Great expectations settle on Richmond
Jake Niall | March 26, 2009
GEELONG is seeking to atone for a botched grand final. Melbourne and North Melbourne are scrapping for survival. Carlton has to play finals to complete its recovery.
Yet no club appears to have entered the 2009 season under more scrutiny and pressure than Richmond's 44 players, staff and board.
In some ways, the pressure on the Tigers is absurd. Despite Kevin Sheedy's optimism, they're not considered a premiership contender, and they're unlikely to be in the ladder's lower reaches, either; they're a classic mid-table team, with a mix of veterans and talented kids, with relatively little in the middle.
But in football physics, the pressure on a club is in proportion to expectations. Richmond's are loftier than they have been for several seasons. "We've got high expectations as a club," said president Gary March, who hasn't ducked the question of what would be considered an acceptable season. "We expect to finish higher than we did in 2008."
Finals is the benchmark by which the club and its energised supporters will judge the season, and the senior coach. But Terry Wallace is far from the only person whose future rides on the wobbly Richmond wagon.
Ben Cousins, obviously, has plenty riding on what he does in 2009; he is fighting, not simply to re-establish a career, but — and this is really the main objective — for his fragile health. In addition to a sold-out MCG tonight and several thousand members, he's given Richmond the important sense that it is larger than life again.
Then there are all those veterans who are hanging on in the hope that they'll see a yellow-and-black September. The game's premier performance artist, Matthew Richardson, has never had the good fortune to be surrounded by a worthy supporting troupe, having seen just one finals series since 1993. Joel Bowden — recruited after the top-four finish of '95 — also has played finals only once.
Bowden, Richardson, Nathan Brown, Kane Johnson and Cousins are all past 30, contracted only for 2009 and must perform to be assured of continuing in 2010; in any case, this might be their last chance for finals. One of the strange quirks of Richmond's 2009 unit is that, inflated by the presence of those veterans, the Tigers own the second-oldest list in the competition behind Sydney.
The pre-season form of the veterans suggests that most of them should be productive, Brown having the greatest up-side on what he did last year. Johnson, whose role might be usurped by Cousins, would appear to be the least secure. The redoubtable Richo, clearly the oldest at 34, is also the least pressured.
If most of the veterans survive the cull for another 12 months, the Tigers still have a surprisingly high number of youngish players approaching their career high noons.
Jarrad Oakley-Nicholls has managed nine games in his four seasons at Tigerland — numbers that spell crunch-time. Jay Schulz, almost traded to Port Adelaide in 2007, is 24 next month and won't be there next year without significant improvement. Kayne Pettifer has managed eight seasons without ever establishing himself; a late-season knee reconstruction means he has even less margin for mishap.
Dean Polo would want to be a regular and even Andrew Raines, another knee victim last year, faces a career-defining season. Tom Hislop, discarded by Essendon for disciplinary breaches rather than football failings, has a two-year contract, but players in his position can have their cards marked early.
March's board has been pretty stable over the past few years, the notoriously trigger-happy Tiger army laying down their weapons to allow the club the luxury it has seldom been afforded since 1982 — time.
March doesn't view this as a crunch year, although he readily admits that the expectations have risen. "I feel as much pressure as probably the players do," he said. The president is confident that the Tigers will improve "at all levels".
Improvement is the external and internal demand. It doesn't sound like much — moving from ninth to seventh or eighth — yet Richmond has been unequal to that task three times since 1996. So much rests on whether it can make that modest gain.
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