Roar Feature: Ivan Soldo
By Konrad Marshall,
Richmond Media
Ivan Soldo sits in his private quarantine quarters on the Gold Coast, a dimly lit beige space with a splash of inoffensive hotel art on the wall behind him, and - from underneath a neatly trimmed Slavic moustache - he smiles warmly.
“Hub life’s not too bad,” he says, shrugging. “You get your own privacy. I wouldn’t want to share a room with anybody, so it’s a good setup. We’ll be able to go to the shops and beaches soon. Nothing to complain about. Probably better than it is down there, right?” Indeed it is.
The 24-year-old ruckman well remembers the first Melbourne lockdown. Like all Richmond players, he stayed at home, dutifully bringing with him as much club gym equipment as possible, and buying a few workout items of his own, too. A door bolted chin up bar was a must at home in Thornbury.
“I like doing weights, and I wanted to get an advantage,” he says. “Motivation’s pretty easy for me. Starting something is always the hardest part, but I started training by myself when I was 14.” For the past decade, in fact, the 6-foot-8 footballer has been building a mentality that “competing with yourself is the best kind of training”, almost out of necessity. He was skinny, you see.
“I was always tall, but I wasn’t always strong,” he says. “I was a late bloomer, and I played basketball, centre, but I couldn’t muscle anyone out. There were all these manchilds on the court, and they could just push me out of the way, so I had to put on some size.”
That was in Canberra, where he grew up as the middle child between an old sister, Lucija, who now works in the public service, and a younger brother, Stjepan, an electrician. They moved around the suburbs there a handful of times in his childhood as his father, Nevenko, a renderer, would buy a block and build a house, buy another block and build another house, and so on. Mum, Slavica, was a cleaner who now works in security and is eyeing retirement, but whose money and labour back then went into feeding the bottomless belly and burgeoning muscles of her second child. Two lamb backstraps with veggies and grains was the not uncommon high school lunch of young Ivan Soldo.
The abiding memory of his best friend and fellow Croatian Australian, Daniel Ujdur, 24 (with whom he speaks every day on the phone) is - unsurprisingly - connected to food. “He was always eating - always had this massive tub with rice and chicken,” says Ujdur, laughing. “We went over to our coach’s place after a gym session one night, around 11pm, and Ivan asked if he could have some eggs, to get his protein in after a workout. Then he ate basically a whole carton of eggs - 10 or 11 - just scrambled them up before midnight.”
The two were born nine days apart and as children they were, by their own admission, not remotely quiet or passive. Spend any time around Soldo and you’ll notice the sly smile he wears - the idea of him terrorising primary school teachers is utterly believable. “Ivan was the one who always got in trouble, because you can’t miss him,” Ujdur says. “He thinks he’s blending in, but his head sticks out above everyone.” (“We were little poos,” Soldo confirms. “We were pretty bad.”)
They began playing soccer when they were four years old, and did so together for the next decade, Soldo an uncoordinated defensive midfielder who was always hurting people by accident. That ability to injure or maim only grew. “I remember he got banned from sparring in the boxing gym, because he doesn’t know how to tap someone,” Ujdur says. “He taps you and it feels like someone threw a brick at you.” (That’s still true, incidentally: “I was sparring with Dylan Grimes once and he was like ‘Bloody calm down mate - stop throwing bombs!’” says Soldo, giggling. “But I was just throwing little straight jabs.”)
He played a little rugby union, too. Imagine, if you will, a 203-centimetre teenager being lifted up in a line-out. His big hands basically used to seize the ball 12 feet into the air. “I played one game with him, just for fun,” says Ujdur. “It was a tight game and he scored four tries or something ridiculous. He was just so strong, people cannoned off him.”
Basketball actually didn’t come to him until he was 14, and he didn’t really want to play the sport either - but he was good at it, and he likes trying new things. Soon enough he got into representative squads and various competitions that meant he could play all year round. “But I got a bit bored of it, honestly,” Soldo says. “It just seemed like a selfish game, and I didn’t like that aspect. It’s not easy to go from a sport that’s all about team-team-team, to this game where it’s only five people on the court and you’re all trying to score. It was a bit of a cultural change, too, or maybe it coincided with an age where sport was getting serious, but I didn’t love the personalities. It just felt like my real mates were elsewhere.”
