Oh we're from Tigerland: Cheryl Critchley

Oh we're from Tigerland
Stories of being Richmond

Cheryl Critchley, 50, Blackburn

Favourite all-time player:
Matthew Richardson - “I’d have to say Richo. It was his passion, and how he loved his club. He epitomises Richmond, and is just a great person.”

Favourite current player:
Jack Riewoldt - “He’s a character and you need characters in footy. And he can turn it on when he needs to. And I think he’s a bit like Richo, a bit misunderstood.”

Star struck: a fan interviewing her former duffel coat idol, Michael 'Disco' Roach

Many of us are born a Tiger, we all die a Tiger, but how many marry as a Tiger?

Welcome, Tiger fans, to Cheryl Critchley, a big-spirited Tiger-woman whose voice is known by many in the crowd, as a grassroots barracker, as a tireless contributor, whose passion for all things yellow-and-black – and for football – was part of her wedding day.

This is a Richmond love story, and it couldn’t be any other way.

Cheryl met her husband-to-be, Brian, on New Year’s Eve 20 footy seasons ago, at the end of 1995, after Richmond reached the finals for the first time since 1982, and overran Essendon in mid-September, and we were contenders, and a glorious future beckoned. The venue was the Corner Hotel, in the bowels of Tigerland. The bloke barracked for Richmond. He was a keeper.

Seventeen months later they married, beside the Yarra River, with a reception nearby at Richmond Town Hall. Wedding tables were decorated with jars of turf from Punt Road Oval. “We had a Richmond cake with two little Barbie dolls dressed in Richmond colours, and we had black cars with yellow ribbons on them, and we left the reception to the Richmond theme song,” says Cheryl.

“Our vows were for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, in premiership and wooden spoon years.”

Wedding bells: a yellow and black affair

Little did they know what lay ahead. Three lovely children, so many football friendships and fondness; but also two wooden spoons and – sigh – no premierships.

“Richmond won five grand finals in the first 14 years of my life,” says Cheryl, by way of explaining the boom-and-bust of barracking familiar to all Tiger fans of a certain age. “In my eldest daughter’s first 14 years of her life I think we played in one finals series, when she was two, so she doesn’t remember it. They’ve grown up with no success at all. Their mentality is very different to my generation, where at least we can remember the good years.”

Loss and longing, it makes the heart grow stronger, the passion deeper.

Cheryl and her centre-half-back line: daughters Jess (top) and Bec (left), and son Ben

Not one to sit idle, with her husband Brian Roy, and a group of likeminded friends – including Claire Heaney, Kate Wowk, Kevin Passmore, Keith Joyce and Demitri Serghis, many of them News Limited work colleagues from her days on-staff at the Herald Sun – in 1998 Cheryl helped found and publish an unofficial Richmond FC fanzine called ROAR. “We had a good relationship with the club, and we did things like dress-up the coach Jeff Gieschen in a dog collar and ran the pic under the headline ‘Leash the Giesch,” says Cheryl. “I remember I would give Q&A’s to Brendon Gale and he got all the players to fill them out, and we’d publish them.”

It was run from Cheryl’s kitchen table, when living on Lyndhurst Street, opposite the Richmond Town Hall, with editorial meetings held at the nearby Royal Oak Hotel. “I love the club, and they were my skills as a journalist,” says Cheryl, who sold the fanzine for $2 outside the MCG, while she was pregnant with her first child. “It was just a really positive, feel-good experience, and the club was great.”

After two seasons and six editions, ROAR was wrapped-up and Cheryl and her friends handed all profits to the football club. A cheque for $5000.

Cover boy: 'Richo' as front page news on the ROAR fanzine.

And she wasn’t even born into a Richmond family! Cheryl’s father, Ron Chritchley, a school teacher, played three senior games for Hawthorn (for three wins) in 1960, before his job took him to Wangaratta, where Cheryl was born. This was the gilded hour of country football, when the VFL’s Coulter Law restricted a player’s allowance to £5 per match, or about 70 per cent of the basic wage. Country football clubs had no such curbs.

Tobacco growers in the nearby valleys bankrolled the local team. “Dad always says he got more money as a playing coach of the Wangaratta Magpies than what John Kennedy got to coach Hawthorn,” says Cheryl. “Dad and mum are still Hawks supporters.”

Cheryl’s unwavering Tiger allegiance began at primary school in Goornong, outside Bendigo, where the Critchley’s lived in 1969 (a good year), across the road from a persuasive Richmond fan. “I chose the Tigers and my sister Maree chose Carlton, probably because we were living in a Carlton recruiting zone and she liked Trevor Keogh and Geoff Southby and they came from up there. My bother Paul is the only one who ended up following Hawthorn.”

Family frenemies: Cheryl's sister, Maree, who we respectfully hope has a miserable night on Thursday.