Can Richmond make it 9-0? A modern football fable Dugald Jellie
The Age
August 30, 2014 "I believe in fairytales," says Cassandra Hall, 51, whose father kicked 26 goals for Richmond's reserves in 1959, before his job as a bank clerk took him to Heyfield and to her childhood of ovals in the Latrobe Valley League. "There's a magic about football and a magic about Richmond. This run of wins, it's as if what we've dreamed will come true."
On a Saturday morning early this year, catching a bus with a group of Tiger fans from Canberra to see Richmond play in Sydney, I sat with Cassandra and we spoke of Chaucer and pilgrimage and football. She moved to Melbourne as a young woman to study mediaeval languages. She watched Richmond's last premiership while standing in the outer with her sister and mother. She sees the game as a parable of life, wrapped as it is with heartbreak and hope.
And now a season, and our lives, are condensed to a tease like this.
After all these games, all these rounds, all the feats of young men on grassed fields, all the wins and losses and the endless chatter about our self-made code, it comes down to two teams playing late this afternoon, and the possibility of fairytales.
Can Richmond do it? Can it topple Sydney, the league's likely minor premier, on the cusp of spring, playing away, before a foreign crowd, winning an improbable ninth straight game to claim the most unlikely of finals berths? Oh, how this year of despair for all Richmond fans that turned unexpectedly on winter's solstice – on a season's shift, a pagan rite – could yet become one of this city's great sporting fables of resurrection.
"My heart's in my guts at the moment," says Jason Mariniello, 37, a house painter, who this week daubed the wooden fence slats of his Richmond weatherboard cottage a perfect shade of yellow and black. "I'm knocking on wood wherever I go. All we can do is hope."
The son of migrants ("We come from an Italian family so when they came out it was Richmond, Carlton or Collingwood"), Mariniello usually paints his fence black-and-white in the first week of September in deference to Suzie, his wife, and the finals chances of her team, Collingwood.
"I was very happy to crack open the yellow paint," he says. "I'm really excited about it. It's good for us Tiger people."
For all who follow our code of football – who subscribe to its romance and make-believe – Richmond this year is a story that takes some imagining. To be a Tiger in this city is mostly to be a star-crossed lover. For a generation, it's a club that's been condemned; on the lowlands, on the wrong side of a muddy river, playing on an oval named after a forbidding road (named after an unreliable river crossing), entwined in Melbourne's social fabric as a sporting endeavour doubling as a tragicomedy.
But now, from their mid-winter plight, the Tigers again flirt with our hearts and the prospect of walking with angels. The team started winning, and how we hope they've now forgotten how to lose. Other results have fallen our way (thank you North Melbourne, thank you Jack Ziebell). From equal last, we can almost touch the one remaining finals spot.
"Of course we can do it," says Verran Fehlberg, 41, from Fitzroy North, a corporate lawyer and company secretary with three young children who last fortnight at the Adelaide Oval was seen on national TV holding up a home-made yellow-and-black sign that read, simply: "7-0". For all Richmond fans, after rising from the dead against the Crows, in these two numbers was perfect alchemy.
Fehlberg was on the boundary again last week, at the MCG, singing in the rain and farewelling our team from Melbourne, holding aloft his updated message. It mattered not that in the euphoria, in that joyous valedictory, he held it the wrong way around: "0-8".
"I've got five more folders of yellow card and I reckon I'll need them all," says Fehlberg, who, like thousands of other Richmond fans, has found a way to get to Sydney for Saturday's moment of reckoning.
If the Tigers win against the Swans – a team wrapped in cotton wool, knowing a home finals safety net is ensured – it'd be 9-0. If they won an elimination final, likely away against Port Adelaide, it'd be 10-0. Dare to dream. 11-0, elsewhere on the road. A preliminary final against, say, Hawthorn? 12-0. Destiny would beckon at the MCG on that last Saturday of September. 13-0. Imagine that? The city would never be the same again.
"I'm just over the moon," says Norma Malloy, 84, a pensioner from Heidelberg Heights who's been a member for 64 years and has schooled all 10 of her grandchildren into the ways of the yellow and black. "My uncle was Jack Dyer's boot studder," she says. She rarely misses a game in Melbourne, and on Friday night was on the overnight train to Sydney – economy class, in a seat – to see her team play.
"There was a man on the wireless who dreamt we won 13 games and Cotch was holding up the premiership cup," she says. "I pray they can win, but I'm nervous. If we lose, we still love 'em."
In this week of delightful tension – full of wonderings about Dusty and Jack and Lids, and this new bloke Miles – no Tiger fan wants this dream to end. When the league was renamed the AFL in 1990, Richmond held the wooden spoon and was as good as insolvent. This financial year, they've not known about loss.
Our last loss, to the Swans, by happenstance fell on the year's darkest day. Back then, on a dour and fateful night at the MCG, they overran us in a shroud of mist and it seemed like this season's last rites were played out. Jokes about memberships and microwaves did the rounds. Holidays were booked. Yet now, at 4.40pm, up north and in the gloaming, everything is alive and football fairytales could come true.
"The rituals of the season aren't over and I'm not ready for this to finish," says Cassandra, who with her gathering from the Capital Tigers Supporter Group will again make the bus trip from Canberra to watch the match at Homebush Bay, in Sydney.
"I guess it is like a pilgrimage," she says. "We should have shrines along the way to the ground, and when we get off we could light a candle. I'm praying to the football gods. We all are. Please let them win."
Dugald Jellie writes a blog about football, community and belonging found at tigertigerburningbright.com.au.http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/can-richmond-make-it-90-a-modern-football-fable-20140829-109w6u.html