The plan to play AFL wasn’t hatched but rather evolved from a casual conversation with his cousin, the talismanic former Richmond ruckman and vice-captain Ivan Maric. The two Ivans were on the Gold Coast, at an Australian-Croation soccer tournament when Soldo, then 16, said he might like to swap the Wilson for a Sherrin. “We took a photo together,” says Maric, now 34, “and I sent it to our list manager, Blair Hartley. Ivan was already 6 foot 8, and about 125 kilograms, just massive
They had a meeting at Punt Road and - without committing to anything - put some goals in place for the teenager. All that weight he worked so hard to gain? It had to be shed. And then he had to train and wait and hope. “From his point of view, it was pretty frustrating,” says Maric. “He kept persisting, texting, staying in touch, but it was two years without being sure of anything. I just kept telling him ‘You’ve gotta be patient, gotta be patient’.”
Soldo listened. His dad is one of 14 children, and mum one of 11, so he has around 50 first cousins - yes, fifty - but Maric was special among them. “I always looked up to Ivan, this older cousin, professional athlete, coolest person ever.”
He took every bit of his advice on board, slimming down by around 20 kilograms, doing a pre-season with some school mates at the Queanbeyan Tigers, and another pre-season in Albury. He played a few scratch games and practice matches, and eventually Richmond asked him to come down to Punt Road for a trial. “It was just a muck around, to see what I could do. It was a rainy day, and I was doing all these drills against Mason Cox, because Richmond was looking at him, too,” says Soldo. “I was like, ‘This bloke is way too tall’. I didn’t know what I was doing, but neither did he. It was pretty funny actually.”
Then in April 2014, Soldo turned 18, the age at which Richmond were allowed to approach him - as an adult never before listed with a football club - to become listed as a category B rookie. Near the end of the year he played his first serious game of football, rucking in the second half of a TAC Cup game for the Northern Knights. Surrounded by elite juniors and draft hopefuls - he describes fleeting memories from within that confusing match. In my mind, he is a lost giraffe surrounded by braying hyenas.
“I picked up the ball at one stoppage and tried to fend off four people, and didn’t know what to do, and someone got me from behind, and then someone else, and there was this scuffle on the ground with all these guys, and it was sort of my first skirmish, first initiation into how brutal footy can be,” he says. “I enjoy that part of the game now, but I remember thinking ‘Huh, so this is the way it works…’”
In truth he didn’t even know the rules of the sport, and played largely on instinct. He caught an opponent holding the ball, for instance, and instead of going back and taking his free kick or dishing a handball, he ran off down the field after chucking the footy to a teammate. He had to be called back by the bemused umpire to take his kick. “I’d come from soccer and I just thought that’s what happened: you give it to a guy who can kick it better.”
The guy he handed the ball to was Jayden Short.“I remember it was in Gippsland, in Morwell,” says Short, by phone. “It wasn’t great weather for a big fella’s first real game either. It was peeing down rain, and cold. But he was this huge ruckman with ties to Richmond, so everyone was intrigued by him. We were all 16 and 17, and he was 18 and just a massive man - so he sort of made everyone stand a bit taller. I’m just amazed at how good he’s gotten since then, for a bloke who had never played the game before.”
Not long after this humble start in elite football, Soldo and Short joined the Richmond rookie list together, along with Jason Castagna and Kane Lambert, in a stunning piece of post-draft recruiting. Those four overlooked players now have six premiership medals between them, but back then they were just hopefuls, and so they hopped on a plane together and headed to Townsville, to join what is still regarded as the toughest pre-season camp at the club this century.
“Connor Menadue was drafted in my year, and he was a high-end talent, picked for his running and speed, and a few days into the camp he said he was about to quit. Being thrown in the deep end of that wasn’t easy,” Soldo says. “I don’t know what happened the season before, but there was probably a goal to test people out mentally and physically.”
