“Let’s be honest,” Brendan Gale told author and journalist Konrad Marshall. “He inherited a piece of shit.” Even by Richmond standards, 2009 was a rough year. Terry Wallace’s final weeks as coach were particularly unedifying. The Herald Sun ran with the headline “Death Row”. He departed mid-season and retreated to his bolt hole, barricading himself in his home theatre.
His replacement was a Kevin Sheedy man. Damien Hardwick had the Sheedy cunning, the Sheedy mongrel. He’d narrowly missed out on four senior coaching roles. He was pipped for the Essendon job after his computer short circuited during the interview.
It was always going to take time. He was always playing the long game. In his first year, smart arse bookmakers paid out on them finishing last halfway through the season. He lost three elimination finals in a row – the kind of games that would have broken a lot of a coaches, and a lot of clubs. They fell in a hole in 2016. By the end of that year, he’d won 74 of 157 matches. Resembling undertakers, rebel board candidates were determined to raze the place and start again.
But the club held its nerve. They backed him in. A different Hardwick emerged. The cranky coach of 2016 was suddenly replete with homilies and dad jokes. His team played like kids – for fun and without fear. It helped that Dustin Martin had one of the greatest years a footballer has ever had. Indeed, in every sentence written about the Hardwick era, it should be mandatory to tack on at the end “… and he had Dusty”.
I’ll always remember the game where they finally convinced me. It was a putrid July day. I’d been dragged to the MCG by a Richmond supporting friend. I was hypothermic and sceptical. He was long suffering, but buoyant. “Trust me mate, we’re ready to pop,” he said. He’d been saying that since Richard Lounder. Richmond had taken him to places no footy supporter should go. He was at intervention stage for a while there.
Their opponent was GWS, a crack side that year. “The orange tsunami,” they were called. But the tsunami was the home side. They surged and swarmed. It was wave upon wave of power-endurance runners. It broke the Giants that day. And it changed football. We’d had the brutal simplicity of Leigh Matthews’ Brisbane, the free-flowing purity of Mark Thompson’s Geelong, and the Swiss precision of Alistair Clarkson’s Hawthorn. This was completely different. “Every game was an arm-wrestle that they always held a slight but undeniable advantage in,” Jay Croucher wrote for The Roar. “Their beauty was in the grind – the knowledge that wherever the ball was, whatever the state of play, they were always just a little bit harder than the opposition, and a little bit smarter.” It netted three of the next four premierships. They could have won all four if a Texan who slept diagonally on his bed wasn’t waiting with a baseball bat on preliminary final night in 2018.
Any columnist who references Hemingway’s quote about bankruptcy (“gradually, then suddenly”) is usually two or three pieces away from complaining about the service at the bakery. But if Monday night’s news felt sudden, there were plenty of hints over the past few years. After the third flag, Hardwick’s marriage ended. Caroline Wilson was gunning for him. He was at Jonathan Brown’s throat. The team played at a frightening intensity that was simply impossible to sustain. They had a dire record at Docklands – a ground he and his supporters hated. They kept being overrun. They kept losing close games. “Richmond is killing Richmond,” he said a number of times.
For 15 minutes against West Coast and for four quarters against Geelong in recent weeks, there were signs of life and hope. But that was dashed on Saturday night. He knew they weren’t playing finals. He was burnt out. One of his best friends had stepped down from the North Melbourne job a few days earlier. On Monday night, in a sign of the times, most of the focus was on whether Tom Morris had the right to break the story. Fox Footy paid a stunned tribute, and then quickly moved on to speculation over the coaching future of Adam Simpson. That’s footy. The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on.
But the Hardwick era will endure. His impact can be seen at other clubs – the entire psychology and method of Collingwood right now screams Richmond in 2017. He changed how football is played. He took Richmond from a laughing stock to a colossus. He found the perfect balance of risk and reward, of the analytical and the animal. His teams would grind the opposition to dust, and then pick up their rubbish afterwards. “It’s been an incredible ride,” he said on Tuesday. “I’ve pushed every button I can.” There would be no farewell game. He was choking up. He was completely cooked. He wanted to leave the club, and the game, on good terms. He departed as a Richmond great – its longest serving coach – and as significant a figure as Hafey, as Hart, or as Bartlett.
