The Tigers' king hitRohan Connolly
May 7, 2011IF YOU were ever looking for a passage of play to sum up what Richmond's Jake King is all about, a moment in the second quarter against the Brisbane Lions last Saturday night provided it.
The little pocket battleship had just beaten the Lions' Ash McGrath to a ball on the junction of the 50-metre arc and the boundary line. As King turned inside his opponent, a despairing tackle saw him well and truly "dacked".
Unperturbed, but with his shorts halfway down his bum, King bolted towards an open goal with that distinctive waddle of his. Now, Brisbane's Pearce Hanley came at him full tilt from the opposite direction. This time, King was nearly decapitated as the Lion tried to stop his momentum.
But King didn't lose his footing, let alone stop to take the free kick. He ploughed on regardless, eventually slamming through his second goal from point-blank range, in need of a wardrobe adjustment and perhaps a neck brace, dishevelled, but satisfied. You didn't know whether to applaud or laugh.
"I was going to give it off, but just the pace he was moving at, and the pace I was moving, there was no way a tackle was going to stick, so I just kept going," he explains, unfazed by the Benny Hill-esque escapade.
For looks aren't important to King. "As long as it goes through," he says, smiling.
A point emphasised by his coach Damien Hardwick yesterday, King's obstacle-course goal the first example he raises. "Sometimes it's a little bit unfashionable the way he gets those results," says Hardwick, more admiringly than critically.
"He's probably one of those guys - and every club has one - who wears his heart on his sleeve and he plays with passion. That's what we love about Jake. He's a guy who will do what he's told. He plays to the nth of
his ability and he gets the results done. He's just a guy we love having in the side, and he brings a lot of passion to the footy club."
But these days, a lot more besides, as King writes a new chapter in what has already been a compelling football story.
He's already been cast as the limited scrapper who could "blue" better than get a kick. Then, in turn, as a sort of novelty act, whose penchant for push-ups and general puffing of the chest gave him a popular nickname and reduced commentators to pant-wetting hysteria every time he went near the ball.
Now comes the latest and, to some early sceptics, perhaps most surprising instalment. That, simply, of King as the pretty decent player, a critical goalkicker and, as Hardwick puts it, "a tackling machine" in the forward structure of a young team going places.
After six rounds, King is behind only Jack Riewoldt on Richmond's list of goalkickers. From just 18 kicks inside the forward 50, King, whose kicking has often been the subject of scorn, has a phenomenally accurate 11.1. He's equal leader for tackles inside 50, and equal 10th across the entire competition. They're serious stats, not those of a novelty.
And after being a one-time back-pocket cliche, to a midfield agitator, it's close to goal that the Tigers have
found the maximum possible returns from all King's niggle, aggro and nervous energy.
"The coaches have put enormous faith in him and he has delivered as a result of that," says Hardwick. "We
spoke about the role and what it required, some KPI areas he needed to achieve to play that role effectively.
"A lot of those things - and [Collingwood's] Jarryd Blair is the same - don't involve kicks, marks and handballs, it's the tackles, the pressure pursuits, those sorts of characteristics. If they do those things well, the offensive side of the game comes, as has been emphasised by the last couple of weeks on the scoresheet."
King reckons his awareness has improved, and his focus on maintaining the side's structure, making sure teammates are getting to the right spots. But theorising about football isn't really his go.
"You just keep working on things as you get older. I reckon from the time I've come in, every area has improved, whether tackling or awareness or kicks, marks and handballs," he says. "I think the longer you stay in the system, the more you want to improve, and the more you improve, the harder you want to work, and the better you become.
"To be truthful, I've been playing the same football all my life, and I think it's just I've got more responsibility now. And you mature a lot more, so you sort of tweak a couple of things. I can still be aggressive and do what I've got to do, but obviously without getting rubbed out or anything like that any more, just try to keep pushing the boundaries without overstepping the mark.
