Dylan Grimes admits continued off-field incidents left Richmond players 'at rock bottom' during seasonBy Chris De Silva
Nine
26 October 2020Richmond defender Dylan Grimes admitted that he and his teammates were at "rock bottom" after the late-night incident which resulted in two players being sent home.
After completing a remarkable season to secure the club's third premiership in four seasons, Grimes fought back tears when discussing the hurdles the Tigers had to overcome in 2020.
Incredibly, the 29-year-old also revealed that he came close to exiting the Tigers' Queensland hub due to troubles with his business before the bond he shared with his teammates convinced him to stay the course.
"I haven't told anyone this, but I packed that light coming up here because Alicia, my wife, was in Melbourne," he told Nine's AFL Sunday Footy Show.
"(Richmond players) were coping a lot of heat for thinking about not coming to the hub and there was a lot of talk and I didn't want to add to that, so I thought I'll come up for two weeks and then I'll go back.
"The business, the farm, there was so much going on for us personally, and we had staff we were trying to pay during this time and it was really tough."
The Tigers' culture was questioned after a number of controversial off-field incidents, from skipper Trent Cotchin's wife's day spa breach, to the groping of youngster Mabior Chol, as well as Sydney Stack and Callum Coleman-Jones' late-night COVID-19 breach.
Grimes admitted that the constant off-field turmoil had caused the Tigers to question their own vaunted culture, revealing that the Stack and Coleman-Jones affair threatened to derail the season.
"In the days after the incident where the guys left the hub a lot of us were at rock bottom," he said.
"We felt like as a playing group and as a club, we'd been challenged and we had a huge game, we actually played Geelong that week.
"It was a moment for us where we had to galvanise and we've grown from being rock bottom to just growing and growing and we built something that was just remarkable.
"As a club, you're built on so many little actions throughout the year. You're trying to put the right things in place and we had mistakes happen up here. That really cut you because we are a proud club.
"We felt like we built a really strong culture, but I can see from the outside why it didn't look like that.
"When it starts to look like that from the outside, you think, 'Do we have it right? Are we doing the right thing as leaders?'.
"We had faith that maybe these were just a couple of isolated incidents and maybe we are as strong as we think we are.
"Every challenge we had, we kept coming closer and closer and we feel like we've grown through everything."
https://wwos.nine.com.au/afl/dylan-grimes-emotional-reaction-to-richmond-premiership-triumph/e4d03486-1d4e-4688-835d-805d5d2d2833