If you check your notes, you’ll see that the 2014 camp came not long after the disastrous elimination final loss to Port Adelaide in South Australia - an utter mauling that capped off a strange season, which in truth started with calamity and was saved only by an improbable nine-game winning streak. “The coaches were clearly testing us,” Soldo says. “If you complained about the heat, the whole team would have to do a one-kilometre run, and it was scorching in Townsville. It was like going through a Navy Seal boot camp.”
Having the seasoned Maric there as a senior player and sounding board was an immense help, but Soldo actually didn’t lean too heavily on his cousin. A sponge at all times, Soldo learned as much or more over the years from coaches such as Mark Williams, Andrew McQualter and Max Bailey, or players like Shaun Hampson, Ben Griffiths and Alex Rance. Fulfilling the rigorous demands of a full-time athletic career - a rude shock to many other young recruits - was a relatively seamless adaptation for Soldo.
“The professional environment was something he picked up easily - he’s really organised and disciplined,” says Maric. “It was just picking up the skills of the game. Kicking, marking, handballing - that was tough. When you’re that tall you’ve got such long levers, so timing becomes a big issue. Kicking for instance was about keeping his technique compact, dropping it close to the foot, and he’s worked really hard on that.”
He had a harder time getting his head around the way footballers were regarded and revered in Melbourne. At his gargantuan height, Soldo has always experienced that sensation of being noticed when he enters a room, but he had no comprehension of the way prominent players have their importance magnified by the lens of the Melbourne footy fishbowl.
“I’d see these players who I didn’t really know, and they’re superstars in this city. The way people acted around them - I didn’t get it completely,” he says. “I also didn’t realise how much I could affect someone’s life, how there’s this responsibility that you get given with the jumper. You go to a school and these kids just want to hear you talk. I didn’t realise I would ever be someone that kids look up to, but I feel like it’s something I do well. Once footy is done, I think I’d like to go into working with kids.”
With so much new knowledge to acquire, and so many new environments to navigate, I’m curious to know when he the cogs and gears of his new life began to align, namely when he felt comfortable on the football field, playing in the AFL. “Truthfully, I go in and out of that mentality constantly,” Soldo says. “There’s no real comfort.”
Right now he senses that Toby Nankervis is the preferred single rucking option for Richmond, and he is fine with that. Soldo is playing right now - while Nankervis recovers from injury - but to Soldo “right now” is all that matters. He’s doing well, too, throwing his weight around in a recent wet weather skirmish against Sydney, and then on Saturday growing into a huge nullifying presence against the Kangaroos’ in form ruckman, Todd Goldstein. The composition of the Tigers’ rucking cohort will shift and change throughout the season, of course - Soldo sees it as his job to roll with that uncertainty.
The ruck is a strange position though, one almost unlike any other in footy. It’s a physically unique slot - a singular hole to be filled by a specific peg - and it ultimately means that a handful of very, very tall footballers - Soldo and Nankervis, Mabior Chol and Callum Coleman-Jones - train together every week as a close unit, while remaining in direct competition with one another.
“It’s hard,” Soldo says, nodding. “It’s probably exciting for observers to see that competition between a few guys, but when you’re in the middle of that, it’s hard to have good relationships with these people. You want to leave it on the track but no one likes being second, so there’s a bit of a rivalry but there’s a real understanding as well. Us competing against each other is going to make us better players - Ivan has coached us to have that mentality.”
All he can do is enjoy the labour, combining attention to diet with competitive training. “You do all this work, to be so strong and so ready, and then you get to prove how strong and ready you are. That’s rucking. You build up all this momentum, then let it go on the field.”
Chol, for instance, unleashes athleticism and agility and a lithe left foot, and that tests Soldo’s size and strength and reach. Nankervis is shorter, but has many more tricks. Then there’s young Coleman-Jones, replete with big footy attributes but unable yet to win his place in the 22. “I do kind of feel sorry for him, because I’m seeing Callum improve every week, and I do want to see him play - because I don’t want his work to go to waste - but at the same time, he’s playing for my spot. It’s an interesting situation.”
Maric, as a development officer and the club ruck coach, sees the same dynamic unfolding. It’s his job to manage the balance between competition and cooperation. “You feel and see how hard everyone is working, and then when they don’t get their opportunity it’s tough on everyone,” Maric says. “I think to make it in the AFL you have to go through that, so you remember what it feels like to miss out. But it is rough.”
