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THE WHY OF THE TIGER BY EJ CARTLEDGE AND ROBERT DRANE

THINGS JUST SEEM TO GO FROM BAD TO WORSE FOR THE RICHMOND FOOTBALL CLUB. IT’S NOT A NEW PHENOMENON: IT’S BEEN THIS WAY FOR YEARS

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coach Terry Wallace subsequently presented their case to Hunt, the revelation that Hunt was not eligible to stand seemed to come as a shock. They couldn’t have chosen a worse target. Hunt was loudly acrimonious.

This farcical escapade pointed to one finality: the board would be thrown out come the November election. After all, it came on the tail of yet another annus horribilis for the club and anyone associated with it.

It didn’t happen. The popular Miller, generally thought to be wavering, joined the Casey ticket. Billy Barrot – who only a week before had advocated boardroom change as the solution to the Tigers’ woes – voted 5-4 for the current board. Suddenly, Casey was home and hosed. It was a shock to many, considering the supposed discontent with the president and his methods, which seemed to be growing by the minute.

The year had begun with Casey making a typically big statement at the January AGM: “We’re on the move and I hope you agree with

The fact that nice guy Frawley was the victim means Wallace has some serious deposits to make in Tigers fans’ emotional bank account – something that is well-and-truly in the red after 25 years of dismal failure.

How dismal? Here are some numbers: • Between 1964 and 1984, the Tigers won

62 per cent of home-and-away matches. Since 1984, they have won 39 per cent.

• The five heaviest losses in the club’s 96-year history have come since 1989.

• Fifteen of the 16 highest scores ever kicked against them date from 1984.

• The famous “Save Our Skins” campaign in 1991 cut a crippling $1.5m debt – but debt is currently over $2m.

• Richmond conceded 100 points in each of the last ten games of 2004.

• It scored over 100 points just once last season and only four times in the previous 40 games.

• Richmond’s last Brownlow Medallist was 34 years ago – Ian Stewart in 1971.

• Since 1981 (the year current Bombers coach Kevin Sheedy joined Essendon), the club has averaged a coach every two seasons, and a captain every two-and-a-bit (despite longish reigns by Dale Weightman, Matthew Knights and Wayne Campbell). In that time, it has had seven presidents.

• In the 22 seasons since 1982, the Tigers have finished in the bottom three 13 times, and have collected three wooden spoons.

• Since its last premiership in 1980, the club has been in only three other finals campaigns.

When Clinton Casey was reappointed president of the Richmond Football Club in late 2004, it seemed a

masterpiece of Machiavellian politicking. A rival faction, led by former board member Charles Macek, had been agitating for change and a spill of the board. The two sides circled each other for months. Each had recruited big names, fired broadsides, orchestrated leaks. Club legends such as Francis Bourke, Jim Jess, Nick Daffy, Dick Clay and Bill Barrot threw their symbolic weight behind the challengers. Each side launched a website, mailed members and used media leverage.

During the four years of Casey’s tenure, the best thing he’d done, according to his opponents, was appoint the astute and affable Greg Miller as director of football. At least Miller’s management credentials were on the table. Casey was more a self-made man whose high-powered connections got him what he wanted. His job history, which included selling time shares in the 1980s and working in PR in the rock industry, seemed to indicate he wasn’t the sort of “football man” the club needed. His competence as a manager was less obvious.

These criticisms seemed a little unfair, as presidents these days are often wealthy, well-connected figureheads with a passion for the club they lead, à la Eddie McGuire and David Smorgon. But even the respectable Miller became a victim in the escalating boardroom farce when he secretly flew to Arnhem Land to convince former Tiger Rex Hunt to turn his back on piscatorial pursuits momentarily and run for election as part of Casey’s ticket. Remarkably, Miller had previously been informed that Hunt was not a member of the club, and could not run.

But decisions have often been made at Richmond that resulted from enormous political pressure rather than common sense. The politics of denial seemed to have taken hold. When Miller, Casey and newly appointed

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THE FACT THAT NICE GUY FRAWLEY WAS THE VICTIM MEANS WALLACE HAS SOME SERIOUS DEPOSITS TO MAKE IN TIGERS FANS’ EMOTIONAL BANK ACCOUNT me that we’re heading in the right direction.” Three months later, three board members had resigned, two of whom cited concern over financial matters. A $2.2m loss was announced. The team’s fortunes nose-dived. Their vilified, spat-upon coach Danny Frawley resigned in August, but agreed to see out the last few weeks of the season. It was an awkward time for him and the incoming Wallace. They politely avoided each other, but Wallace, the man they call “Plough”, generally a candid and open communicator whose “man management” has been one of his many strengths as a coach, unwittingly acquired a skulking image.

