also had a limited future.
The new coach had virtually written him off with his pen the previous season when he was a full-time media commentator and the former All-Australian looked at the end of his career. As soon as Wallace arrived, things were sorted out, though. Gaspar told Wallace he had no issue with him over those views, and Wallace told him he wanted him to play full-back.
However, it wasn't long before reservations took hold. "In the first four weeks I was here I thought he was in all sorts of trouble," Wallace said.
"I was looking for a determined bloke trying to break down the door and prove a point. But then he does things like run the Tan 2 1/2 minutes outside his best time. I thought, `Hang on, what's going on here?' Then we go into the boxing ring and he says: `I don't know whether boxing is for me.' And he's allergic to chlorine so he can't go into the pool.
"I was scratching my head wondering where he was in his own head, whether he was determined enough to have a crack at it."
Wallace had also been doing plenty of wondering about Gaspar's long-time teammate and running defender, Mark Chaffey. "Here's a bloke who is 27, who has played eight years almost in the one position and who doesn't seem to have grasped it as if he'd be one of the top players in the competition in that role," Wallace said. "If anything he was just puddling along. I thought if we don't give this bloke a new challenge he won't be at the club in 12 months' time."
In order to ensure former captain Wayne Campbell would be at the club in 12 months' time, Wallace decided the veteran midfielder needed a major role change. With preservation the key aim, Campbell would no longer be at the seat of the action all day. "Firstly I spoke to him about playing forward, and then bench forward. I think there was a little bit of shock. He was terrific and said he'd do what I wanted," Wallace said.
"I'm sure that's not the same conversation he had with the other senior blokes but it's the one he had with the coach, and the one that matters.
"I was hoping he'd get more enjoyment; that he wouldn't get to the stage each week where he had to try so hard to come up to play and then fell over the line. Then when you needed him in the last quarter he had no legs left to give you. And by Round 16 or 17, he was stuffed and gone."
It says much about the new environment at Richmond this year that these four projects on the coach's drawing board Hyde, Gaspar, Chaffey and Campbell have adapted superbly to their new roles and have all been significant contributors to the team's exhilarating resurgence. Although a knock that left him with a hairline fracture of the skull in Round 5 has cost him games and form, Hyde has shown enough to convince people he's much more than a tagger.
"The box he put himself in has been shattered," Wallace said. "Now he's baulking blokes and running and carrying the ball. He got a nickname out of it. The players call him `The Monster'. They reckon we've created a monster."
At 29 and two years after a knee reconstruction, Gaspar, a former vice-captain who was dropped from the leadership group this year, has regained his form and his place as a respected defender.
"After four weeks here I thought he was a chance," Wallace said. "He has just got better and better. I'd say he's lowered his colours three times. On the other occasions he's been great."
Chaffey's new life as a tagger has also revitalised him, and the team.
"It started off as an unmitigated disaster in Round 1 when he had Cameron Ling, who got about 800 possessions," Wallace said. "But he's been very good, taking it on as a challenge."
As for Campbell, he's progressed so much as an impact player that Wallace is desperate for him to cancel retirement plans and reach the 300-game mark in 2006.
"I don't think he'd be up and running and influencing games so much if he'd done the hard yards earlier this year," said Wallace, warning that Campbell would not be starting all games, as he's been doing in recent weeks, during the remainder of the season. "Otherwise, we'd blow him up again."
Wallace said he had no idea at the start of the season how his players would respond to him and his methods, and, given that his contract gives him five years, he's very careful to ensure there are no extravagant predictions in what is recognised as a long, slow, detailed recovery operation. But a 9-6 win-loss record so far this season still represents a significant triumph of confidence over self-doubt and is evidence that a paucity of talent wasn't the major shortcoming at the club.
"If you have a D-grade student you have to ask whether he's that way because he's been perceived that way for the past two years and is therefore treated that way, " Wallace said. "He may not be a B-grade student but if you start treating him like one he might become at least a C.
"It's the time, the work and the encouragement you put into people that can change things. What have we proven so far? Nothing. But I still think we've proved a side that couldn't win a game in the last 14 isn't as bad as it seems."
What he is also trying to prove is that a team need not follow the fashionable model that dictates you rebuild your club primarily from the draft. It's the reason he was so intent on bringing in the likes of Trent Knobel, Troy Simmonds and Mark Graham to add to the pool of experience and put some physical presence around the younger players.
"I think there are others in the competition who believe you need to bottom out and be prepared to wear the wounds of absolute non-success to get that core group of players and come back up. I don't believe in that," he said. "I don't think there's anything I've seen that shows bottoming out and getting those draft picks creates premiership success."
Wallace's way is to keep a team constantly evolving in its mix of seniority and youth, and try to remain highly competitive throughout the evolution. And at the heart of it all, is a game plan that is based on attack.
"I've always believed from back in `Yabby' Jeans' days at Hawthorn that it is a running-based game. Go to the Malcolm Blight teams that charged off half-back and the Leigh Matthews' teams that always played that footy," he said."I didn't see this side as a running-based team. I saw it as a stop-chip-and-hold team. And I didn't see that as conducive to winning games."
Although there have been occasional reversions to the old way, most notably in the last quarter against the Swans two weeks ago, as the Tigers hung on to win by a point, and also at times in the four successive losses before the break, Wallace believes there has been significant progress.
"We are a long way down the track but some are more accustomed to it than others," he said. "We probably need more speed in our team to play this style of game. At the (2004) draft we got Brett Deledio and Danny Meyer who are both super-quick. That's the way we want to go.
"In today's stats terms, we are a very good hardball side, not necessarily a good looseball side. The best teams in the competition play good looseball footy. West Coast, Brisbane . . . they kick goals on the run. Sprint and go. You can't stop them. We aren't there yet. But we've got a good handle on our style and what we want to become."
One thing he is hell-bent on doing is ensuring that a mature perspective is maintained as he tries to secure the foundations of the rebuilding plan.
"There's a hell of a lot to be done," Wallace said. "Have a look at the Carlton mob. No disrespect; I could pick another 10 models of a side which is down, has a change of environment, has a honeymoon period, goes back up and then goes down just as quickly. There's nothing that says it goes in one direction."
So does he worry about false expectations being created so early? "No. I'm not going to say I'd rather not have three of those wins because it might affect expectations," he said. "You don't worry. Actually you go the other way. I was having a bit of a chuckle to myself a few weeks back. I'm saying: `We're 7-2, hell, what's going on? We're saying we are going to give it five years and then all of a sudden everyone is saying, `We're a chance for the flag'.
"You know that's not where it's really at. You know there were reasons for it.
"We got off to a flyer and we met some sides that weren't at full strength. But it's pleasing for people who've had a pretty lousy run."
The prospect of finishing in the finals so soon into the Wallace project is tantalising for everyone at this battered club, but there will be no wrist-slashing in the coach's room if it doesn't happen. The major focus there is on continuing the healthy rise on the graph of key performance indicators.
"I've heard Steve Moneghetti several times. I liked very much his assessment that if he came 17th in a race then that's where he stood at that time in the world," Wallace said "It didn't matter if he had a cold and should have been higher. He was 17th until he proved he was something different. We are aiming for the finals but if we finish ninth, then that's us until we prove to the world we're better."
Meanwhile, Tiger fans will be praying that after years of silent suffering they are about to get what they've always wanted; a Richmond team that once again makes a hell of a big noise.
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