Last Saturday night, anguished after the siren, I felt like crying.
It welled from within as a visceral response to loss and its bedfellow, grief. Football sometimes has this effect and it is wonderful. It shows we care, that we’re passionate, that our emotional attachments run deep. The football makes us as one, and brings us to the game as the Richmond crowd.
Sunday afternoon the week before and I caught a train and walked to the MCG with three seven-year-old boys, two of whom had not before been to a football game. Krushna was born in India, Haydon in Fiji. I wanted to show them something so many of their friends at school talk so animatedly about. I wanted to include them, make them part of a heartbeat, a community.
My only proviso: they wear yellow and black. In these two colours, I tell their parents, there’s an endless conversation, a lifetime of belonging.
A future Richmond centre-half-back line: seven year-old Alastair, Krushna and Hayden off to the Freo game.
David Mundy’s kick after the siren floated goalward and the purple crowd at the ground’s city end rose in euphoria, and the three boys I was with stood in an aisle, disbelieving, and I turned from them, reaching for a water bottle, and in our despair tears could easily have fallen.
But they didn’t.
A buzzword of parenting is ‘resilience’. It holds true also in football. Our team loses narrowly, in heart-breaking circumstances, outrageous misfortune, our players walk from the ground crestfallen – giving their all, falling agonisingly short – and this is no time for self-pity. Now is time to double resolve. Harden belief. Not give up, not turn backs. Now is time for fortitude.
What do the cheer squad chant late in the game if it’s long gone?
If you love Richmond, stand up! If you love Richmond, stand up!
An entire bay at the Punt Road end of the MCG stands up.
No use bemoaning the past, the umpire’s whistle, what has been lost, what could have been. Football is about making a future. Now is the hour, the week, the night this Saturday, for standing up.
**
Sunday morning, Richmond fan, Aaron Smith, posted a Tweet: “My football frustration has been tempered by my son singing Yellow and Black this morning”.
Another fan, Steven Wright, responded: “Got up to find Mr 4yo sitting at the breakfast table in Tiger No 9 jumper waving @Richmond_FC flag. He wanted to go to Tigerland. #resilience.”
The sun comes up, a game is on this weekend, count our blessings, all is righted in our world.
Monday morning, and on social media I ask other fans to share the love, the meaning, the belonging of Richmond. Here are some of the voices in our crowd.
Geoff Matheson's girl, Claire, and her Tigerish smile (& beanie).
Geoff Matheson: “This is my girl Claire & when she woke Sunday AM and heard we’d lost, she still wanted to get around in Tigers gear. That’s what Richmond means for me.”
Sarah Brook's two Tiger cubs, walking to the game, blue skies above.
Sarah Brook: “My grandparents grew up in Richmond in Struggletown days – never another option for my mum, me or the boys. The roar at the ‘G on a good day!”.
Michelle De'Lisle (right): "We're so proud of him".
Michelle De’Lisle: “The Tigers are in our blood. My late Pa [Ray Potter] played a couple of games for them in the 40s and we’re so proud of him. We stick by them. #gotiges.”
A pair of sevens: Melissa Rose with Richmond player Ben Lennon.
Melissa Rose: “5 years ago I decided to be a member and this year I am a player sponsor. I’ve been a supporter all my life thanks to my grandma :)”.
Ben Kelly, ready to rumble by the front door ("about 16 years ago").
Ben Kelly: “I love the steely resolve of a Richmond fan. To get knocked down, suffer defeat and maintain the love and support. Our time will come.”
Paul Ager and his two boys, at the game, together.
Paul Ager: “For about a decade I had little chance to get to the footy, but now I get to enjoy taking my autistic sons to games when I can.”
**
Saturday night, a cruel joke.
I listened to most of the game on the radio, a knot in the stomach, doing odd jobs about the house. In the last quarter, our seven-year-old boy crouches on the floor over his mother’s smart phone, watching the game on a live AFL feed. The radio broadcast is a few seconds ahead of what he sees, and his screen footage freezes regularly, needing refreshing. Shai Bolton kicks his first goal in league footy – a hero on debut! – and I hear our crowd in Sydney roar in delight and I bundle up my son on the floor – we’ve won! we’ve won! – and he jumps on my back in joy, and the phone screen pauses, and the two of us wait to see the vision of our victory denouement.
In our minds, we’re nine points up with only a minute to play and we’re not letting this one slip.
