Stability is a "joke" word on this forum .
But the reason why the Tigers have been an embarrassment for 3 decades is rampant instability. At least the current regime is doing its best to rectify this - even if its with a coach who has lost the support of the tiger faithful.
Maybe it all started when Tommy Hafey left the club .....who bloody knows.
The club should never have sacked TJ in 1981 - could you imagine Hawthorn sacking Clarkson in 2009 for missing the finals .
Richmond probably would of won the grand final in 1982 had Tony Jewell been coach. We were two goals up at half time .
Instead TJ was replaced by Francis Burke who was a recently retired champion player with no coaching experience.....Imagine Newy coaching us now. Burke got many of his former team mates off side with his condecending coaching style.....especially the senior players.
Then in 1983 the club let walk its captain from 1981 , the captain from 1982 and a triple B&F winner.
What happened between Richmond and Collingwood that year with the poaching of players definitely led to financial instability at the club . 7 years later the club was rattling tins and was a charity case .
Poor old KB never had a chance by the time he became coach . Richmond was so under resourced it didn't even own a brench press back then . Bartlett had to buy sporting equipment for the club out of his own pocket.
By the time the game went truly national in the early 90s we were so far off the pace it wasn't funny .
No way we could compete against interstate juggernauts like West Coast or Adelaide.
Against the odds the club looked like it was headed somewhere in the mid 90s .Finally we were playing a brand of football which made us proud plus we has a young superstar called Matthew Richardson who could be anything.
John Northy who had a year to go on his contract asked for an extension. Not unreasonable - especially in this day and age where Dimma gets a 2 year extension after losing 3 elimination finals in a row.
The club said no and Swooper walked . Richmond replaces its most successful coach in over a decade with a coach who had to be talked out of retirement.
I always wonder how the Tigers would of gone in 1996 had Northey still remained as coach .....better than 9th I would suggest.
Even last decade the club was still well behind the elite clubs with money spent on football departments , player development , recruiting etc . Club just did not have the money to compete with the big boys .
Say what you will about the current administration but Benny Gale has always said there is a correlation between on field success and money spend on football department. At least we have a club now that is debt free and has state of the art facilities.
You raise some good points Mat, I'm particularly in agreeance with you regarding the whole Northey fiasco. Going back into that point in our history when the wheels conclusively fell off (early 1980's) though, rather than not sacking TJ (which is also an interesting "what if"), I find myself being haunted by another hypothetical question; "what if we'd had the foresight to talk Kevin Sheedy into staying on as senior coach"? Now I know a lot of you will probably be saying this is ancient history and has no bearing on where we find ourselves as a club today. But if Sheeds had carved out the kind of 20year dynasty with us that he did at Essendon, I dare say we could have had a seamless transition from our Hafey era into a powerhouse in the era of the national game. As such we would be a much different entity to the apologetic, dithering, scared of success mess of a club we currently are.
Mat, on your last point about the correlation between on field success and the money spent on the football department, I would say that all logic and common sense would suggest that this must be right. However, in recent years since we started recording healthy profits, haven't we been allocating more and more resources into our football department with little or no success? If so, is there something else holding us back from getting the desired results? Is it a cultural shortcoming or just plain bad luck that we always seem to appoint the wrong coaches, the wrong recruiters and the wrong players? I don't have a definitive answer, but I'm keen to hear what other think.