He himself had been twiddling his thumbs in the media for three years. Rumour had it that Wallace’s inexplicable departure from the Western Bulldogs in 2001 was the result of a clandestine agreement with the Sydney Swans board to coach the Swans in 2002. But popular sentiment suddenly favoured the Swans’ caretaker coach, Paul Roos. The board dropped Wallace like a molten-hot pie and he was left unemployed.

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE Danny Frawley makes his last walk to the coach’s box before the round 22 game against the Swans at the MCG last August; Richmond fans were predicting a wooden spoon as early as round five last season – sad but true; former greats from days long gone – (from left) Roger Dean, Bill Barrot, Tom Hafey and Tony Jewell.

These figures indicate phenomenal failure unforeseen in those amazing years of the 1960s and ’70s when the Tigers were unstoppable, wildly successful, arrogant and ruthless with opposition teams. And, it must be said, with their own if they failed to cut it in the decidedly Darwinian microcosm that had been created at Punt Road.

By the time Wallace took over as coach, the playing group was, in his words, “shell-shocked”. The club had lost 48 of 66 matches during the previous three seasons and the players had simply ground to a motivational halt. Wallace cannot be expected to do much better, despite his ability to turn average playing lists into overachievers, as he did year after year at the Bulldogs. His list this year is typically weak, despite nine delistings at the end of 2004. Losing has so long been part of the culture at Punt Road that barely anyone there remembers the sensation of winning. To long-suffering Richmond supporters, the appointment of Wallace is merely the latest chapter in a scarcely believable tale of powerlust, mismanagement, revenge, personal feuding, profligate spending and appalling onfield performance.

Who can be blamed? The sins of the fathers have, to a certain degree, been visited upon the current generation. History? Perhaps, but the club seems destined to repeat it.

Since the end of the Tigers’ glory days in 1982, Punt Road Oval has become a metaphor for the decline of the club, and Richmond’s place in the new scheme of things. The oval sits next to the MCG, home-ground to six AFL

clubs, and is dwarfed by its monumental presence. The ground has been reduced in size due to widening of the road that gave the oval its name. The old grandstand is dilapidated.

But then, if these anachronisms were confined to mere capital and equipment, there would be little to worry about. Unfortunately, however, they have thus far carried over to the club’s management of its entire range of affairs. Ironically, the consistency of Richmond’s approach has been its downfall. Somewhere along the continuum, yesterday’s solutions became today’s problems. The Success Mentality led to failure. Good decision-making became bad. To his credit, Casey has identified some of these things as problems.

Take the appointment of coaches. Ruthlessness is fine when one coach wins several premierships, like Tom Hafey did. It can be directed at the opposition. One or two bad seasons, and suddenly love becomes conditional. Allegiance is seen for the relative thing it is. The rancour turns inward. These have been the normal conditions at Punt Road for so long now, it’s a wonder there still is a Richmond Football Club. Boardroom disloyalty has become so much the norm, it has been almost risible when inevitably sacked coaches such as Tony Jewell, Kevin Bartlett, Jeff Gieschen, John Northey and Frawley

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Richmond’s two stabs at Carlton in 1972 and ’73 (a win and a loss, like Essendon in 1983 and ’84) were like world heavyweight championship superfights.

Richmond’s dynasty was more than comparable to Hawthorn’s of the 1980s, or Brisbane’s today. After its second successive premiership in 1974, even Hawthorn’s guru-coach, John Kennedy, threw up his hands in despair. “Richmond played a wonderful, natural game,” he rhapsodised. “It’s no wonder players from other clubs want to go to Richmond. Their style of football is so attractive.”

Back then, the club’s unspoken motto was “Kill or Be Killed”. The players loved being the “us” against “them”, and revelled in the sustained booing from the 113,000-strong crowd the day they denied North Melbourne its first premiership in 1974. In the dressing-rooms after the game, long-time president Ian “Octa” Wilson declared hoarsely, “We earned this bastard!”

“The mentality was that if you didn’t win

The purchase of other journeymen and fading veterans pushed the club into the red: Murray Whitcombe from Geelong; the disastrous acquisition of Darryl Sutton from Swan Districts. Coaches were being blamed for their onfield failure, but decision-making at the club had become desperate and indiscriminate.

By the time Richardson assumed the presidency in 1985, he was shocked at the rubble he’d inherited, compared to the club he’d left as coach seven years earlier. “We were going into debt but the players were demanding higher contracts,” he says. “There was a different mentality among the playing group. The tail was wagging the dog. They were too influential. I tried to make a

difference but I entered it pretty naively. The whole joint was rotten through and through. It was a den of iniquity.”

The unfolding tragedy momentarily detoured into farce under the effete presidency of Alan Bond in 1987. It was the beginning of the corporate era in football, and corporate hotshots were viewed everywhere as messiahs or, at least, financial saviours. Bond was either utterly incompetent, or suffering the early symptoms of the supposed IQ seepage that later led to “diminished responsibility” in his business dealings.

