Tiger defender is flying Emma Quayle
The Age
August 24, 2013 Go, go, go. There were three things Alex Rance used to think when the football landed in his hands. He wanted to move, to run, to do something, to do anything and it meant that in some ways, he didn't want to think at all. It was his nature and still is, one of the reasons he started a carpentry apprenticeship but now goes to flying school.
“It's a little bit more exhilarating,” he said of his first, 40-minute solo flight last week. “It's like getting your driver's licence again, it's like that first drive when you're all out by yourself and you start thinking: yes, independence!”
When he became a Richmond player, Rance wasn't entirely sure what sort of Richmond player he could or would be. He waited a long time to get his first chance, more than a year. He tried the half-back line, the wing, then was part of the forward line. Wherever he went, he was in a rush and he remains a courageous, urgent, lunging desperado who despises being beaten: after wanting Troy Chaplin to join his club at the end of last year, badly, Rance looked at him when he arrived and realised there was no way he wanted his authority in the back line to be challenged too much by this newcomer.
“I knew he'd be really good support, but then he got here and I was, not standoff-ish, but I was thinking: 'OK, it's good that you're here, but I'm not going to let you take my spot.' It was a strange thought I had in my head,” he said.
“I get really competitive, even around here, but I think that's healthy. As soon as we started training, I knew how cohesive we could be, and it was the same when Dylan Grimes started playing really well for us. If I feel like guys are playing better than me it makes me want to work harder, to stay No. 1, to push back past them. It's good that we have that sort of atmosphere here.”
Rance has asked more of himself internally, too, in the past few years. He's also become more confident. He never used to want the ball in his hands because when he took off and ran, there was no telling where he might end up, or what trouble he might find himself in when he got there. Even now his coach Damien Hardwick points out his 'Alex Rance Moments',” he said, smiling.
It helps that he has grown up with his team, and Rance feels like he has become a more predictable player because he is surrounded by teammates who are understanding each other better by the week. He knows what the players around him will do in any given moment, and understands exactly what they expect of him.
But he has also tried to rework some habits. “It's been a constant battle for me, to stop for a second and take a breath, not just take off and run,” Rance said.
“It's definitely come with all of us knowing the game plan and having confidence in it. If I take a mark, I know everyone is going to run this way, and that they're going to expect me to do this or do that. It makes it so much easier when everyone around you knows their role, when you know what you have to do in every situation and have blokes around you telling you to chill out.
“That's been good, and it's something I work on out on the training track all the time, putting myself in game situations and then visualising it: 'OK, I've taken an intercept mark, am I going to run? Or am I going to look first?' Some of it's really simple, it's taking a mark and taking a second to just turn your head to the side before you run, to slow yourself up. Or knowing how to position your feet in a marking contest to help you keep your feet, technical things like that.
“It's really hard to do in the heat of the moment, especially if it doesn't come naturally to you, but if you keep going over it, over it, over it, then it's going to come to you in time, it becomes like any other skill you need to work on if you're going to last.
“There's a lot of little things I'm working on and that I just keep reminding myself to do. I think what happens is you start to understand the player that you are, and stop wasting time trying to do things you can't really do. You feel a bit more comfortable about who you are, and what you're good at.”
Working out what those things are – or were – has taken time too. Rance has done it with the help of one of Richmond's assistant coaches, Justin Leppitsch, who thought he would be a good key defender long before Rance realised how much the idea appealed to him. Leppitsch has taught him “the technicalities” of playing in defence, and helped rewire his instincts.
“There's so much going on down in defence,” said Rance, “that you don't want to waste your decision-making on things to do with defending. You want that to come to you straight away so that you don't have to think about what you're doing, it just happens. You want to save your thinking, your decisions, for when you can be more creative, do something a bit more offensive.”
Rance has also become a calmer, more assured and steadier senior player at a time when he was under extraordinary pressure away from his day job. The 23-year-old was in court earlier this year when a man was convicted of stalking him and harassing his sister, and jailed for one year. He was pleased, most of all, that the episode was over, two years after the man contacted him promising a made-up part in an invented reality TV show, then hacked his email, posted messages to the club and his friends, sent people to his home and began contacting him incessantly, among other things.
The situation being over meant his family was safe; Rance had always worried more about them than himself.
Now he tells his teammates that if something seems too good to be true, it most often is. “There was some naivety on my part. I'd never been exposed to that sort of thing before, I'd never mistrusted anyone before and that's what I say to a lot of the younger blokes here. By all means trust people, don't be caged off and shut yourself away from the world because there are a lot of great people out there, but make sure you have the right support network around you and that you're a little bit wary of people's motives if it doesn't feel right,” he said.
“I was worried mostly about my family. It was probably more stressful for them than it was for me because I had a release, I had football and I could put my time into that and not think about it.
“For me the scariest part was probably not knowing what someone else was capable of. I didn't know whether he was going to seriously threaten my family or what he was thinking of doing and that's what got my back up, and when that happened I couldn't see how there would be any finality or how it was going to stop without something being done by the police.
“He wanted more and more time, it was all consuming and it was when I put my foot down about it when it started to get more full-on.
“Obviously he has issues which he has to deal with and a part of me is quite compassionate towards that because I think he needs to sort that out. But then, another part of me thinks: why? Why did this happen to me? But I had good support with it, the club and my family were both great. It was a part of my life I'll remember for a lot of not-very-good reasons, but I'm past it. I never let it get me down.”
Now he has new things to worry about. Or look forward to. Rance has barely had time to think about what it will be like to play in September for the first time in six years as a Richmond player; the coaches, he said, had been good at reminding the players of what they needed to get done before then.
He has never watched a lot of finals football, but he was out on the MCG four years ago, called up into the half-time sprint after Nic Naitanui strained a hamstring, and it was hard not to hear all the noise, notice all the people and think about how much he would like to be playing on that day. He was 19 then, and the thought hasn't left him.
“It was enough to be sitting in the crowd, but to be out there on the ground, to soak it up and see all the people, it was unreal. It makes you want it so much more,” he said. “I was getting goosebumps just from being on the ground, from thinking about it. I'd love to know what it feels like.”
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/tiger-defender-is-flying-20130823-2shhi.html
