How Tigers hunted as a pack to get their man
The Age | December 19, 2008
It was on a Thursday, at the home of a 1960s Richmond player, that Ben Cousins was truly embraced by the Tigers family, setting in train his rebirth as a footballer.
Cousins, who had arrived at 6am on the midnight "red eye" from Perth, was spirited from the airport by his manager, Ricky Nixon, to the home of Barry Cameron, a 96-game Richmond ruckman who also happens to be the father of the club's general manager of football operations, Craig Cameron.
Cousins spent six hours at the home of Cameron snr, meeting officials, senior players, coach Terry Wallace and the club's new general manager of learning and development, Jeff Bond, who served as the Australian Institute of Sport's psychologist for 22 years.
Cousins was interviewed and probed in four separate meetings.
First, he spoke with Wallace, Cameron and Bond, then he had a one-on-one discussion with Bond.
Next, a group of four senior Richmond players - new captain Chris Newman, his predecessor, Kane Johnson, and Troy Simmonds and Nathan Brown - spent 40 minutes with the player whom they'd vainly chased in his past life as a celebrated West Coast champion. The players, unsurprisingly, wanted him.
Finally, Cousins met president Gary March and chief executive Steve Wright. March found Cousins to be slightly nervous, but completely honest and forthright in his responses to all the curly questions that were thrown at him. Significantly, the chastened Cousins did not exude arrogance or attitude.
Later that day, Wallace, Cameron and the football department made an in-principle decision to recruit Cousins. They were counting on the help of the AFL in opening up an extra draft pick - assistance that was ultimately not forthcoming - but the club had crossed its own Rubicon in the sense that it did not object to recruiting a recovering drug addict. It just had to find a way to accommodate him without losing face or compromising its youth policy.
The following evening, last Friday, the Richmond board approved the football department's recommendation. Three days later, the Tigers' late-breaking bid for Cousins would nearly unravel when the AFL rejected the club's application to place Graham Polak, recovering from head injuries sustained in a tram accident, on the rookie list.
By then, however, the pro-Cousins momentum had become unstoppable.
Cousins's AFL career had seemed buried after he was spurned by sponsor-conscious St Kilda at a late November board meeting before the national draft. Following on the heels of Collingwood's rejection (and soon by Brisbane's predictable withdrawal), the Saints' knock-back seemed to represent the end. In the days immediately following the rejection, Cousins was holed up in his Perth home and unreachable on his mobile. Nixon and others close to him were concerned for his welfare, knowing the potential for such rejection to set back his recovery.
Yet sources insist it did not.
Richmond first began to explore the notion of Cousins in yellow and black in the wake of the national draft, when the Tigers had passed on their final selection, pick 70, after Brisbane picked the player they wanted, Bart McCulloch. Richmond acknowledge that, if not for Brisbane drafting McCulloch at pick 69, the whole Cousins project probably would never have eventuated.
That said, the Tigers did not want to use their first pick in the pre-season draft on Cousins, and sought to conjure an extra choice via the Polak application - a bid that rival clubs strongly opposed.
The club was clearly surprised that the AFL commission rejected the application and remains silent about what it believed happened to cause the league to knock back the Polak transfer, which was based on the premise that Polak would have difficulty playing in the first half of next year and might not play senior football at all in 2009.
The AFL had indicated privately to various parties that it was keen to see Cousins drafted and playing in 2009 - league boss Andrew Demetriou having been lobbied heavily by the AFL Players' Association, among others, on Cousins's behalf.
Nixon had planted the idea Cousins could end up at Richmond when, shortly after the national draft, he proposed to the Tigers that Cousins be made a mature-age rookie and train with Coburg, their VFL affiliate.
It is understood that the AFL made sympathetic noises about Cousins then and were receptive to the Nixon proposal. More significantly, however, Richmond began to see that, a, the talent pool was running dry and, b, that they could pick Cousins.
March says Kevin Sheedy's role in bringing Cousins to Tigerland has been exaggerated, but that the influence of another Cousins supporter, Brownlow medallist and media commentator Gerard Healy, has been understated. Healy acts as a mentor to Cousins and was one of the five people Nixon had engaged to protect and advise the player in the event that he was drafted by the Saints.
Healy's major role was not simply to lobby Richmond and the league, but to turn the tide of public opinion through his media outlets, especially 3AW's Sports Tonight, which became the centre of a shameless "Give Ben a Fair Go" campaign.
Sheedy's contribution was to challenge Cousins, in effect telling him to get off his backside and phone the clubs that had "live" picks in the December draft.
On Monday night, after the AFL stymied the club's plans to pick Cousins via the Polak avenue, Richmond finally decided that the consequences of not picking Cousins were potentially worse than the risks of selecting him.
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