‘Beware fallen rocks’ says a road sign, and I know I’m off to a faraway place to see a game of football.

Early Saturday morning, I left home to drive east, through “the Valley” of Latrobe, where fog hung low, beneath snow glistening on the shoulders of Mount Licola near Stratford, listening to the Coodabeen Champions on the car radio, who sing a song about the “much-maligned” Shane Edwards to the tune of the country ballad Always on My Mind, made famous by Willie Nelson.

Mine was a fanciful notion. Like many supporters, for much of the season I make confidential pacts, believing that if I do this, my team will do that. Formerly, when living in Sydney, I would swim laps before watching televised games, encouraging myself to push a little further, a little faster, thinking somehow this extra effort would be reciprocated by my team.

Here is the illogical behaviour of us barrackers, thinking and hoping our support just may be the reason the team wins. It’s why so many of us dress with deliberateness on match days – the lucky socks, charmed underpants, auspicious scarf – in a belief we know is flawed, but adhere to anyway. We convince ourselves it matters, and maybe it does. Sport is an inexact science, swayed by the whims of humanity, and few sports can be as inexact as our code of football – played on a field like this, with a ball like that.

So, on Saturday morning, I left Melbourne to break a curse. I drove four and a half hours, along the Princes Highway to Bairnsdale, turning off at Bruthen, where, at the Tambo River, I headed north on the Great Alpine Road, listening to Gerard Whateley on ABC Grandstand talk about Richmond’s game in Cairns, and the “twilight zone”, while passing a bend marked by a road sign as the “Devil’s Backbone”.

My team on Saturday played in far North Queensland, against Gold Coast, in a fixture that hitherto has instilled fear in the hearts of all Richmond supporters. Watching this game these past two seasons, we’ve been like lovers scorned, jilted at the altar, condemned to a certain kind of misery. My aim was to jinx the hoodoo. I found a game in the coldest league in Victoria – where snowfall on the oval is not unknown – and went there to try and rid my team of the tropical Cairns curse.

We’re a superstitious lot, us supporters – these are the lengths we go to.

**

Arriving in Swifts Creek, this looks Tiger country. The ground is ringed by utes with bull bars, my mobile phone has no reception, and the oval is cut into terrain so steep, it looks to curl up at either end. “It’s a great place to be a full-back,” says Gavan O’Brien, 75, who won a premiership for the locals playing in the late 1950s, and who, today, works the numbered tin plates in the scorer’s box. “You’re kicking off downhill at both ends.”

All afternoon I hear wonderful stories about football, from the longest stand-alone club in the Omeo District League, which for, as long as anyone can remember, has played 16-a-side football, and on grounds occasionally above the snowline. “We had to call a game off at half-time up at Omeo once,” says Stephen Richardson, a Swifts Creek stalwart known to all as ‘Sleepy’ because, of course, he fell asleep once in grade prep at school. “The umpires and players had hypothermia.”

**

Stars twinkle, a fingernail moon hangs high in the sky. The locals beat the Bruthen Bulldogs comfortably and all are in good spirits. The night air is cold, but all at the club are warmed by drinks, food and company around the fire.

It is hard to leave, but I’m a long way from home and I’ve a score to check. When I turn on the car radio, the Tigers are up by 10 points in Cairns with about 10 minutes to play. These mountain roads at night are tricky, but not nearly as perilous as how it sounds up north. Commentary fades in and out as reception is lost around every other bend. At one point, I pull over to listen. Being a Richmond supporter, it’s never an easy ride.

**

Watching the recorded game on Sunday afternoon reminded me of those long ago games televised from Lakeside Oval, seeing South Melbourne scrap it out in conditions that seemed always inclement. The wind whipped off Hobsons Bay, favouring the Albert Park Lake end. It looked always cold, and wet. My enduring memory of those telecasts is of mud; a rich and dark alluvial paste the likes of which few in football know of anymore.

Likewise, this game in Cairns was no attractive spectacle. How could it be, with a wind howling like that? It looked like country football, like suburban football, played on fields in the open, in the outskirts, exposed to prevailing elements.

From the first quarter, here was a contest that was a game of chess, played with a cake of soap, in a sauna, to strict team rules. Never have I seen Richmond play such confined football, in such a shoebox, for such a pleasing result. For that first half-hour, for instance, kicking against the blunt wind, the team tactic obviously was to hug the defensive boundary, on the windward side. It was ugly football, beautiful to watch.

Time and again, the Tigers played in a corridor, hardly a handball’s length from the boundary, down the wing closest to the TV cameras. It was dour football, disciplined football. They bottled the game, minimising risk. Each player took on a role that sacrificed individual honours for the ideal of team success. Our Tigers, they played for the greater good.