"It's more being aggressive, whether it's tackling or actually attacking the ball and making contact in that sort of way, and walking off with your chest sort of pumped up. Having a presence physically like that instead of doing stupid things, whacking someone, mouthing off or giving them too much crap."
It was all too easy to paint King in his early days at Richmond as some sort of nostalgic throwback to the 1970s. The rough-and-tumble angry little bloke who'd cut his teeth in his mid-teens playing with North Heidelberg in the then-notoriously willing Diamond Valley Football League.
King, in his own words, had stuffed up the chance of a smooth path to the AFL, managing just a handful of games for TAC under-18 side Northern Knights before heading back to his old club. The goal-focused and development-centred environment he found too selfish for his liking, so he simply left. He doesn't regret it. Nor much else.
"I don't regret anything I've ever done," he says. "If you were to change the past, the future wouldn't be exactly where is right now. I learn by my mistakes, and I think that's the best way to learn. I'm happy the way everything's turned out."
King, who had been working full-time as a plumber for five years by the time he walked through the doors at Punt Road, eventually made his path to Richmond, at the age of 22, through its VFL affiliate Coburg after tying for the best and fairest in his only season.
And that came a year after what he considers one of the greatest moments of his life, playing (hard to believe though it is with a height of 178 centimetres) at centre half-back alongside his brother Jarrod in a North Heidelberg premiership side.
"I just remember when the final siren went, and we'd beaten Heidelberg, and it was unexpected ... I looked over him, and he looked at me, and you just knew it was one of the best feelings you could ever have in your life. To actually share that with him, my best mate, was just amazing."
The Kings are famously close as a family. Mum Helen, stepdad Craig (or "Nudge" as he is better known), brothers Jarrod and Liam and sisters Bianca and Shaelee are all regulars at Richmond games. Over the years, they've heard their son and sibling called everything under the sun by opposition fans. And that flak was flying pretty early on.
Like when King, at the start of his second AFL season in 2008, told The Age, "I'd hate to play on me", then had a bag full of goals kicked on him by North Melbourne's Corey Jones and Shannon Grant. The "haters" loved seeing him brought down a peg or two. Those who know him best knew that what he'd meant was anything but self-promotion.
"I'm not big on pumping up my own tyres," he says. "I remember it. What I was trying to say was that I was so hot and cold, you wouldn't really know what to expect. It certainly wasn't a 'my poo don't stink' type thing."
Not that King is exactly fussed about just how he's seen beyond family and football club. "I know who I
am and what I'm about; the people closest to me know who I am and what I'm about, and to be truthful, I
couldn't care what anyone else's opinions are. As long as the family's happy with me, and they're happy with me here, the rest is just water off a duck's back."
Just being around the environment of a football club, whatever the level, is enough to keep King's spirits high. "I love my footy, and I played all my local footy at the one club and just loved it there, through thick and thin, it didn't matter if we were winning or losing."
At Richmond, the stakes are considerably higher but King feels the same mood. "You see some of the poor boys get put on pedestals, or labelled every which way or the other, but when you come down to it, they're just the same as everyone else, the tradies, or the blokes in suits. I just love the people here. We've got a real good culture going on, and I absolutely love it."
Like the rest of what passes for a senior core at a young club, King has seen some pretty ordinary times at Tigerland. But also like them, what is potentially around the corner helps keep the fires burning.
"We've got our trademarks that we go by, and one of them is belief, and I believe the boys are now starting to see the path we're heading down and actually believing in themselves, believing in the game plan, believing in pretty much everything to do with winning," he says. "You look ahead and think of all those young players coming through, and just think 'Wow'. You want to be around when it all unfolds, because you can see something big happening."
But what you can also see is him playing an increasingly important part of the equation. No longer just a scrapper, and made of more substance than his jokey alias "Push-up", Jake King the footballer is now also well and truly putting his hand up.
Perhaps not gracefully, and perhaps with a bruise or two along the way, but as with that eventful path to goal last Saturday night, always with a determination to get there in the end.
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/the-tigers-king-hit-20110506-1ecgy.html#ixzz1LcjgHao4
