The baffling history of the Riolis rolls on in the 2020 AFL grand finalBy Steve Vivian
abc.net.au
23 October 2020If success was measured in the number of the cliches written about you, the Riolis are going to be hard to top.
Much of what they do on the field defies description. And the Riolis, like they've done to their opponents, have outpaced the vocabulary of Australian rules football itself.
So, to keep up, we've made up a little pocketbook of inadequate expressions to explain the things Riolis do that we don't quite understand.
When a Rioli creates "something from nothing", or you just don't quite know how they did that — that's "Rioli magic".
Recent Rioli grand finals
2008 — Cyril Rioli (won)
2012 — Cyril Rioli (lost)
2013 — Cyril Rioli (won)
2014 — Cyril Rioli (won)
2015 — Cyril Rioli (won)
2017 — Daniel Rioli (won)
2018 — Willie Rioli (won)
2019 — Danielle Ponter (won)
2019 — Daniel Rioli (won)
2020 — Daniel Rioli (?)Then there's the conventional commentator wisdom: that a Rioli's impact on a game can't be judged by mere statistics alone; that a Rioli "doesn't need to have many touches to have a big influence on the game".
For a Rioli, transcending statistics, well that's merely a cliche.
"Draft a Rioli, win a premiership", is now thrown around the internet as a suggested recruiting model for some teams struggling for success.
In attempting to detail the things a Rioli can do on the field, veteran sports broadcaster and famous Cyril Rioli devotee Bruce McAvaney has been the most authentic.
For McAvaney, platitudes were never enough to describe the pleasure, the joy and the delight of watching Cyril; that "something from nothing" became "delicious", that Rioli magic "just a beautiful thing", and one time, during a particularly transcendental piece of play when Cyril gathered the footy on the wing, McAvaney relayed his gut response to a national audience like this:
"Oh I hope this stays in, it does, keep going, oh yes, now it gets really interesting, two bounces, he'll caress it down someone's throat, and he does."
The upshot of McAvaney's commentary could be that, without sticking to the cliches, it gets strange when you attempt to describe what these Riolis do on the football field.
And when Daniel Rioli runs out on the Gabba this Saturday to mark the ninth grand final appearance of a Rioli in the past nine years, there won't be sufficient words to describe what this family has achieved in the game of Aussie rules.
'They see it too quick'From Pirlangimpi, a Tiwi islands community of less than 400 people, the Rioli footballing dynasty has emerged as one of the sport's greatest storylines.
From this tiny outpost on Australia's borderlands, the Riolis have won eight premierships, two Norm Smith Medals and, along with the Longs — also hailing from the Tiwis — have laid claim to the throne as Australia's greatest sporting family.
Charlie King, a long-time ABC sports broadcaster who has called games featuring the Riolis for decades, describes the family as "a phenomenon".
"I can't for the life of me come up with a reason why so many of them would be so talented," King says.
"I've been watching footy in the Northern Territory for 30 to 40 years and I just haven't seen players who are as gifted as the Riolis.
"There's nothing more enjoyable than watching a Rioli swivel his hips and move out of a pack of four or five players and streak away and find a target.
"It's a beautiful thing," says King, like McAvaney before him.
Has any one family done more to surprise and delight football fans across the country's football-obsessed south than the Riolis? With respect to the Gary Ablett Sr and Jr, the latter of which Daniel will face on Saturday and is another footballer who has defied otherworldly expectations, King thinks not.
"They make football so enjoyable to watch and we've been fortunate enough to watch them over many years," he says.
And how does King describe that hard-to-pin-down thing Riolis seem to have that others don't?
"They call it the X-factor. They can do what they have to do when they have to do it. They can be calm and cool in a crisis, and then all of a sudden they can turn on a bit of magic," he says.
Another famed virtue of the Riolis is their humility despite successes and abilities that would excuse self satisfaction.
Daniel Rioli's modesty is one of his uncles' favourite things about the two-time Richmond premiership player.
"If you ever met him you wouldn't know he's an AFL player because he doesn't have that ego about him. He doesn't have that strut on him," says Shannon Rioli, Daniel's 28-year-old uncle who captains the St Mary's Football Club in the NT Football League.
Even when describing what many know and love about the Riolis, Shannon is at pains to suggest he doesn't want to sound boastful.
"Most Riolis sort of have a bit of a sense of occasion. You look at Maurice he sort of started that trend," says Shannon Rioli of the great Maurice Rioli, who was the first Indigenous player to win the Norm Smith Medal.
