‘We are bloody hurting’: Jack Riewoldt’s raw insight into ‘sombre’ Tigers campSeptember 7, 2020 8:52pm
Ben Waterworth
FOX SPORTSRichmond star Jack Riewoldt has provided a raw insight into the “sombre” mood among the club’s playing group and admitted it was on “heightened alert” to avoid another off-field misdemeanour.
Riewoldt’s comments come after teammates Sydney Stack and Callum Coleman-Jones both copped 10-game suspensions, while the Tigers were hit with a $100,000 fine, after the pair were involved in a 3am scuffle outside a Gold Coast strip club.
Speaking on his SEN program Tiger Time, Riewoldt said it’d been “pretty difficult” period of time for the players and there’d been a “sombre mood around the hub”.
“We’ve had we’ve had two young men make a lot of very poor decisions and the easy thing to do is to ostracise them from the group and say ‘that was their choice’. But the sign of a good football club and the sign of a good organisation is that we own it,” Riewoldt told SEN.
Riewoldt said the “decent whack” the club had copped from commentators and fans was deserved but also “cut the deepest and the most”.
“We feel like we’re a great organisation and we’ve had a couple of young men that have made the decision to pull against the fabric of our organisation – and it really hurts,” he said.
Stack and Coleman-Jones’ error was the second breach of the AFL’s COVID-19 protocols by people connected to the Tigers.
Should the club breach protocols a third time, it’d face losing premiership points and draft selections.
Riewoldt said the playing group understood the consequences of their actions, adding they “only have ourselves to blame”.
But the dual premiership forward declared “you can’t take it as a failure of two people”.
“This is a team sport and we’re not going to ostracise the boys and throw them out. We’re going to own it – and I think the club’s done that really well,” he said.
“They’ve gone against the grain of what we’re about. The majority of our actions – and I mean, 99.999 per cent – are of solid, good-cultured football club and a club that is built on respect and built on connection, built on love and built on care for each other. But these two young men, they made two really poor decisions.
“That’s not going to define us in the back-end of the season … We’ve got to learn our lesson from it because we’re in a position where we’re right on the borderline of going over into the next stage of punishments, which are pretty severe.
“So we’re on heightened alert as well. We know that we need to maintain the regulations, as every side does up here.”
Riewoldt said the club’s brand had taken a hit but took umbrage with suggestions the club had become “arrogant”.
“We’ve got some extremely humble people in here and they would cringe hearing that and I would cringe about them saying that about our people,” he said.
“The brand has really been affected – and it’s a brand that we do so much work on … We do some amazing things in the Alannah & Madeline Foundation space, Black Lives Mater I feel like we’ve been the industry leader, KGI and all these other programs that happen behind the scenes that players put a lot of energy in and staff at this football club put a lot of energy in – and that’s been really hurt by this.
“Yes we’ve stuffed up, yes the brand has been affected and yes we’ve lost some respect from people in the industry, from other supporters and from our own supporters who would be feeling down about the way that the club’s been painted at the moment. But culture is what you do next. How do you bounce back? How do you prepare and put this behind you and get ready for Friday night in a massive game of AFL football? How do you look after your people to get them through and get them going again?
“I have a firm and strong belief the leaders that we have around this club – and that’s players, Peggy, Brendan, Dimma, everyone that’s in a senior management position – is pushing in the right direction. We’ve had a couple of slip-ups and a couple of massive blues, but we are pushing in the right direction. We learn, we grow and we’ve been planted again. It will be the true showing of culture.”
Asked if he had a message for Richmond fans, Riewoldt said: “I just empathise with them and say that we are in that position as well.
“There’s players here that are guttered, absolutely guttered about what’s happened because they’ve been dragged into something that is so against the grain of their own ethos and the club ethos.
“The last thing that the players want is to be in the media for the wrong reasons and that’s all I can really say is that we are bloody hurting. It’s really cut deep in a lot of our guys and I think that’s what steels us to go: ‘How can I make up for this mistake? How can I get the get love and get the connection back to those fans that have been hurt?’ Because we’ve got 100,000 members that have paid their money up.”
https://www.foxsports.com.au/afl/afl-2020-jack-riewoldt-on-sen-sydney-stack-and-callum-coleman-jones-fight-at-strip-club/news-story/ea9f48c339dedcbe05c38fc1821a305c