“I’ve always followed the red and black,” he told the assembled players and members. Essendon must have been breathing a sigh

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announced to the press over the years that they had the board’s “full support”. At least it might have been funny, had we not been witnessing the professional demise of hard-working men at the hands of scapegoating backroom lurkers.

In those heady days of five premierships in 15 years, a formidable core of outright champions such as Royce Hart, Dick Clay, Francis Bourke, Bartlett and Ian Stewart, a fiercely driven coach in Hafey, the madly parochial club secretary Graeme Richmond and the wily Alan Schwab, the club was a raging beast. Everything worked. It pulled the biggest crowds and threw money at the best footballers in the land. Like the Essendon-Hawthorn grand finals of the 1980s,

the flag, you were unsuccessful,” says Barry Richardson, former premiership forward and coach in 1977 and ’78.

Richmond Football Club has been all about power for as long as anyone can remember. That’s been fine as long as the right people had control of the ball. Yet when it hit the deck, the scramble for power has been as laughable a scrimmage as you’ll see anywhere. The board, the players and, of late, the fans, have had far too much influence at different stages of the club’s recent history.

Ruthless sackings, management by fiat, the closed-door approach, intolerance of difference, lack of self-awareness – all are management products of the 19th century that were carried to the shores of the 21st by the sheer force of its origins in the industrial revolution. It took a long time for people to realise that compliance doesn’t equal productivity. When everyone was compliant, these practices worked. Men with the methods of Graeme “The Godfather” Richmond or even John Elliott were able to get their way with ease. In the new millennium, Carlton has had to get over it. Richmond hasn’t yet, although the advent of Miller, and now Wallace, is more culturally significant than people credit. But they are only two.

The slashing and burning began at Richmond in the early 1980s. Continuing its tradition of having great club men coach the side, it appointed the great “Saint Francis” Bourke as coach. It made the grand final in 1982, but tenth place in ’83 was just not good enough. Wilson and Graeme Richmond – who’d wielded enormous influence in various capacities around the club for years – wouldn’t have it. Bourke, the club treasure, was dumped. Today, the irreproachable Bourke won’t hear a bad word said against the late GR: “He’s the greatest single influence on the events that led to the rise and the sustaining of the Tigers as a force in the ’60s and ’70s.”

Rival clubs were quick to sack the disintegrating empire. According to another in-and-out Tigers coach, Jewell, the departure of three of its best players – David Cloke, Geoff Raines and Bryan Wood – at the end of the 1982 season, was something the club “never recovered from”.

Cloke and Raines went to Richmond’s hated rival Collingwood. Motivated by revenge – okay when you’re in the ascendancy, but the worst of motives in the long run – Richmond, as in Graeme, began a recruiting war against the Magpies, and spent up big on Phillip Walsh, John Annear, Neil Peart, Noel Lovell and Craig Stewart. None had much impact. Even fading fullback Peter McCormack was bought across from Victoria Park. He barely lasted a season. It seems the Tigers were blinded by vindictiveness.

of relief that he decided on the yellow and black, then. Building up the drama, he then bathetically announced the best-and-fairest winner, one “Dale Wineman”. Wineman must have been flattered that Richmond immortal Weightman stood to receive the award on his behalf.

It was a comical interlude, but the rest of the decade wasn’t nearly so funny. A cavalcade of coaches: Patterson, Sproule, Jewell and Bartlett. Rapid decline. Blame. GR’s reputation was wheeled out to be dragged around the oval and pilloried. The humble Bourke has tried to assume the club’s sins: “Geoff Raines and David Cloke leaving Richmond to join Collingwood was regretfully more to do with me as senior coach than anyone else, including Graeme.”

GR himself admitted, before his death from cancer in 1991, that “the administration at Richmond in the ’80s has a lot to answer for”. He was very influential in that administration, so we can only assume he was including himself.

Around the time of GR’s death, highly paid club veterans such as Michael Roach, Jim Jess and Mark Lee, beneficiaries of the club’s munificence, all retired, while teenage talent from the under-19s was thrown into the seniors and then mostly discarded. Only two from that era, Knights and Tony Free, survived their experience at the front.

Finally, in 1991, a decade’s worth of administrative malpractice caught up with the Tigers. That year, its seven draft picks

IN ’91, THE TIGERS’ SEVEN DRAFT PICKS FAILED TO PLAY A SINGLE GAME BETWEEN THEM. THEY FINISHED SECOND LAST. THE CLUB WAS BROKE

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE Heavenly duo – long-suffering Tigers fans will be hoping new coach Terry Wallace walks on water, just like the larger-than-life Jack Dyer used to; Kevin Bartlett on fire in Richmond’s last winning grand final . . . a mere 25 years back; Tim Fleming feels the pain of it all after the club’s 12th consecutive loss (this time to the Crows) last year.

