Konrad Marshall sat down with talented small defender Jayden Short earlier this month to kick-off a new series of long-form features on current Tigers by the author of Yellow & Black - A Season with Richmond.
Click here to read Part 1 of the feature, if you missed it.
Jayden Short was taken by Richmond in the 2015 rookie draft, along with Kane Lambert, Jason Castagna and Ivan Soldo - part of a solid haul from the list managers. He knew he would be overlooked in the national draft. “No one was telling me ‘You’re gonna get drafted’ so I had no expectations,” Short says. “I think it was better that way.”
He lived at home with his parents for two years, then going into his third year moved into a house in Northcote with Lambert. “Kane works his arse off, and he’s polite, and you go home and he introduces you to all his mates, and they become your mates, making you feel really comfortable. He’s the perfect man, really.”
Around that time Short also began learning lessons from the famously dedicated Lambert, almost by osmosis, about everything from recovery and diet to cleanliness and mindset. He had already established his reputation as a bubbly jokester. That was just him being himself. “A loud annoying kid, trying to have fun, trying to take the piss out of a few people, get a laugh out of them and make their day a little better.”
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Short plays jokes on any and every teammate, of course, but also peripheral figures. The gameday doormen. A security guard. He’ll see a tradie walking through the club and call out to him - tell him he needs to report to the front office, for no reason at all. Last season, I was embedded at the club during the finals campaign and I kept hearing my name called out in meetings - “Konrad!” - or between meetings - “Konrad!” - or while I was standing on the sidelines - “Konrad!” I fix him with a look: That was you, wasn’t it!
Short flashes a sheepish, guilty grin: “I get a few people. I’ve pulled it on pretty much everyone, but you kept biting, snapping your neck every time I had a try. That’s why I kept getting ya.”
As his time at Tigerland went on, Short added something to his repertoire, perhaps after seeing Lambert modelling his formula for success. Taylor says things changed for Short in his crucial third pre-season. “The grit came through,” Taylor says. “Jayden came back and had taken about 45 seconds off his 3km time. That’s phenomenal. You could see he had some resolve, that he wanted to make it. And he has.”
Shane McCurry, who leads the playing group’s leadership and culture sessions, sees this, too. “When I think about leadership, I don’t think about seriousness, or positivity - I think about contribution. He’s one of the biggest drivers of the fun, but he mixes that with hard work. He’s not one or the other - he’s both.”
Short himself enjoys flicking that toggle switch between the hard stuff and the fun stuff.
“Having a laugh while you’re slogging away, it gets you through the work, and you end up making the most of it. You don’t want to dread your job. I speak to my mates and they’re tradies, and they don’t really enjoy their work. For them it’s another day, another dollar. I wake up and this doesn’t feel like a job. It’s never a burden. We work hard, we laugh a lot, we get it done, and when the hard conversations need to come we can have those, too. What else would I rather be doing?”
Emma Murray, watching the same intraclub match at training, says Short has found a balance because he needed to. He has an obvious gift for holding the energy in the room, whether creating a new nickname or simply smiling. “He’s like this little energizer bunny, vibrant with his voice, always grinning, always happy, and that’s awesome,” she says, “but I don’t think we can sustain that forever.”
Murray more fondly remembers a moment on pre-season camp, when she happened to be sitting next to him on the bus in Queensland, on the way to a set of hill sprints. They shared a lovely conversation about nothing in particular: girlfriends, family, footy, life. “And there was no masking - just comfort in his own skin,” she says. “Watching Shorty grow, for me, has been watching him learn that he doesn’t always have to play that high energy role. That he can just be where he’s at - he doesn’t always have to be up, up, up. It’s such a subtle growth but such an important one.”
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On field, his role is as it has been these last two years. He starts as a defender, there to beat his man, to make his day difficult and to do that - in part - by taking the game on, exploiting any weaknesses while opening up the ground for the Tigers down field. It’s a clarity of purpose that saw Short land in All Australian calculations last year. He deflects any praise.
“Bringing your strengths is about helping out your teammates,” he says. “If I don’t bring my strength - my run and carry - then maybe Grimesy’s gotta do it for me, and then he doesn’t get to focus on his game. If I do what I need to do, that bond in the backs can be formed.”
He wants to grow as a player, of course. This is not his ceiling. Sharpening the axe at training for Short means many things. Right now, it’s extras in body work. It’s going into a drill and understanding - knowing - exactly what he wants to learn and better within himself.
“If it’s a contest drill, long down the line, and I’m playing on a small forward, I can’t be taking off and running to the contest, forgetting my man. I need to get some physicality on him, make life difficult for him, rather than hoping that I get the ball and he doesn’t,” he says. “There’s also opportunities for me to intercept the ball a little more. We rely a lot on our keys to intercept the ball, but sometimes I need to go.”
Konrad Marshall is the author of Yellow & Black - A Season with Richmond, and a writer for Good Weekend Magazine.
