In 1861, when Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations, Australian Rules football was a baby.  Back then, the only official games to have been played were between some posh schools and a couple of cricket clubs.  Apparently though, as early as 1860 a bunch of blokes calling themselves Richmond liked to front up for the odd scratch match of Aussie Rules.  I think I can imagine this bunch.  Unlike the tights-wearing brothers of Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar, these Richmond blokes would have been rough.  Knockabouts in trousers from the foundries and work houses of Richmond. Dickens was at his writing desk back in the mother country, but his observations of mid-century London would have rhymed in Melbourne.

Great Expectations is a story about coming of age through the most challenging of circumstances, in the most difficult conditions.  Decades have passed by the Richmond Football Club since we last enjoyed rich seasons of promise and deliverance.  We've been impoverished, and our poverty has taken on every conceivable expression.  We've faced financial ruin.  We've lost more matches than a blind man trying to light a fire in a blizzard.  We've lost coaches, and champions, and credibility, season in and season out.  We've lost fans.  We've lost our memories, game plans, skills. I could go on. For sure, we've known poverty and its entrapment, how it has left us desperate for opportunity but too weak to grasp even the smallest opportunities that have drifted by.

But, great expectations... coming of age.  I'll grant you that no one does pre-season build ups like Richmond.  Yes, sure.  I know we've talked ourselves up as fancy chances every year since 1980.  And I'm fairly confident that once upon a time the only prerequisite for coaching Richmond was a healthy respect for public relations and the art of spin.  Once, I'm pretty sure, the only qualification for playing at Richmond was to be a master of potential and how to waste it, how to fill hearts with hope only to take those hearts and kick them out of bounds on the full when goals were needed. 

Yet this year it's different.  This year, it is others who are talking us up.  Journos who for years have honed their careers through inventing different ways to write Richmond off as pretenders are backing us in.  Fans of other clubs are not laughing quite as loud or long upon learning of whom I barrack for.  Your average punter can name at least half a dozen Richmond players in order of Brownlow medal winning prospects.  Great expectations.

It is not so well known that Dickens changed the original ending to his earlier drafts of the novel.  He had been advised that his proposed ending was too sad.  In that original ending, after all of his growth and development, through all of his trials, after all of his striving and surviving, the main character Pip did not get the girl. That is to say, the premiership went begging despite decades of effort. Sad.  Very very sad.  So Dickens changed the ending to make it just a little less clear whether Pip misses out on the girl.  It can be read either way, with Dickens preferring to leave it up to the reader.  He leaves Pip's destiny in the reader's hands.

Great expectations.  Setting aside bad luck - and despite Dickens' begrudging concession - whether these are ever met always remains in the hands of those who carry them. We are carrying them now at Richmond and the first thing we should do is embrace them, make them the core of our self-belief.  During the decades since we last lifted the cup, we have questioned and doubted ourselves like no other club.  We have tortured ourselves with mad devices of all kinds, including Terry Wallace.  Instead of burying them, we've so often tried to revive the ghosts of the glorious past.  

Now, come closer lads.  Let me share some wisdom.  The past is the result of what we did yesterday, the future is the result of what we'll do today.  We inherit what we expect of ourselves.  And because of the work we have done in recent years, there is no longer any reason why we shouldn't expect greatness of ourselves.  Do not fear great expectations. Own them and thus make them met.