Infighting fury at TigerlandPatrick Carlyon
Sunday Herald Sun
11th September 2016BARRACKING for Richmond is the emotional equivalent of being waterboarded. One day, when the United Nations stumbles across the practice and tries to ban it on human rights grounds, some official report will cite the annual mewling ritual. Sometimes it begins in April, sometimes as late as September. It marks not only the surrender of hope, but the unbearable knowledge that the torture will go on.
The rise of Focus On Footy, a rival board ticket at Richmond, is no surprise. The optimism quotient for 2016 was higher at Punt Rd than any other time since Malcolm Fraser was prime minister. FOF’s choice of a boxing gym for its announcement seemed shrewd, an injection of doggedness for a club that last threw a punch in the era of Muhammad Ali. By every other measure, however, FOF took its cues from an African military coup.
The new ticket included two doctors — Dr Martin Hiscock, a cardiologist, and Dr David Marsh, who has letters after as well as before his name. FOF had a long list of complaints and a long list of targets. How the two would be bridged could not be explained. FOF had a new approach, apparently, to address Richmond’s rope-a-dope default.
But an endless stream of media interviews did not tease out FOF’s details.
Applied to a medical patient, the FOF pitch went something like this. Let us operate on the club. It’s not dying, and almost all the critical systems are best left alone. But we demand to cut it open and poke around. We will flush away the toxins introduced through the years, the poor recruiting choices (Richard Tambling instead of Lance Franklin, Aaron Fiora instead of Matthew Pavlich) that stymied the fullest use of your body. (Think of this the next time the doctor links any present-day ill to an old smoking or sugar habit.)
We might introduce this drug (Neil Balme) or that stent (Mick Malthouse). We won’t replace this organ (coach Damien Hardwick) or that system (chief executive Brendon Gale). But if we don’t like how something’s going, we may tinker. Then again, we may not.
Oh, by the way, we trust that your body will not violently reject the procedure. Resistance is no good for you and it’s an unnecessary bother for us. If our fiddling doesn’t work, don’t worry. After our marathon spell of surgery (nine years), we’ll hand over to another set of specialists.
Please sign here, here and here.
If the opening statements left plenty of unanswered questions, the follow-up media interviews invited more. On radio last week, Hiscock explained that he had not spoken to Balme, Malthouse or current president Peggy O’Neal. It seems FOF had done less homework than a Kevin Rudd election promise. Yet, like Rudd, Hiscock blazed with Napoleonic vision.
Tigers fullback Alex Rance ends a game flat on his back, exhausted and frustrated.
The course was clear (except for the details). The new board would oversee gameplan strategies, which sounds a bit like hospital executives telling surgeons to stick scalpels in left legs instead of right.
Under his plan, Hiscock’s seven members would be in and the existing board out. It wasn’t all bad news for them — they could reapply for the two remaining board spots. He hoped for no blood, he said without irony, and a “smooth transition”.
Hiscock was delightfully pompous. This Richmond fan has never met him. But has a specialist ever kept you waiting forever, then never threatened to call you by your name? Have his eyes glazed over at the first sign that you have questions in response to the spiel that just reduced your being to an incomprehensible horror show?
Hiscock is your man for the poorly understood links between transient ischaemic attack and patent foramen ovale. Cardiologists hold people’s futures in their grasp; patients understandably bathe them in gratitude. Both Hiscock and Marsh are doctors of the highest reputation. But they weren’t at their strongest in explaining why their footy club would be better than O’Neal’s.
“Of course we would consider some of the recent appointees …” Hiscock said, sounding like a doctor advising against drinking, pizza, or any other vice that brightens life.
Or an assortment of football club board folks over the decades, long used to the sound of their own voice but untrained in the power of persuasion outside their own domain.
A media commentator summed up FOF as “amateur hour”. Someone likened it to pub talk. Its outraged tone was warming to generations of Richmond fans, but it lacked the usual handbrakes of logic and reason — and the sort of fellow drinkers who compare half-baked ideas with Angry Anderson’s 1991 Grand Final effort.
Here was just another power play. Like the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the Night of Long Knives in Canberra in 2010. If it was Fidel Castro, it was also Richmond: in 1986, when (fleeting) club president Alan Bond wanted to relocate his pet team to Brisbane; or the following year, when the club could afford to pay only two-thirds of the salary cap: or a few weeks ago, when Richmond surrendered a massive three-quarter time lead to Geelong.
For Tiger fans, it’s just another flicker of chaos. Theirs is a permanent crouch, in part to pre-empt the sniggers of other fans. They are “others”, to be treated with sympathy and disdain, as if they suffer chronic disease and vote One Nation. They know the club’s cultural failings, and its flair for defeat, are self-fulfilling loops.
Even if they scoff at Hardwick’s “we won’t be rushed” statement on Thursday, they also recognise the same-old masquerading as new-and-improved.
The Richmond glitch no longer resides just in poor performances but in the club’s response to them. A call to panic is common after a Richmond season: it’s happened more years than not in the past 35.
Criticisms of past judgments are justified and easy. But change for change’s sake doesn’t work.
FOF represents just another anthem without a beat, another triumph of frustration that arises when logic — burdened with the twin handicaps of humility and patience — seems too hard.
Boardroom brawls won’t win games and they don’t build clubs.
Imagine if a doctor treated a patient the same way.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/patrick-carlyon/boardroom-brawls-will-not-solve-problems-at-richmond-football-club/news-story/665274af14a5c97dea115dec8eaae653
