Everyone loves Richo
Martin Flanagan | May 30, 2007 | The Age
THERE'S only one Matthew Richardson. In British soccer, they'd sing about him. Here, we give him his own name — Richo.
This week, an Essendon fan wrote to me and said that Richo, in a strange way, "gives as much joy to opposition fans as he does to his own". The reason opposition fans like Richo is because anyone can look at him and see what's going on inside. Everyone knows him.
He's always been eye-catching, although not always for the right reason. One of my indelible images of Richo is from the first match of the 2003 season, Richmond versus Collingwood. The Pies had played in the previous year's grand final, the Tigers were pumped with the belief that the start of a new season is like the start of a new life. Anything can happen.
It did. Nathan Buckley cut the Tigers apart, ferociously, methodically. In the third quarter, Richo produced one of the great tortured efforts that characterised his early years, where he nearly marked, chased, pounced, fought, won the ball and — was penalised. My final image was Richo, face furious, getting an arm free from beneath the pile of bodies and making a single-finger salute in the direction of the umpire.
That was Richo — talented and flawed. I made him the hero of my book The Game In Time of War because to watch Richo play — to watch him closely — was to see someone who was gifted by the gods but awfully human. There was a problem with temperament, there was a problem with kicking, but after every setback, each of which was as spectacular as his triumphs, he was back as heart-felt and passionate as before.
Some players who began their careers at the same time as Richo, such as Adelaide's Mark Ricciuto and Bulldog Scott West, have now played more than 300 games. Richo's played 242. The difference is injuries.
Four years ago, I met him at a match-day club function. He'd missed the game through a fractured eye socket; half his face was blown up like a purple football. He told me he'd wanted to play. I thought he was joking. He wasn't. That's when I realised Richo was a serious footballer.
Before then, I have to admit, I viewed him as a figure of fun, flawed kicking, blowing his top — the talented player who was forever young. But when I met him, his manner was of a much older man — genial and gentle. Three weeks ago, when I did one of these columns on Ted Soderblom, the Tigers' former chief property steward, he told me some players take the work of trainers and property stewards for granted, but not Richo. "He always appreciates what you do for him," said the old steward.
Recently, people also have started taking Richo more seriously as a footballer. After all, he's kicked more than 700 goals and his much-derided conversion rate when kicking for goal is only marginally below that of Sydney's Barry Hall, the gun centre half-forward in the competition.
Richo's life has been Richmond. His first football memory is watching the 1980 grand final, in which Richmond flogged Collingwood, with his father when he was five. He has bitter memories of the Tigers' loss two years later to Carlton. "I was shattered. I walked round the house for days in my Richmond scarf."
His father Alan, known as "Bull", played in Richmond's '67 premiership. Richo points out that his father was ahead of his time since he rarely, if ever, kicked the ball. He was a poor kick and, in the words of his son, "Len Smith (the Richmond coach) told him to handball each time he got it". (If people tell Ron Barassi that he invented the modern use of handball in the course of the 1970 grand final, he says, "No, Len Smith did".) As a kid, Richo spent hours reading his father's scrapbooks.
Richo came to Richmond under the father-son rule 15 seasons ago. He was 17 and says he immediately felt at home. There were still people around the club, such as property steward Dusty O'Brien, who'd been there when Bull played. His first coach, John Northey, was one of his father's teammates. The first time they met, Northey told Richo to expect 100 x 100-metre runs at his first pre-season training. He went home and started running. So you were always serious about your footy? I ask. "Oh, yeah," he says. "Always ambitious. If we lost in junior footy, I could be filthy for days."
He says he's learned to curb his emotions. He says there's always the temptation, when you feel your emotions rise, "to let them go and see where they take you". He reckons he's played some of his best footy when he's played on emotion. And some of his worst. In the end, he says, in the interest of playing more consistent footy, he had to even them out.
I reckon last Saturday's Dreamtime match between Richmond and Essendon ultimately became a match between James Hird and Richo. The modern game is so complex, you often struggle to understand who is doing what and why. But I still maintain the great players make it simple. Hird did, radically so, and Essendon rallied around his example. But Richo did, too. In cricket terms, Richo played a faultless innings but was still given out to an iffy call by the umpire.
He held the Tigers together, he kicked five goals if you include what appeared to be the winner. Then the ball was taken off him and whipped down the other end. The young Tigers lost their composure. Their first win of the season — and in a big game — slipped through their fingers and, while others such as Graham Polak and Brett Deledio played well, if anyone summed up the occasion for Richmond in symbolic terms, it was, as it has been so often, Richo.
He had played with a fractured bone in his face. He had a headache afterwards but says "it's not an issue". He often has a headache after a game.
About the decision disallowing the mark from which he scored his last goal, he says: "I'm not criticising the umpire. I just think the rule's gone too far."
Richo would have liked to captain Richmond, "but somehow the timing was never right".
He is contracted until the end of next year and, if his body permits, would like to continue after that. Richo, the perennial youth, is now one of the elders of the game such as the Kangaroos' Glenn Archer and the Demons' David Neitz.
http://realfooty.com.au/news/news/everyone-loves-richo/2007/05/29/1180205249768.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
