Inside Richmond: Why this could be the dawn of a new Tigers era
By Konrad Marshall
September 29, 2019 — 4.07pm
https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/live-scores?match=106750401
It's 11:47am, the day after the 12th premiership of the Richmond Football Club, and coach Damien Hardwick is inside the war room at Punt Road Oval, sipping a light beer over best-laid plans.
Behind him, thousands of fans bedecked in yellow and black are gathered on the ground outside, and through the open, cantilevered windows of his office, Dimma can hear them cheering in the sunshine as they watch a replay of the match on two huge screens.
Coach Damien Hardwick and captain Trent Cotchin with the premiership cup at Punt Road on Sunday, where tens of thousands of Tiger faithful gathered to celebrate.CREDIT:CHRIS HOPKINS
He's seated at a big table made of blonde timber, and in the centre rests a whiteboard in the shape of an oval, with centre squares and goal squares and 50 metre arcs. The coaches sit around this board almost every day of every season, marking the blank schematic depending on the task at hand. In match review, they use it to illustrate and untangle passages of play. In opposition analysis, it's where they sketch convoluted, diagrammatic paths to victory. Now, less than 18 hours after a famous flag is won – done and Dusty-ed – the board is clear.
Hardwick isn't alone. To his right sits his right hand man, Tim Livingstone, the head of coaching and football performance. (If the club were a school, Livo would be the encouraging, organised vice principal.) There's also defensive coach (and comedian) Justin Leppitsch, wily list manager Blair Hartley, the inquiring tactician and statistician Hayden Hill, plus new midfield coach Adam Kingsley and old football boss Neil Balme. They're shooting the breeze but also doing their best and fairest voting from the day before.
After an 89-point mauling of the Giants, a record margin for a Tiger premiership, it's an enjoyable task. They rate every player, every week, along a colour continuum – from red to brown to orange to light green and dark green (dark green being excellent). Unsurprisingly, there is little variation in the voting today.
Tiger faithful celebrate premiership success at Punt Road.CREDIT:CHRIS HOPKINS
There is more than a little dark green in their assessment.
What interests me, though, is the casual, open-door manner of the meeting. On a seat in one corner sits Dimma's wife, Danielle – the famous "Mrs Hardwick" – and opposite, his mother Pam. Trent Cotchin, wearing all black and a fetching chestnut cowboy hat, is there with his daughters, Harper and McKenzie. And the flow of faces doesn't stop there. People meander in and out, from administration and recruiting. A couple of the IT guys linger by the door. Things are bound to be a little loose in clubland less than a day after a flag, but still, this warm inclusivity is indicative of something pivotal to Richmond, something I've seen for three years now.
It goes by many names and slogans inside these walls. The players call it connection. The board calls it alignment. The marketing department calls it unity.
The captain calls it a blood brotherhood. The coach calls it love.
I wrote a book about that theme and the flag it helped win two years ago –
Yellow & Black: A Season with Richmond – and I've kept visiting Tigerland since that time, popping in to say hello, to watch training and to write profiles of players. I was embedded with the club for the last month of the 2018 season, which didn't end well. And I've been embedded again since the final round of the 2019 season, slowly stitching together the story of this new flag. And what has struck me most this September is how little has changed here, yet how much has grown.
https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/the-five-moments-that-mattered-20190928-p52vs9.html
For instance, I sat in the main briefing room at Punt Road Oval on Friday afternoon, the day before the grand final, for a weekly event the club calls "The Ambush". Staff from all over the building – membership and sales, communications and finance – gather in the Graeme Richmond Room, where Livingstone and Hill tell them the entire game plan. This time it meant hearing direct coaching notes and instruction from the opposition analysis of the Giants. Tactics. Game plan. Strategy. Everything. They shared the "pump-up video" the players watch for inspiration. They shared the "story" of the week, which Hardwick would base his own pre-game speech on.
I've never been inside a club other than Richmond, and so I asked the various coaches – who have worked at roughly half the teams in the AFL – for a comparison. Not one had seen a club do anything like this weekly sharing ritual – this act of connection between the briefing room and the change rooms, the board room and the back rooms. It gave me confidence.
When I began writing at Richmond this time, I told myself I wasn't concerned about what might happen on grand final day. I told myself – and the people here told me, too – that the story isn't really about a win or loss on that one day in September, but the winning culture they establish and reinforce here every single day of the year.
There's contagion in this kind of messaging. This club talks endlessly about the journey, not the destination. It's the process, they say, not the outcome. It's the steps you take while climbing the mountain, not the view from the summit. They use the metaphor of a sledgehammer pounding a rock until it cracks. By all means enjoy the satisfaction of that vicious fracturing blow, but remember the hundred blows that came before, incrementally weakening the solid stone before that big, bold, satisfying split.
And yet, this win – this destination and outcome, this view and this destruction – means everything. It does. It's vindication. Affirmation.
People have lately learned things from Richmond, about the value of vulnerability, the power of storytelling, the efficacy of mindfulness, the importance of connection and care, and the necessary enmeshing of these programs throughout the club. No closed doors. No silos. No divide. But there has always remained a vague disbelieving undertone – a sense that the kumbaya Kool-Aid the Tigers are drinking is not a magic potion so much as a placebo.
But two flags in three years? That's confirmation. That's corroboration. That places this Tigers team alongside the greats of the modern game. The Cats and the Hawks, the Swans and the Lions. The Crows and the Eagles and the Roos. That's an exclamation mark. A roar. And perhaps also, I hope, a warning, about the establishment of a yellow and black era, only now nearing its blinding dawn.
