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

110 www.inside sport .com.au 111


W
hen 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
112 www.inside sport .com.au
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
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 The fact that nice guy Frawley was the victim
avoided each other, but Wallace, the man they means Wallace has some serious deposits to
call “Plough”, generally a candid and open make in Tigers fans’ emotional bank account
AAP Image / Joe Castro // Mark Dadswell / Getty Images // Ryan Pierse / Getty Images
communicator whose “man management” has – something that is well-and-truly in the red
been one of his many strengths as a coach, after 25 years of dismal failure.
unwittingly acquired a skulking image. How dismal? Here are some numbers:
He himself had been twiddling his thumbs in • Between 1964 and 1984, the Tigers won
the media for three years. Rumour had it that 62 per cent of home-and-away matches.
Wallace’s inexplicable departure from the Western Since 1984, they have won 39 per cent.
Bulldogs in 2001 was the result of a clandestine • The five heaviest losses in the club’s 96-year
agreement with the Sydney Swans board to history have come since 1989.
coach the Swans in 2002. But popular sentiment • Fifteen of the 16 highest scores ever kicked
suddenly favoured the Swans’ caretaker coach, against them date from 1984.
Paul Roos. The board dropped Wallace like a • The famous “Save Our Skins” campaign in
molten-hot pie and he was left unemployed. 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.
LEFT TO RIGHT
• Since 1981 (the year current Bombers coach
Kevin Sheedy joined Essendon), the club
has averaged a coach every two seasons,
Robert Cianflone / Getty Images
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.
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• Since its last premiership in 1980, the
club has been in only three other
finals campaigns.
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
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.
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
113

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE Heavenly duo – long-suffering
Tigers fans will be hoping new coach Terry Wallace
Richmond’s two stabs at Carlton in 1972
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 purchase of other journeymen and fading difference but I entered it pretty naively. The of relief that he decided on the yellow and
The slashing and burning began at veterans pushed the club into the red: Murray whole joint was rotten through and through. It black, then. Building up the drama, he then
Richmond in the early 1980s. Continuing its Whitcombe from Geelong; the disastrous was a den of iniquity.” bathetically announced the best-and-fairest
tradition of having great club men coach the acquisition of Darryl Sutton from Swan Districts. The unfolding tragedy momentarily detoured winner, one “Dale Wineman”. Wineman
side, it appointed the great “Saint Francis” Coaches were being blamed for their onfield into farce under the effete presidency of must have been flattered that Richmond
Bourke as coach. It made the grand final in failure, but decision-making at the club had Alan Bond in 1987. It was the beginning of immortal Weightman stood to receive the
1982, but tenth place in ’83 was just not good become desperate and indiscriminate. the corporate era in football, and corporate award on his behalf.
enough. Wilson and Graeme Richmond – By the time Richardson assumed the hotshots were viewed everywhere as messiahs It was a comical interlude, but the rest of
who’d wielded enormous influence in various presidency in 1985, he was shocked at the or, at least, financial saviours. Bond was either the decade wasn’t nearly so funny. A cavalcade
capacities around the club for years – wouldn’t rubble he’d inherited, compared to the club utterly incompetent, or suffering the early of coaches: Patterson, Sproule, Jewell and
have it. Bourke, the club treasure, was he’d left as coach seven years earlier. “We symptoms of the supposed IQ seepage that Bartlett. Rapid decline. Blame. GR’s reputation
dumped. Today, the irreproachable Bourke were going into debt but the players were later led to “diminished responsibility” in his was wheeled out to be dragged around

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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.
announced to the press over the years that
they had the board’s “full support”. At least
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
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
ABOVE RIGHT
disintegrating empire. According to another
in-and-out Tigers coach, Jewell, the departure
Tony Lewis / Getty Images
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
business dealings.
“I’ve always followed the red and black,” he
told the assembled players and members.
Essendon must have been breathing a sigh
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

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
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
of three of its best players – David Cloke, cancer in 1991, that “the administration at
Geoff Raines and Bryan Wood – at the end of Richmond in the ’80s has a lot to answer for”.
the 1982 season, was something the club He was very influential in that administration, so
“never recovered from”. we can only assume he was including himself.
Cloke and Raines went to Richmond’s hated
rival Collingwood. Motivated by revenge – okay
IN ’91, THE Around the time of GR’s death, highly paid
club veterans such as Michael Roach, Jim Jess
TIGERS’ SEVEN
RIGHT

champions such as Royce Hart, Dick Clay, “Kill or Be Killed”. The players loved being when you’re in the ascendancy, but the worst of and Mark Lee, beneficiaries of the club’s
Francis Bourke, Bartlett and Ian Stewart, a the “us” against “them”, and revelled in the motives in the long run – Richmond, as in DRAFT PICKS munificence, all retired, while teenage talent
Hamish Blair / Getty Images

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
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!”
Graeme, began a recruiting war against the FAILED TO PLAY from the under-19s was thrown into the
Magpies, and spent up big on Phillip Walsh, John A SINGLE GAME seniors and then mostly discarded. Only two
Annear, Neil Peart, Noel Lovell and Craig Stewart.
None had much impact. Even fading fullback
BETWEEN THEM. from that era, Knights and Tony Free, survived
their experience at the front.
Peter McCormack was bought across from THEY FINISHED Finally, in 1991, a decade’s worth of
Victoria Park. He barely lasted a season. It seems SECOND LAST. THE administrative malpractice caught up with
CLUB WAS BROKE
LEFT

Essendon-Hawthorn grand finals of the 1980s, “The mentality was that if you didn’t win the Tigers were blinded by vindictiveness. the Tigers. That year, its seven draft picks

114 www.inside sport .com.au 115


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”.
116 www.inside sport .com.au
ROBERT WALLS WRYLY
TOLD THE PRESS: “OTHER
CLUBS DON’T WORRY
ABOUT THE TIGERS,
AS THEY USUALLY
SELF-DESTRUCT”
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 POTATO
Richmond’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.
More than 1000 mourners gathered at St Ignatius
LEFT
Church in Richmond for the funeral of Captain Blood,
who passed away age 89 in 2003.
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
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is, apparently, an unknown quantity. The club
might go either way.
Page 117
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
AAP Image / Julian Smith
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
ABOVE
the guernsey.
Newspix
Old Jack reckoned he wouldn’t sleep for
a week if the Tigers lost. He must have gone
LEFT
to his rest a bloody tired man.
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