O'Neal to continue playing her part at RichmondCaroline Wilson
The Age
March 23, 2016Peggy O'Neal likened the public view of her first historic years as Richmond president to acting out a part in a play.
Having accepted her starring role on the football stage in the belief it would eventually fade — "and it has" — O'Neal now reveals she does not plan to make an early exit.
Calling for patience from the Tiger faithful and stressing she will continue to take the long view, O'Neal has forecast she will stand for another three-year presidential term at the end of the 2016 season.
"At the end of this year it will be three years and I'll do it again if the board will have me," she said. "This club is evolving and what it stands for is part of that.
"People still talk about the old Richmond and the tumultuous periods, but that is long gone. Both of our last two coaches, Terry and Danny, stayed until their last contracted years and we have achieved so much – a sustainable financially secure Richmond.
"I know premierships can come out of the blue like Hawthorn in 2008 but that didn't feel solid and it wasn't."
O'Neal's stated ambition for the Tigers is to achieve an inclusive, honest club maintained for its members and the future. "And a premiership," she added.
The Tigers' evolution and the so-called "old Richmond" still rears its head at times and did again last season - first when the club suffered a dismal start and O'Neal once again found herself in the firing line, and later when club directors found themselves facing what smacked of a hostile challenge from two rogue candidates.
"Having lived here for more than 25 years," said O'Neal who relocated in 1989 from the US, "and trying to make sense of this world of football, I could see that the version was that we had started losing and the only thing that changed is that we've got this woman president.
"I didn't expect I would be such the object of attention and I tried not to make a big deal out of it, but then I just told myself it's a part in a play. You're just a character. Play your part and it will die down. And it has."
O'Neal's pragmatic view extends to the club's devastating elimination final loss to North Melbourne along with the Tigers' inability to secure a star player during last year's trade period.
While the board asked itself the hard question about Damien Hardwick and his coaching future, O'Neal said that some questionable selection decisions were made before the North game and that "we were still in the game with five minutes to go and yet some of our good players had some of their worst games".
"I don't think we've got a block about finals. Trent [Cotchin] had a terrible game and he's said so himself and he's had to relive and relive that.
"We know we've still got some issues. The forward line needs more work, we need more back-up for Ivan [Maric] and replacing Chris Newman was always going to be tough.
"People say that people don't want to come to Richmond, but you can't think there's going to be a player who's going to come in and turn things around. It's a collective. We got Chris Yarran and we kept the players we needed and wanted to keep and now we need to get on with life."
On the eve of her third season as president, having re-signed coach Damien Hardwick until the end of 2018 and having seen off last year's board challenge from property developer Joe Russo and Jason Dowd, O'Neal said she remained at philosophical odds with a number of aspiring football club directors.
"Members can always run but this happened at a time when there seemed to be a lot of stability and that can change quickly ... So when Jo and Jason decided to run on the last hour of the last day they left us no time to talk.
"Being on a board of a football club you have to make a lot of decisions and most of them are about money. You're not picking the team, you're not paid and you're not playing golf with Damien every week.
"I don't think I've ever heard of someone challenging for the board and saying they want to work towards financial stability and security, but the truth is that is what a lot of the big decisions are about. Patience is necessary and you have to take a long view."
To that end, as exclusively revealed by Fairfax Media, Richmond on Monday night won the tender to manage eight health and fitness facilities in the shire of Cardinia. The move could ultimately rid the club of its reliance on gaming revenue.O'Neal's long view also includes an ambition to field a women's team in the new national league, although, with the AFL now calling for clubs to tender for inaugural sides, not necessarily from the outset. And not if it means overcrowding Punt Road's facilities, now housing a VFL team, to an impractical extent.
"I want us to have a women's team but would we divert our resources from our men's team? We're in a good position, we're in good financial shape but we would never want to risk that. Is there an advantage to being first rather than being in the second wave?
"We also want to make sure our women footballers are working and playing and training in the best conditions."
O'Neal, who sat on the AFL Commission selection panel which recently appointed Gabrielle Trainor and Andrew Newbold, remains disappointed that head office still employs so few senior women with only one female on its nine-member executive.
"We have two women on our commission but you would think an organisation that big would have more women on its executive. Perhaps the bigger the organisation the slower the change.
"Gillon McLachlan is a champion of change and we could all do more in that area. But they [the AFL] could set an example. It's really the clubs who are doing more in that area."
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/peggy-oneal-primed-to-continue-playing-her-part-at-richmond-20160322-gnormj.html
