Assistant coach Xavier Clarke, who designed Richmond's 2023 Dreamtime guernsey with his family, spoke to award-winning sports writer Konrad Marshall for a long-form feature ahead of this year's Dreamtime at the 'G match.

It’s gotta be an interesting year to coach the Richmond forward line. Or perhaps a challenging one? Maybe both? Xavier Clarke loves the job either way, and why wouldn’t he?

Dustin Martin and Shai Bolton are lurking with menace, closer to goal for longer than ever before. Dion Prestia and Marlion Pickett have made inspired, impactful cameos there, too. Trent Cotchin is looking for - and maybe just found - his groove in a forward pocket. He’ll need it, too, with the X-factor of Noah Cumberland, the diligence of Rhyan Mansell and the fast twitch speed of Maurice Rioli jnr never far from selection. And with the foreseeable absence of Tom Lynch, a spot has opened up for a pinch-hitting tall like Samson Ryan or Ben Miller to drift down from the midfield and clunk the odd high mark.

“Jack Graham keeps playing a role for us. Judson Clarke is very disciplined, too. Jack Riewoldt is there, still sharing what he knows,” says Clarke, listing the seemingly endless roll call of Tigers who run through his part of the field. Footy units within clubs often feel settled and secure - with set-and-forget defensive and midfield magnets that seldom move - but the Tigers attack has been a rotating roster all season long. Its complexion is changing, too.

“You think about our forwards recently, guys like Jason Castagna, Kane Lambert, even Daniel Rioli and Dan Butler, or Jake Aarts - and there’s always been those role players, not high possession guys, but guys who’ve helped us be successful. How do you keep that, but play all your talent and star power there as well? Our challenge is how we get the balance right.”

That’s the ever changing and always shifting puzzle Clarke has to solve, with new pieces added to his board almost weekly. “I see it as a great opportunity,” he says, smiling in his office at Punt Road Oval on a recent Thursday, following a light captain’s run training session. “It’s exciting to give players a chance and back them in and see what they can do.”

Surprisingly, Clarke has trouble naming any of his proudest moments as a coach, or even the individual players he’s helped extract and produce their best football. “It’s a hard one, because our job is to do that for everyone. If we’re not doing that with every single player, then we’re just not doing our job. I like to think I’ve helped them all.”

The joy he gets then comes more from sharing the journey. He remembers Shai Bolton, for example, arriving at the club at 17 and barely speaking a word, even during the five weeks they spent living in an apartment in Jolimont with Tyson Stengle. Or he remembers Jack Graham, making his case in the VFL before a dream first season - five games for five wins, including a flag. “And then there’s someone like Jack Riewoldt, who has been a phenomenal player, and I can’t teach him anything new at all. All I can do is reinforce what he’s doing. Honestly, he’s more likely to be able to help me. Sometimes it’s more about listening - not talking and telling.” 

That’s something Clarke learned long ago, and far away, up north, at home outside Darwin. A proud Larrakia and Amrreamo/Marritjavin man, he grew up near Darwin on a 30 acre block at Berry Springs. It was an hour’s drive into school and back every day with his three brothers and sister. School holidays, meanwhile, were spent in the expanse of the Northern Territory, on his mother’s country in the Daly River region to the southwest, and the Moyle River floodplains beyond that, or with an aunty in Gunbalanya, on the far eastern side of Kakadu, near Arnhem Land. For weeks on end Clarke camped and fished. Barramundi was the number one target, but also snapper and mud crabs. As a kid he was untroubled by any lurking reptilian threats to his safety. “We would go out hunting for magpie geese, and you’d go shooting and walking through billabongs, and I never really thought much of it,” he says, laughing. “I wouldn’t even go near the water there now.”

He remembers a close encounter with a crocodile in Darwin, when fishing with his Mum down at the beach, off some rocks. He walked out into the water - knee deep - when one of those big prehistoric predators popped up in front of him and sent him scurrying back to land. “My grandma thought it was a good idea to ring the NT News and say that I got chased by a croc, so I ended up on the front page of the newspaper. But that’s my closest call.”

His football journey began at home in the backyard. “You start out kicking a Coke bottle around with your brothers, dodging around the clothesline, playing until it’s dark outside. Your older brother kicks the ball up and your Dad squatting down so you can take a screamer on his shoulders.”

His Dad played 200 games (including three premierships) with St Mary’s Football Club - the famed NT institution that produced Richmond royalty in Maurice Rioli, as well as his son Maurice jnr and nephew Daniel (among many other talented AFL players). “Before any dreams of playing in the AFL, you just wanted to follow in their footsteps and put on that jumper. For me it was being part of something - a family, a team - where you could celebrate the wins and losses and friendships.”

