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It’s not your fault, Richmond fans. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.
I started following the AFL in the late 1990s and every team that was in the competition then has since had a year or a series of years where their fans could have feasibly said out loud ‘we can win the premiership’ and not been laughed at.
Every team except for one.
The Richmond Football Club has won a total of two finals since 1983. And those two glory years of finals success, 1995 and 2001, ended in preliminary final defeats to the tune of 89 and 68 points. In 25 of their past 32 seasons the Tigers have failed to win more games than they’ve lost.
The best Richmond win of my lifetime was probably last year’s final round victory over Sydney; a three-point victory against a team with nothing to play for that granted Richmond the right to be beaten in an elimination final the following week by 57 points. Again, Richmond fans, it’s not your fault.
In 2015, Carlton has become the most popular whipping boy in the AFL and over the past decade Melbourne has been the league’s favourite piñata. But in the context of AFL history both of those clubs have had much more tangible success than Richmond.
Since the re-naming of the VFL into the AFL in 1990, Carlton has made the finals 11 times and Melbourne has made nine appearances compared to Richmond’s four. Richmond has been the worst, least successful club since the dawn of the AFL and it’s not especially close.
The past two years were a cause for optimism among Tigers fans. There was reason to think that after more than three decades in the barren wilderness of ‘ninth or below’ that it might finally be time to take a swig from the fountain of relevance. An impressive record of 27 wins and 17 losses and back-to-back finals appearances with a young, developing team hinted that meaningful success might be around the corner.
Look a little closer, though, and much of Richmond’s good fortune in 2013 and 2014 was simply a mirage, with the Tigers making the finals both years by beating mediocrity, accumulating a 21-6 record against teams that didn’t make the eight.
Richmond isn’t a bad team. There’s a lot to be said for being able to take care of business against inferior opposition. However, while the Demons have spent the better part of a decade making a strong, depressing counter-argument, generally the leap from ‘bottom four’ to ‘eighth’ isn’t especially difficult. With the simple maturation of a playing group, that should occur naturally over three to five years as it has for Richmond.
The real challenge is jumping from ‘finals contender’ to ‘premiership contender’. There’s nothing to suggest Richmond is built to make that leap, and if anything, through the first five weeks of 2015 it looks like they’re going backwards.
The difficulty with Richmond is finding what their scope is for improvement. These Tigers are no longer cubs; they have the ninth oldest list in the competition. On the weekend against Geelong, even without Brett Deledio, Richmond had ten players line up with 100-plus games experience, the same amount as Hawthorn, and just one fewer than top four contenders North Melbourne and Port Adelaide. The Tigers had just seven players with less than 50 games played, in stark contrast to the two most exciting young Victorian teams, the Bulldogs and Collingwood, who had 14 and 12 respectively on the weekend. At this stage, the Tigers are what they are.
Richmond’s most glaring deficiency is a lack of quality key position depth. Alex Rance is an elite defender and Jack Riewoldt is still one of the most dangerous key forwards in the competition. The problem has been Richmond’s inability to supplement these two pillars of the spine with reliable options.
Tom Hawkins embarrassed David Astbury on the weekend, exposing Astbury’s lack of brawn in one-on-one contests. Ben Griffiths has emerged as a potential foil for Riewoldt, flashing intermittent star power with his pack marking and an agility that belies his size. But Griffiths remains a perpetual injury risk and accordingly missed the Geelong game with a calf injury. The less said about Griffiths’ replacement, Ty ‘Casboult’ Vickery, the better.
There are an inordinate amount of B to B+ players at Punt Road. Players like Brandon Ellis, Edwards, Nick Vlastuin, Anthony Miles, Dylan Grimes, Chris Newman, Paul Chaplin, Bachar Houli and Steven Morris are all perfectly respectable but none of them are game-breaking stars, not yet anyway. The supporting actors could be upgraded but they’re competent enough; perhaps a larger problem lies with the main cast.
In their 22 combined seasons, Brett Deledio, Dustin Martin and Trent Cotchin have a grand total of two All-Australian guernseys between them. By comparison, in 21 combined seasons Dane Swan and Scott Pendlebury have ten such selections.
Cotchin has regressed after establishing himself as a top ten player in the league during his phenomenal 2012 season. He hasn’t cracked even the 40-man All-Australian squad the past two years and of his eight three-vote performances across 2013 and 2014, seven of them came against Brisbane (twice), St Kilda (twice), Carlton (twice) and the Bulldogs (in Cotchin’s defence his one other three vote game was against Hawthorn). He’s fast on his way to earning a reputation as a flat-track bully, something that was not helped by his meek 16 touches in last year’s final against Port Adelaide.
Dustin Martin is a riddle wrapped inside a tattoo of an enigma. He has the raw talent of a generational star but his decision making ranges from ‘ingenious’ to ‘insufferable’. Brett Deledio is too talented of a player to have never polled more than 13 Brownlow votes in a season, and like Cotchin he goes missing in big games. Of the 18 games Richmond played against finalists in 2013 and 2014, Deledio polled Brownlow votes in just two of them.
Deledio, Martin and Cotchin are all fine football players – stars, even. But they’re not on the same level as Sam Mitchell, Jordan Lewis and Luke Hodge, or Josh Kennedy, Kieren Jack and Dan Hannebery, or Nat Fyfe, David Mundy and Stephen Hill.
Some might think it’s unfair to make those comparisons, but Deledio, Cotchin and Martin were taken 1, 2 and 3 in the draft – if those guys aren’t going to be your superstars, then who is? It’s a popular AFL-ism to say that you’re only as good as your bottom six, but sometimes it’s just as accurate to say that you’re only as good as your top three.
The state of affairs is bleak at Richmond. Eleven seasons without finals from 2002 to 2012 has given them nothing but three very good but not transcendent players, a perpetually frustrated Jack Riewoldt, a gun defender who might turn down millions and retire at the end of the season, and a supporting cast of role players who don’t suck. Damien Hardwick strikes me as the type of coach that was always destined to lead a fairy-tale journey to eighth spot before getting crushed by the reality of finals and the mythical monsters of ‘actual good teams’. That’s seems to be his ceiling, and it’s been reached.
Normally, I would implore Richmond fans to look on the bright side. Martin and Cotchin are only 24 and 25 – they still have a half-decade of their primes to make the leap. Rance likely isn’t going to turn down a monster contract. Brandon Ellis has the makings of a star, Anthony Miles looks like a Richmond lifer and there’s a 14 per cent chance that Reece Conca becomes the evolutionary Jordan Lewis. I could try and tell you to keep the faith and talk yourselves into all of this. But I’m not going to.
Richmond fans, it’s time to give up. Let go. Abandon any expectation of this football club. Tyler Durden is telling you that you’re only free to do anything when you’ve lost everything.
The Richmond Tigers have not gotten within 67 points of a grand final appearance since 1982, the same year that Raiders of the Lost Ark was first released in cinemas. It’s time to give up all hope and remove emotional investment from this team, because it’s not going anywhere. There’s something to be said for sticking with a club through good and through bad but that implies that there’s been some ‘good’ at some stage. Supporting Richmond has become an exercise in masochism.
Like Homer Simpson eating Pinchy the lobster, Richmond fans need to briefly embrace their pain and then just move on. The odds say that things will eventually get better, but ‘better’ seems as far away as it’s ever been. Until that stage arrives, Richmond fans have earned the right to abandon ship and then hop back on when the time for meaningful success has actually come. Some might call that bandwagon jumping. After three decades of unreasonable pain, misery and dejection, I call it being rational.