The traits that Soldo brings to his case are varied, which makes sense given his background in soccer and rugby and basketball, or boxing and lifting weights. “I encourage everyone to try all sports, because they all offer you something,” Soldo says. “I’ve always felt in footy that I’m sort of bouncy, light on my feet, and I think that’s come through soccer, where there’s a big field to evaluate. With basketball you have to find your way through traffic with your hands more than your body, so that helps at stoppages. Rugby had that good physicality - I wish I’d played that more.”
There is, of course, an abundance of growth still available to him. Many footballers have a specific improvement area or KPI on which they can focus their spare energy, but Soldo doesn’t have that luxury. He needs to devote time to it all - tap work and second efforts and ground balls and more. If there is an area of greatest interest it’s probably marking - not just taking grabs but setting up on the field, tracking the ball in flight, and halving contests. He trains that “extra” relentlessly, facing off in marking duels with other rucks, tall defenders, hybrids, even nippy runners, one scenario after another - long down the line kicks, lead up options, pack situations, again and again.
“I just feel like there’s so much growth in that for him, even not getting pushed under the ball - not allowing yourself to get out-marked,” says Maric. “If he can improve that, he can be a target up forward for five minutes a quarter - this big guy, hard to match against, who can hopefully get a few shots on goal and nail them.”
He’s also developed his aggression at the contest, says Maric, who himself had a famously competitive streak once the ball was bounced. “Soldo enjoys that physical, combative stuff, but he’s way more relaxed about it than I was,” says Maric. “It’s a part of his game he’s had to learn on the field - that he can go straight after the ball, keeping his eye on it, and he’ll be hard to stop. He’s learning that he can go through - instead of around.”
Soldo laughs at this, mainly because he has had to work so hard to control his attack on the ball, at least at training. “I’ve injured a lot of people on the training track, and I feel so bad when it happens,” he says, shaking his head. “In games I’m better at cracking in, where it’s OK to hurt people, fairly, within the rules. You need to do that anyway - if you shirk it in AFL you’re the one who’ll get injured. And hitting hard is so infectious for the team
It’s infectious for the fans, too. Soldo knows you’re all out there watching, incidentally. He feels your absence, keenly. He enjoyed the novelty of round one in the empty Melbourne Cricket Ground, because they hadn’t played in so long, and the team was physically fit, and he could hear everyone on the ground calling and cheering. But by rounds two and three that quirky silence began to sap something important from the experience of playing. “We knew it was something we’ve gotta get used to, but it was a bit depressing. You kick a goal and there’s no roar. And with social distancing you can’t even high five.”
And now of course, he’s in the hub, training and playing and trying to amuse himself. He’s listened to the audiobook version of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, and the biography of former Navy Seal and American ultra marathon runner David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds. He draws his own cartoons occasionally, and watches the anime series Dragon Ball Z. Online, he’s an avid gamer, consumed with two-on-two games of FIFA, and recently completed a Yale University course on wellbeing.
“It’s such a bizarre year. I was thinking of it as another year to improve, but that idea changed completely - now I’ve learned to just take this year as it comes. I never plan ahead anyway, because things are always going to change, this year especially.”
He has no goals written down. He just makes his bed every morning, and focuses on improving his body and mind. Soldo is 24, and in no rush to grow up. He doesn’t think about how far he has come since his childhood in Canberra, nor what he will do when his career ends.
“What I’ve been practising is just being present, staying in the present,” he says. “Your mind tells a lot of stories, and pretty much 90 percent of them are negative. That’s taken me a long time to understand, and to identify as soon as it starts creeping in. I’ve come from far away, from other sports, so there’s lots of things telling me that I shouldn’t be comfortable out there. But what I’ve learned is that no one is really comfortable out there.”
In truth, he doesn’t think he will ever fully feel at home on a footy field. But he does derive comfort in understanding that about himself - his need to approach the game as a constant challenge to improve. There is freedom in that kind of self knowledge - in knowing that there is nothing to be won, only work to be done.
Remainder of the article...
https://www.richmondfc.com.au/news/780970/roar-feature-ivan-soldo