As he got older Clarke grew competitive, wanting to be the best he could. He remembers watching Michael Long and dreaming of what might be. “Longy was a St Mary’s boy, too. You’d see him running down the wing at the MCG and think ‘I want to do that’.”

Clarke landed in Melbourne as pick number 5 in the 2001 “superdraft”, but doesn’t remember feeling any pressure. He suspects he was naive enough not to notice the whorl of professional expectations. “I was just a kid who grew up loving playing footy, and so that’s what I did - I played 16 games my first year, and 22 games the next year. The Saints were struggling and so you got to play a bit more, particularly when you’re a high draft pick. I ran around enjoying it, playing off half back, going for marks.”

The pressure only built later. He started getting attention on the field, from opponents who knew his game, and ways to nullify him. The Saints started doing better, too, meaning more was expected of everyone. The club had already drafted Nick Riewoldt and Justin Koschitzke, and in Clarke’s year they had picked up Luke Ball, Leigh Montagna, Nic dal Santo and Matt McGuire. Brendon Goddard was still to come.

“You start to realise how big and fickle the AFL industry can be. If someone had talked to me about the pressures of the game and focusing on what I could do, it would have helped, but I don’t remember anything like that. Eventually I probably got distracted by the noise - ‘He’s not as good as the draft says’ - because you do read those comments. You’re human.”

Ross Lyon came on board and was clear about what Clarke needed to do to play good footy, and play good footy he did, 18 games in the first year of “The Boss”. But he also got injured, and not just pulled hamstrings or rolled ankles. Clarke ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament at the start of 2009, and sat out the whole season, including the decider, where he watched with 99,250 other spectators.

“That was hard,” he says. “You’re drafted in 2001, when you’re winning three or four games, and then eight years later you’re sitting in the stands and all your mates you were drafted with are playing in a Grand Final, and you can’t help. I joke now that if I had played we might have won. But it was pretty tough to watch the game.”

Clarke says the club handled development and adjustment well for young players during his career. It wasn’t the dark ages. In his first season, for instance, he stayed with the family of club CEO Jim Watts in bayside Melbourne. “I came from a three bedroom house with four boys in one room, to my own room with an ensuite in Hampton. It was pretty cool.”

The part that has changed or improved - in his experience - is the wealth of development and assistant coaches to make players at ease, including Indigenous player managers at all clubs. Richmond has Angela Burt, Director of Indigenous Leadership, charged not just with leading the Korin Gamadji Institute but also being a conduit for any concerns raised by Indigenous players.

“It’s just another safety net, another voice. If a player doesn’t quite feel comfortable going to the head of football - asking for time off for family reasons - they might feel more comfortable going to someone from an Indigenous background. It’s a way to bridge a little gap between players and senior leaders at the club,” he says. “When I played, if a younger Indigenous boy was having an issue, it was always up to the older player to sort him out. And most of the time the older players are trying to do their own thing - they might just be getting by or dealing with their own injuries or issues.”

Clarke remembers being that older player, coping with rehab and wondering about his place in the best 22 pecking order, whilst also showing the ropes to a rookie like young Ross Tungatalum from the Tiwi Islands. “I had to run around and get his bank cards and drivers license sorted, and I was more than happy to do that, but I think back now and realise I was battling my own injuries and trying to get myself right to play AFL footy, without looking out for someone else.”

Burt is looking out for such kids these days, and also in charge of educating all players around racism, and absorbing the lion’s share of responsibility heading into a week as important as this one, culminating in Dreamtime at the ‘G on Saturday night. The players will, of course, run out wearing a jumper designed by Clarke and his family, featuring Merrepen leaves and a dugong. It’s an honour for him in Sir Doug Nicholls Round - a league-wide event that has grown considerably since his playing days.

“In my day, generally the older senior Indigenous player at the football club gets lumped with all the responsibility of that round. The week is great, because it’s a great celebration of our game - all our families want to be involved - but it can be the most hectic, stressful week, too. Family coming over from Darwin or WA, and they need tickets and somewhere to stay, and to find their way around and get into the club or the rooms. That’s where people like Angela are so important.”

The end of Clarke’s playing career was somehow both sudden and slow. That knee injury was followed by the thought that a seachange might be beneficial, and so he sought a trade to Brisbane, but then did his other knee. Upon his return a year later, he tore a crucial tendon in his foot. He missed more than three years of footy, and then it was over. Fortunately he had his eye on a subsequent career.

During his first ACL rehabilitation, he used to go into the Saints early and to do his swimming and physiotherapy and strength training, and then during the day work at the AFL under its first senior advisor on Indigenous and Multicultural Affairs, Jason Mifsud. It was basically work experience, but also a tactic to keep his mind busy, “rather than sitting around in footy meetings all day, knowing you’re not actually playing that week, or that year.”