**

Individual highlights from the game in Cairns on Saturday were few, but profound. Hearing Ivan Maric interviewed on the ground after the game was revelatory. Before Richmond’s Round 14 fixture against St Kilda, a man known to most Tiger supporters and sports talkback radio listeners as “Trout from Woodend’, posted a photograph on his Twitter account (@TroutWoodend) of himself and Ivan Maric, both in socks and helping make the cheer squad’s run-through. Such a simple gesture – visiting a hall in the backstreets of Richmond where, on a Wednesday night, the cheer squad volunteer their time to flag their support –  must have gladdened the hearts of so many. It did not go unnoticed. The standing of big Ivan raised a few more notches.

This was Maric’s first game in Cairns. Immediately after the win, he spoke so well – so calm, composed and assured – it seemed as if the rest of us were making such an unnecessary fuss about this game.

Daniel Jackson was superb on Saturday night. One of the most famous Confederate generals in the US Civil War was known popularly as Stonewall Jackson, a man whose footsteps I once followed through Virginia, leading me beyond a corn field to a small grave plot near Chancellorville, where his left arm is buried. (“He has lost his left arm; but I have lost my right arm,” said general Robert E. Lee, famously, upon hearing the news.)

This is my name for Dan Jackson. I call him Stonewall. Stonewall Jackson. I love the season he’s having, I love his on-camera work around the Club, I love the leadership he instils, and I especially love that this season he hasn’t once been cited by the Match Review Panel. So it’s true, a Tiger can change its stripes.

Listening on the car radio on the way home, ABC commentator Craig Starcevich, a Collingwood premiership player who finished up at the Brisbane Bears, awarded three votes to Dustin Martin, two to Dan Jackson and one to Trent Cotchin.

This seemed a fair appraisal. Our captain, in his 100^th game, played as he always has, with an industriousness that lifts all teammates around him. I would like to write at length about what it’s like to watch ‘Cotch’ and ‘Dusty’ play, but not on this occasion. Among Richmond supporters, there is a wonderful shared appreciation when seeing them play; a tacit acknowledgeable and common agreement, that there before us go two champions of the game. What makes us so happy is that they wear our colours. They are our champions.

Where would we be this season without Troy Chaplin? He was superb, again, on Saturday, playing the defensive quarterback role. Tyrone Vickery offered telling contributions with his overhead marks. Ricky Petterd was terrific, in his sixth game for the Tigers, always in the contest and mopping up in the backline with a game-high 11 marks. And Brandon Ellis, in the dying throes of half-time, kicked a goal to put us six points up, and again thrilled us supporters with the exuberance of his celebrations.

But from Saturday’s game in the tropical maelstrom of Cairns, two acts linger longest in the mind. The first was from 19-year-old Matthew Arnot, in only his second opportunity to play for the ‘ones’, when he crunched into Gold Coast’s Rory Thompson in the third quarter, in a fair contest, that forced the Suns’ full-back player from the field.

Nobody should gloat about an injury to any player. Sportsmanship is about toughness and fairness, and respecting your foe. When Arnot attacked that contest, Richmond was in front by a point: 35 to 34. The upshot was an extended pause in play. This break allowed the Tigers to regroup and regather, at a time when their faces were to the wind, their backs to the wall. What Arnot did earned him no possession on the stats sheet, but it bought the team time. It was an unexpected consequence, and it may well have won us the game.

The other act was Jack Riewoldt’s goal on his left foot, late in the last quarter, from the boundary, that sealed the win. He kicked a similar goal, from a similar position, in the first quarter against Port Adelaide earlier this season. But this goal last Saturday was harder still, with the swirling wind, the slippery ball, the tension of the occasion. As a footnote to a game where otherwise his involvement was curtailed, it was a masterstroke. Cometh the moment, here was our man – our Jack – with the sting in his tail. He sealed the deal, he delivered the goods. He stood tallest when needed the most. Long may such pleasures continue.

**

The relief on the face of Damien Hardwick after the game was palpable. Our players can now put away their gloves. Nevermore will they be in thrall to subtropical football; to the wind, the rain, the humidity, the eternal damnation.

This Sunday they return to our spiritual home – the MCG cauldron – but also to thoughts of other disappointments. There was the heartbreaking loss to Fremantle in Perth earlier this year, and the loss in the corresponding fixture last season, when Matthew Pavlich kicked six goals in the wet. Damien Hardwick is yet to coach a winning team against Ross Lyon. Here is a spell that by this weekend’s end will be broken. Demons will be laid to rest, dragons slain, anchors cast aside.

Our Tigers won by nine points on the weekend. It may well be nine goals this Sunday afternoon. When it rains, it pours. The drought, it is soon to be forsaken. How do I know? I can feel it in my bones.

Tiger tiger, burning bright.

dugaldjellie@gmail.com

or Twitter: @dugaldjellie