"Cyril won the Norm Smith Medal in 2015, and even you look at Willie up here with St Mary's a few years back. He got the Chenay Medal [best on ground in an NT grand final], kicking five goals as a 17-year-old for Saint Mary's."
West Coast's thrilling 2018 premiership win over Collingwood also might never have been possible without Willie's toe-poke goal on the cusp of quarter time — the first goal for his side which, at that point, was behind by five goals with the game almost slipping away.
Back in the early 90s, Charlie King tells a story of seeing Shannon and his brother Ben Rioli kicking a novelty miniature football through a basketball hoop.
King can remember two things: that the ball was squeaky, and that it did not feel normal for kids that young to have that kind of dexterity.
And these were the Riolis that didn't end up making it to the AFL.
So where does it come from, this innate skill, the unfailing sense of occasion? Is there a secret to football's most famous bloodlines?
King recalls a conversation he had with the late Robert Tipungwuti on the Tiwi Islands.
"Robert turned to me and said, 'it's in their eyes'," King says.
"He said, 'They get the message quicker. They see it too quick'.
"They must get this from their blood, it's in them, we'd be seeing it in slow motion in comparison."
The gift of enhanced vision — or more accurately, photographic memory — is also something the Riolis confer on those who watch them.
Daniel Rioli's 2017 goal of the year is chiselled into the mind of Richmond assistant coach Xavier Clarke.
"There's three or four efforts, I think he had a smother, a marking contest, he brought it to ground, he runs forward, gets kicked to him, hits the ground again, and kicks a goal," Clarke recalls.
Clarke, a former St Mary's player who went on to play in the AFL with St Kilda, says that piece of play was one of those sequences that only a Rioli could pull off.
Cyril's 2009 goal of the year followed a similar script.
"You see all those aspects of the game: the pressure, the contest, second and third efforts, stepping back in, and finishing with a goal," he says.
An ever-growing highlight reel aside, Clarke actually finds Daniel a little "blue-collar" when judged against his uncles and cousins.
"To be completely honest I probably think Cyril and Willie have got a bit more polish — that's not in a bad way — but I think they see the game differently to Daniel," Clarke says.
"Daniel's game is based on the ability to work hard and up and down the ground.
"I think Daniel is a little bit more blue-collar if you want to call it that. He is probably a little bit more of the one that bases his game around work rate and getting from contest to contest."
That work rate, in its most signature manifestation, sees Daniel mowing down unsuspecting opponents with crunching tackles and winning the ball back for his team.
"And sometimes he might not get the tackle but people know he's there and they make mistakes and they turn the footy over," Shannon Rioli says.
"You look at how much Richmond force turnovers … a lot of that is what Daniel does."
Since 2017, through prioritising their tackle and pressure game led by small forwards like Daniel, Richmond has taken a wrecking ball to conventional ideas about how AFL forward lines should operate, all the while becoming the most dominant force in the game
Daniel dashes through sliding doorsWas it romance in the air. Or was it madness?
In November 2015, when Richmond selected Daniel Rioli in the AFL National Draft, you would have heard a different answer depending on who you talked to.
Not all Richmond fans loved the pick. While some might deny it in hindsight, there was an undercurrent of suspicion the club, desperately trying to summon spirits of glories past, had erred in selected Daniel so high.
Draft pundits had predicted Daniel's selection would come well into the second or third rounds, but Richmond snapped the 'blue-collar' Rioli up with their blue-chip first round pick.
Five years, two premierships, three grand finals and, for Richmond fans, innumerable euphoric holding-the-ball decisions later, that doubt seems silly now.
But the Riolis have made careers out of making people around them — usually on the field with a baulk or a side step — look just that: silly.
Daniel might have even surprised his own family.
Shannon can recall one time when a young Daniel, after being away at boarding school, came home to play a game of footy with St Patrick's College on the Tiwis.
"We thought he was going to play well, but he didn't for whatever reason … we weren't so sure," Shannon says.
Did the Riolis waver on Daniel?
"We always knew Cyril was a really good chance … we always knew Willie had the skill, and with Daniel we knew he loved his footy," Shannon says.
"When we saw his work rate, from then on we saw he was a really good chance.
"He's still only 22 or 23, so he's got hopefully 10 years in the AFL left in him, and hopefully there's better things to come."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-23/afl-the-unprecedented-success-of-the-riolis-rolls-on/12785260