He worked with various groups and programs, from the Flying Boomerangs to the Red Dust Role Models, and upon retirement spent two years managing the league’s Indigenous pathways program, which still needs strengthening. “If you’re fortunate enough to play for 12 years, you can set yourself up - if you’re smart, and use your time and money well - but the ones that end quickly are the ones that struggle a bit. You take away structure and responsibility, and come out of the game and your mates have done university and their apprenticeships, and they’re getting pay rises and their first house. That’s the reality of professional sport.”

Clarke had very little coaching experience when he applied for and won the coaching gig at the NT Thunder, but it didn’t stop him being named coach of the year in his first season, and becoming premiership coach in his second. Leading his own side in a competitive league was a learning experience, and before long a friendship with then Collingwood football manager Neil Balme led to a development role at his new club, Richmond, starting at the very end of 2016. He’s been with the Tigers ever since, at one point guiding the VFL side, and now, responsible for the AFL forwards.

There are other Indigenous coaches at AFL level - namely development coaches like Neville Jetta at Collingwood, Travis Varcoe at the Western Bulldogs and Roger Hayden at Fremantle - but Clarke is the only Indigenous senior assistant in the entire league. It’s a mark against the AFL that there aren’t more - indeed there have only ever been two Indigenous senior coaches (in Polly Farmer and Barry Cable) - and the reduced soft cap has made assistant positions less attractive or sustainable than they once were. “The more that I think about it, the more I think that coaching is not for everyone,” Clarke says. “It’s a pretty solid job in season. I’ve got no doubt guys like Shaun Burgoyne and Eddie Betts and Micky O’Loughlin would be great coaches, but it’s just not for everyone.”

For the high of game day and the freedom of training sessions and off-season camps in the sunshine, there’s the complexity and sometimes drudgery of weekly analysis. Coding games, for instance, can be a mind-numbing task, but it’s a duty that all senior line coaches need to perform for several hours every week, mostly the night or morning following every game, watching a replay alone on a laptop screen, pausing constantly, and clicking little boxes to highlight passages of play both good and bad.

As forwards coach, Clarke is looking primarily at how the Tigers set up in attack. A code button might be “Inside 50 Options”, for instance, and so with each foray forward he needs to look at several camera angles of the same play to determine whether the forwards were making the right decisions, or providing the right options. “Aerial Power” would be another button - are we getting outmarked, and if so, why? Then there are individuals to assess. He might spend 30 minutes looking at Rhyan Mansell, to figure out whether he’s getting inside 50 quickly enough, or staying outside the arc looking for kicks. Is Mansell beating his opponent back inside 50, or does the opposition have a plus one against us? Is he chasing a kick, or trying to lock the ball in our forward half? Then Clarke moves onto the next player. 

He also uses his sense of how a game has just unfolded to look for more information. Take the Melbourne game, which looked like a strong Richmond game for the majority of the night. The Tigers created 33 front half turnovers, but couldn’t score heavily from them. It’s Clarke’s job to investigate why. “When I’m coding, I’m looking at how and when we got those turnovers, and why we weren’t scoring off the back of them.”

And the answer?

“Tom Lynch wasn’t playing,” Clarke says, laughing. “Or maybe Melbourne’s defence was just that good. Sometimes the simple answer is the right one.”

Is there a simple answer to why the season has been plagued with inaccuracy in front of goal? 

He says there are positive plans afoot to address the issue, such as a recent goal kicking competition started by Kane Lambert only a few weeks ago. Every player is matched up against another player, and throughout the week, pair by pair, they’ll play off against one another in a kick off. Ten set shots each on goal, the most goals wins. If they’re tied after 10, a sudden death shootout determines the winner, who goes through to the next round - like March Madness for sharpshooters.

“At the end we’ll have the best goalkicker at the club. And the losers progress into the challenge cup, too, so you can actually be the best worst goalkicker at the club,” Clarke says. “A forward really doesn’t want to lose against a backman. A midfielder really doesn’t want to lose to a ruck. It adds this layer of competition and pressure, but also fun.”

People stand on the sideline watching and cheering (or jeering). Kamdyn McIntosh will pretend he’s on his phone answering a call - anything to distract. The hardest fought win happened only a few days ago. Josh Gibcus was up against Sam Banks after training, and both slotted 8 goals from their first 10 shots. Then they each kicked 7 more goals straight, until one of them finally missed. “It was Gibcus - I wasn’t expecting that,” says Clarke. “It was quite funny watching that one unfold. They were the last two out there, with only the coaches watching. You could just see the pressure build.”

Conversion is one of those confounding issues you really can’t examine too closely, at least if you want to stay sane. “Why players miss is a great question, but I don’t know the answer,” Clarke says, grinning. “If you ask any coach or player who’s been through a patch where they can’t kick goals, the solution is as simple as having as many shots as you can during the week at training, because the goals we’ve missed this year we kicked last year. It’s just a funny game.”