Toothless Tigers no longer: Wallace
http://www.foxsports.com.au/story/0,8659,23393448-23211,00.html By Chip Le Grand
March 18, 2008
RICHMOND for years have been the butt of jokes. Some of their own making, some the gags of rivals. This year, the Tigers are widely tipped to finish stone-cold motherless last. Again.
Yet within this most primal of football clubs, something has stirred.
Before a lavish dinner in Melbourne, coach Terry Wallace likened his players to scrawny kids in a sandpit. He urged them to stop being bullied. To stand up. As a call to arms, it was hardly original. Yet it was met with a Tiger's roar.
"There are a lot of people doubting us," Wallace said. "There is a lot of crap being thrown on this football club.
"I have had a gutful of it myself and I just hope the players understand that if you get bullied around in the school yard and you keep taking it from people, they will keep dishing it out to you. It is about time we stand up."
If Richmond players required an even blunter assessment, they had only to talk to Royce Hart, who was made an immortal of the club. When asked if he watched many Tigers games, the revered premiership captain remarked: "Not as much as I used to because we are not winning many. I don't like watching losing sides."
This is the week when 1000 deaths await the loser.
To play on a Friday night in the regular season is to subject yourself to intense scrutiny on national television. To play on Easter Thursday, in the opening night of the AFL season, is to be stripped bare. Whoever loses will know they will be feasted upon for the next two days, with no promise of an ascent when Sunday comes.
Wallace knows he, too, has nowhere to hide this season. He has coached Richmond for three years without success.
Last year his club won three matches, drew one and finished 16th. Richmond coaches have been sacked for far less - or more, as it were. It is no bold prediction to say he will not survive another wretched year.
This year, though, Wallace is feeling better about his lot. He likes how his leadership group has taken a firm grip of culture and club.
On the same night that Channel Seven showed security footage of Carlton forward Brendon Fevola urinating outside a nightclub at 4am - another transgression Carlton have been left to deal with - Wallace revealed that his team's leaders had six weeks ago placed a ban on all players attending nightclubs and pubs. More to the point, they had kept to it.
Fevola's fate will be decided by newly appointed captain Chris Judd and his leadership group. At stake is whether the club's leading goal kicker spends this week in the goal square of the MCG or somewhere in the stands.
It is an invidious position for Fevola's teammates to be in given they would like nothing more than to see him leading out against Carlton. It is also a test for new coach Brett Ratten, who decided to keep Fevola at a time when some within the club were keen to give him the boot.
Mercifully, this is of no concern to Wallace, who has a full list to pick his side from and a playing depth he has not experienced in his time at Punt Road. Wallace warned that when the side was announced, there would be up to eight players bitterly disappointed and some supporters left without a favourite player to cheer for.
He also place the onus on the Deledio generation - the group of talented 20-, 21- and 22-year-olds taken in and around the same drafts as Brett Deledio - to make their presence felt.
"They are not kids any more, they are young men," Wallace said.
"They are not 18, 19 years of age any more. There are 21- and 22-year-olds in world sport who have been world champions. We have got to have an expectation that our blokes who are 21, 22 and 23 years of age are going to start having an impact on this competition.
"We now have some depth in our list. There are going to be some guys who are incredibly disappointed. There are going to be some supporters who have favourite players who won't get a game this Thursday night. When we wear the yellow and black, we wear it for keeps.
"The 22 guys who get the opportunity on Thursday night ought to be honoured because I reckon there are half a dozen to eight blokes here today who would love to be out there taking your place and probably reckon they deserve to take your spot."
It is no dramatic departure from what coaches have been telling Richmond players in the 100-year history of the club. The difference this year is Wallace will be held to his word.
