I’m not sure about the science, but it seems that after a build-up of pressure there will always be a letdown or an eruption. It was fitting that the one time the pressure on the Tigers in the last 37 years resulted in the latter and not the former it was built on a platform of pressure. And what an eruption.
As the siren sounded young Richo tackled me around the waist with the ferocity of Jacob Townsend. “We did it, Daddy! We did it.” I felt guilty for agreeing, but did nonetheless. It was us, and all the other usses around the city, and the various cities, that had made Richmond something else altogether.
Ramshackle amateurs, the scorn of sneering foes countrywide for decades, the next glorious minute the most potent and overbearing power in the land. It was the reckoning that our side had so long fought to witness, and the other had happily thought could never scourge the competition again. We had been too hopeless to turn it around. Even when we’d gotten better we’d found a way to stuff it up, to increase the pressure with yet more comical exits.
I had been pretty big on the #sackhardwick bandwagon on Twitter. Even now I think he deserved to be sacked at the end of 2016. He’d completely misread the competition and his list of players, again. Playing slow, possession football with a team of scrubbers in a year where manic pressure had triumphed was madness. When he repeatedly stated under questioning that “We’re not a tackling side”, my brother and I would say to each other with confused horror, “Why not?”
The players, however, did look like they were genuinely committed to trying to do whatever it was they were asking him to do. It just wasn’t working, and the more they played and failed the more confused and defeated they looked. But they did continue to try to implement his instructions. From that perspective, you can conclude that he never lost them. If he didn’t have two years to run on his contract he may have had them taken off him.
He went away, realised that his all controlling style and focus on negatives and not positives had squashed his players. Pegs and holes; he’d tried to make his players play like Hawthorn players when they were Richmond players. It turns out that Richmond players can play pretty well too. With Cotchin the renewed captain, and Rance and Riewoldt his deputies, the Tigers were reinvigorated. They erupted onto the season with five straight wins, the fifth being against Melbourne in front of 85,657 fans that saw a come from behind victory built on belief and speed and attack. It also saw me, through the efforts of some wonderful Richmond people, in the rooms after the game with my two boys.
I was present for the first two finals, and I was content with the season after the Qualifying Final win over Geelong. I was so proud of the team, especially Cotchin for the way they played. They were ferocious, and attacked the ball and man with a fury rarely seen. Everyone said that Geelong played poorly, and I fell for that trick, probably in part because it was hard to believe that we were actually finally good.
Still no-one was talking about us, and as I said I would’ve been happy enough for us to lose, even though we were in a great position to win. The atmosphere at the Preliminary Final against the Giants was like nothing I’ve experienced before or will again. The set of circumstances that led to a game with about 90,000 fans of one side and about 3,000 for another will surely never be duplicated. My heart swelled whenever I looked around at the heaving masses in yellow and black and then looked down at Richo as he did his little Richard Fromberg style fist pump and marked down a goal or behind in his record.
Once again the Tigers had played a team that had played poorly. For once the Tigers’ luck had turned they said, and poor performing teams had allowed Richmond to progress. For me, however, I was open to the possibility that it was the Tigers that had forced their opposition to play poorly on the back of their harassing and chasing and tackling, unrelenting as it was. Adelaide was a different story though. They’d been so dominant through the season and had lifted their game in the finals.
Wrong. The pressure built alright, but on Adelaide. Yes, Jack’s marking was supreme and he was everything that Taylor Walker wasn’t, and Adelaide forwards panicked whenever Rance was in the area because he’s just so good, and Cotchin was hard inside and Dusty was everywhere. Those guys did their things, but the team played as a great team does. It did it’s thing while stopping the other team from doing their thing and by partway through third quarter, in all honesty, the game was cooked.
The song was blaring, pandemonium was on the screen and there was madness in the house. Nothing in the grand scheme had really changed, but really everything had. While Richo on the TV uncontrollably wept, and Richo in my loungeroom bounced from person to person tackling with fierce glee, and Swan Street broke out in lawlessness like a scene from a Mad Max movie, the eruption had changed everything. A dystopian future had trodden on the present for some, utopia for others.
As Jack Riewoldt’s kick sailed through the big sticks early in the last quarter I leapt from my chair, arms up in the air like I’d done it myself. With other goals I’d yelled out at the top of my lungs, a tinge of desperation and disbelief present. With this goal I knew the result was sealed and I stood in silence, eyes closed as calm joy flooded through my body. It was a serene moment I can’t fully describe, but I felt it start in my head and wash down through my torso and limbs.
I have no expectation that this year’s result will be replicated next year. Honestly, right now I don’t really care. I’m just happy and proud. Proud is a funny one here, because I didn’t really do anything. Happy is funny too, because sport is essentially meaningless, but it provides so much happiness to those that follow. Regardless I am so happy and proud.
I’m proud of the players who did something remarkable, and did it by being so disciplined and determined and for some, talented. I’m proud of the club’s administrators, notably Brendan Gale for setting up a winning structure and sticking fat when those like me were beyond restless. I’m even proud of Damien Hardwick for doing something that is exceptionally rare, and having a good hard look at himself, working out what needed to change, and doing it.
Mostly I’m proud of and happy for all the usses out there. All the fans that kept going each week and copped all the crap along the journey. We all kept marching on despite the many setbacks. Despite following the worst performed team, we were the best, loudest, most doggedly loyal in our own way bunch of fans imaginable. When things were at their most bleak, it was being a part of that enormous, unmistakable fan-base that kept me up, kept me coming back
You could argue that the build-up of pressure was our doing. I’d cop that, we can get a little silly. There is, however, no denying that the eruption was us. Go Tiges.
Follow Greg Gibson on Twitter: @GregGibbo28