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failed to play a single game between them. They finished second last. Attendances had plunged by 60 per cent in ten years. The club was broke, and $1.5m in debt. The “Save Our Skins” campaign was launched. The club’s mascot, legend, immortal and guiding spirit, Jack Dyer, was mobilised. “There’s no way we’ll let them kill this club . . . we’ll fight them to the death!” he announced. It was an admirable abstraction; the fans’ ire could be turned against “them”. But there was actually no-one to overcome, except Richmond itself. During the fund drive, kids kicked footies around with players, now long forgotten, like Brian Leys, Andrew Underwood, Todd Menegola and Alastair Scott.

Coach Barlett was there, posing for photos, signing jumpers and footballs, assuring Tigers fans that everything was being done to address the deep-seated problems plaguing the club. A few months later, he was sacked. The club scraped together enough to continue its dysfunctional lurch into the future.

In 1993, it nearly lost its major sponsor, TAC, when marketing manager Mal Brown, in his outspoken former-Richmond-champion way, called the acting chief executive a “fuckwit”.

needed three. There was to be no compromise. He walked.

The plundering of the team continued on the field as though nothing had happened in the previous two years. After the next coach, Robert Walls, was fired, for failing to “get the players up”, he wryly told the press: “Other clubs don’t worry about the Tigers, as they usually self-destruct.”

Last year, Richardson wrote an open letter to Bartlett to return to the club. The obstinate Tigers legend has vowed he will never set foot in the clubrooms until the last of the board that sacked him has departed. He cops a lot for it, but sometimes such protests are the only gestures that raise awareness and get results. Richardson’s plea is symbolic. Today’s Richmond has been deprived of the living current of its legendary playing past, yet still suffers from the aftershocks of past administrative disasters. Now it has a good coach, a savvy football manager, an average playing list, and a president who is dedicated enough to dip into his own pocket, but who is, apparently, an unknown quantity. The club might go either way.

Still the faithful huddle in the old grandstand at Punt Road on the odd occasion when the Coburg Tigers, Richmond’s Victorian Football League affiliate, are playing on this side of town. Some time before 2pm, they’ll join the streaming thousands and make the short and well-trodden journey to Richmond’s home venue, the MCG.

Beneath massive eucalypts, some witness to the game’s 19th-century origins in this very paddock, the faithful will discuss the likelihood of victory, as generations before them have done. Most will feel the familiar pang of hope; others trudge along out of loyalty, and others still because they wouldn’t know what else to do. But there are no heroes left at Punt Road, only ghosts. The extraordinary deeds of past champions grow ever more hazy as one dismal season rolls into another.

Even the seemingly immortal Dyer eventually succumbed. “Heaven’s football team can now take the field, your captain has arrived,” read the massive banner after Captain Blood passed away shortly before the end of the 2003 season. The faithful paid tribute that day at St Ignatius Church, up on Richmond Hill, but they may as well have been burying Dyer’s football team as well. Any resemblance of the tough outfits he ran out for in the 1930s and ’40s to today’s overpaid and underworked rabble is confined to the colour of the guernsey.

Old Jack reckoned he wouldn’t sleep for a week if the Tigers lost. He must have gone to his rest a bloody tired man.

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John Northey coached the team from 14th in 1993 to a preliminary final in ’95. It just missed the finals in ’94. The supporters were buoyant and hopeful for the first time in years. Under Northey, youngsters like Knights, Campbell, Free, Matthew Richardson and Stuart Maxfield were carving up the opposition. After that preliminary final, Northey sat down with the committee to formalise a new contract. The committee only offered him two years. Northey, seeking the kind of security Richmond has never guaranteed anyone,

TIGERS DRAFT A COUCH POTATORichmond’s draft picks have performed the worst out of any club in the league. One former No. 1 pick, Richard Lounder (LEFT), infamously played only four senior games. It was during Bartlett’s coaching stint that the two-metre, 118kg ruckman was scooped from the 1988 draft, and the future looked rosy after he kicked four goals on debut the following season.

But Lounder’s weight and fitness quickly became an issue, and one Sunday morning Bartlett sent the fitness coach over to the star recruit’s house for some extra running. Lounder was somewhat unprepared for the 10am call, however – he was sipping a tinny with an esky full of beers at his feet watching Wide World of Sports. Empty pizza boxes littered the floor.

Lounder didn’t play senior footy again, returning to his native South Australia at the end of the season. “I used to enjoy a beer,” he says of those days.

ROBERT WALLS WRYLY TOLD THE PRESS: “OTHER CLUBS DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE TIGERS, AS THEY USUALLY SELF-DESTRUCT”

LEFT More than 1000 mourners gathered at St Ignatius Church in Richmond for the funeral of Captain Blood, who passed away age 89 in 2003.

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