“As a football club, I reckon we fail well,” Richmond CEO Brendan Gale said in the lead up to Saturday’s clash with West Coast.
He’d just been pipped for football’s top job by the company man. His team couldn’t take a trick. His coach was cranky. Half his list was sidelined. Against Gold Coast, at a ground they hate, against a team that always brings out the worst in them, they looked tired, confused and frustrated. They gave away 50 metre penalties, flubbed kicks across goal, and sprayed easy sets shots. They’d addressed their deficiencies, but completely regressed in the areas where they once excelled.
Any sports journalist who rolls out the “so-and-so’s dynasty is over” piece is usually two or three columns away from complaining about ageism at the bakery. But when West Coast hit the front with six minutes to go in the third term, it was tempting to call time on the Tigers. They‘d been slaughtered at stoppages. They couldn’t land a handball. They were completely unrecognisable from the team that steamrolled the competition for three of four years.
At their best, what Richmond did was pretty simple. It required total buy-in, a healthy list, and Dustin Martin. There’s your dynasty. Richmond’s signature, especially in finals, was grinding teams to dust. They had hard running, underrated, understated footballers who were crucial to their system but who are now retired - Kane Lambert, Jason Castagna and Shane Edwards. When Dusty is inducted into the Hall of Fame, he should remember those players in his speech.
It’s so different now. The game has changed, and Richmond is trying to change with it. Right now, they’re sort of living quarter to quarter. Most weeks, they have these 20-minute periods where everything clicks. They did it against the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne and came away empty handed. Against a patched-up but willing West Coast, they finally got their rewards.
It started with Samson Ryan - the sort of player who’s better suited in the ruck, a position where paralysis by analysis is rarely an impediment. Granted, there was no Nic Naitanui on Saturday. But Ryan competed hard and played a key role in every one of Richmond’s game changing goals. For about ten minutes, they were bowling the ball forward, running in waves, and waltzing out the front of stoppages. All the premiership stars were in the thick of it - Martin, Bolton, Prestia.
The latter is one of those footballers who hasn’t received the wider recognition he deserves. Hardwick speaks about him in the same breath as Martin. But Prestia has had rotten luck in recent years. Last year, whenever the situation most urgently called for his presence, he was invariably off the ground – whether it was a dicky hamstring or a rearranged face. And he just hasn’t looked right this year. Prestia was going through the motions in the first half on Saturday. And then, like all his premiership mates, he was in that Richmond flow: oh right, that’s what we’re still capable of.
Everything is amplified at Richmond. Every minor transgression is a scandal. Every opponent is a bitter rival. Every loss is the end of an era. For years they’ve been a balls-out club, and it’s taken a toll. There’s been no time to breathe, to tinker. They haven’t been able to fly under the radar, to bank boring but crucial wins.
Right now, they’re clearly trying to change the way they play. The two GWS franchisees are central to that, and both have held up their end of the bargain. But there’s been too many injuries. The kids are too raw. The future Hall of Famers have to be managed, and expectations have to be tempered.
When Gale speaks of failing well, he’s talking about the way they don’t panic, the way they learn from losses, the way they hold their nerve. In the past, that meant trusting the Richmond system. It meant not jumping at shadows if they dropped a few in a row. But football has changed so much since Richmond’s third flag. Can they change, the way Geelong changed, the way Collingwood is changing?
It must stick in Richmond’s craw that those two clubs are now the blueprint. Collingwood is having Homeric epics in front of 95,000 people while the Tigers are eking out wins against a depleted West Coast. Are wins like Saturday’s where they’re at – a 15-minute swarm, a sugar hit, a reminder of better times? Or are they building the momentum that’s been absent since that first lockdown premiership? For half a quarter on Saturday, they looked like the Richmond of old. The question they face, from the CEO right down to the starting sub, is whether the old way is the way forward.
