A warrior on the field, a gentleman outside footy: Trent Cotchin's perfect contradiction

I wasn’t going to write this article. I figure this is Trent Cotchin’s last year, so I’d save my ode to him until after the season.

Then I watched the game he played against St Kilda.

His game last Saturday night, which marked No.300 for his career, was everything that his game has become since his career inflection point in the off-season between 2016 and 2017.

He was tough and hard at the ball, occasionally silky with ball in hand, and bullocking the rest of the game. On Saturday night he was a heart and soul player redeployed to game’s heart, and ultimately central to its soul.

But to understand the story of Trent Cotchin you have to go backwards. Everyone has written and read the story of Trent Cotchin. He was an outside playing accumulator early in his career and the common theory is that he changed his game in 2017.

Where once he floated around the edges of the contest playing a Bryce Gibbs-type game, in 2017 the contest became him. He became the human embodiment of the boulder from the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark, hard and unswerving. He became single-minded in the hunt of the ball and the opponent.

But you have to go back further. In 2014, the week before Cotchin’s fateful decision to kick into the wind against Port Adelaide, he played the best game of his career to that point. It was the game that he eventually modelled his greatest years after. The Dirk Diggler Story to his eventual Boogie Nights in 2017.

Richmond fans will remember that year as the one where the Tigers pulled out eight in a row up to the last game of the season against the ladder-leading Sydney Swans. They needed the win to make the finals.

All the Tiger guns delivered, but it was the game Cotchin played that afternoon that set the basis for the dynasty three years later. Cotchin’s raw numbers that day were good but not gaudy, with 29 disposals and no goals. But you dig a little deeper and, against the toughest team in football and eventual Grand Final losers that year, Cotchin had four tackles, 11 clearances and 21 contested possessions while playing 90 per cent game time.

I thought of that game as Cotchin was delivering the most physically imposing match of his career against Geelong in the 2017 qualifying final. For a relatively slight man Cotchin careens toward physical harm more willingly than anyone since Boris the Blade, and is just as unaffected.

With four and a half minutes left in the first quarter of the first game in the tapestry of Cotchin’s legacy years, Cotchin laid the tackle that set the foundation for the dynasty. Richmond’s pressure that first quarter was frenetic. Kamdyn McIntosh had just tackled Patty Dangerfield and the ball spilled to Scott Selwood, who took a quarter of a second to gather himself.

Cotchin, who hunches his back like an apex predator when he chases opposing ballcarriers, saw Selwood’s hesitation and ran five metres in what felt like a hundredth of a second. He launched into Selwood violently, then finished the assault by dragging Selwood over the boundary line.

Cotchin didn’t want to lay a tackle. He wanted to send a message.

The crowd erupted as their once maligned skipper became the player that he had always promised to be. Hard and uncompromising, unconcerned with cheap possessions.

Concerned with winning and intimidation.

Trent Cotchin celebrates a goal. (Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)

Cotchin’s numbers that day showed it. He had only 20 touches but 13 were contested, he laid nine tackles and had seven clearances. Cotchin never got a soft kick in that game. It was as if he made a bargain with himself. It would never be easy for him, but it would be fathoms harder for whoever he was playing against.

That change in game style coincided with a shift in his personality, as well. As his game hardened, his personality softened. In 2014, Cotchin didn’t have that ingredient and it showed in his reaction to the pile-on after he kicked into the wind at Adelaide. He was stoic and insular as he laid at the butt of all jokes.

At the end of 2016 and through 2017, however, he let more people in. He opened himself up to his teammates, then the football-watching world. He formed a relationship with his coach that appears unbreakable. The school captain from Parade became best friends with the neck-tattooed bloke from Castlemaine, who dropped out of school at 14.

He dropped his guard off the field, but always had his sword on it. The contradiction between his on and off-field character was the perfect blend for the modern AFL captain.

Beyond that, his shift came at a time when men’s mental health was a topic of concern – it still is, of course. To see an AFL footballer who carried himself like Captain America be so openly vulnerable was inspiring. That is true for fans of the club, and for his teammates.

Ask any one of them.

They will tell you that he pried open the club’s walls and made it a happier, more open, more vulnerable place in his image.

I don’t know how much longer he has left, but Trent Cotchin has left an indelible mark on the Richmond football club. But more than that, he has left an indelible mark on anyone that has followed his transformation as a player, and as a man who is just trying to find his way.