But at the kitchen bench, the radio running, my partner says GWS have sent the ball down the other end and have kicked a goal, they’re going to win it. It makes no sense! It doesn’t add up.
Our goal was disallowed, she says.
Turn off the radio. Turn off the phone. It’s not the time for post-mortems. We need hugs, love, togetherness.
Sophia Danielle by the boundary at Tigerland with one of her heroes, Dan Rioli.
Sophia Danielle: “You don’t choose your team, it chooses you, and when you realise that it’s the best feeling!”
Welton Marsland: “I’ve never not been entertained by my team, and that’s the bottom line for sport, seeing as it’s a game. I’ve never felt ashamed of this team, and I’ve *very* frequently felt intense pride and awe and, yes, love, as well.”
Pete Steinfort: “We are one tribe, together, united in pain and passion.”
Kate Miller: “The football brings my family closer together. No matter what, we always have Richmond.”
Donnie Davidson: “We love Richmond. Once addicted to the rollercoaster, there’s no getting off.”
Steve Boyd: “I am Richmond because 10yo me, top deck of Olympic Stand, remembers Kevin Sheedy hugging Tom Hafey on the boundary in the last ¼ of the ’74 GF.”
Jason Dowling with his mum and his brood outside the gates of Heaven (or at least gate 5 of the MCG)
Jason Dowling: “The passion of the Tigers is the best. A bit of a rocky ride, but we love ’em.”
**
A football club is a community, real and imagined. It’s a collection of people all pulling for a single cause, on and off the field. Richmond is a proud club, an old club steeped in the Catholic history of its suburbs’ working class river flats, of outsiders brought into the fold, of hard men soaring like angels above saw-tooth factory roofs, above circumstance. It is a club that’s always brought a crowd together and always will, because for a few fleeting hours each weekend its players – our players – take us far from our everyday lives. They transcend, inspire, they skip onto the grass and our hopes are only with them, wanting only the best for them, in football and in life.
A string of heartbreak losses and our hearts are broken with them. A stirring win in the darkest hour on Anzac Eve and our hearts are stirred with them. There is no going back. We are in this together.
Ben Dobson: “Unconditional”.
Skippygirl (left) with her footy crew, ebullient after a win.
The Skippygirl: “Cos when they *do* win, it’s joyous”.
Kym Croft: “It’s in the blood”.
Terry-anne Angwin: “Four generations”.
Brett Wightman: “I still have no idea why. I just do and have my whole life. Born in 1980.”
Robyn Meggs (left), all smiles at the game with her daughter.
Robyn Meggs: “It’s euphoric, it’s devastating, it’s fun, it’s duty and it’s very, very human. It’s part of our psyche and I wouldn’t swap my Tigers for anything.”
Jane Arnott: “I’m Richmond therefore I am”.
**
Paul Thompson, visiting Melbourne from his job in Kenya, texts in the pall of the game’s end against Fremantle. He took his ailing 84-year-old father to the game, “probably the last he will get to”, with all his memories of watching Jack Dyer play and his favourite Tiger of all time, Don ‘Mopsy’ Fraser. His dad has been a RFC member for 72 years. Highs and lows, he’s seen them all.
“I’m gutted over those last 20 seconds, but dad’s telling me to spark up,” he writes.
“He reckons these Tigers are looking the best he’s seen in many a year.”
I text back, let him know what I think matters. There we all were on a Sunday afternoon, at the ground, in the crowd, together in spirit, and Brandon Ellis bobbed up from a tangle of bodies and his kick sailed high and we all watched as the goal umpire at the Punt Road end planted his feet between the posts and arched his back and the crowd went wild, pandemonium, a guttural roar that surely crossed the river to Hawthorn, South Yarra, a delirium only Richmond people truly know, with all our pent-up yearning and desire.
The three boys I was with danced in the aisle, hugging each other. This is football. This is life.
Monday morning before school, coaxing our seven-year-old to the breakfast table, I ask him to read out the percentages of each team in the morning newspaper, knowing there is good news there. Something to cheer him up.
Dad, he says, I wish we had of beaten GWS.
I tell him I do, too, and that’s why it’s essential we go along again this Saturday night, to barrack, to support, to do all we can to show these players how much we appreciate their courage, bravery, their commitment, the way they make us feel when they all play as one, which is to say when they all play for us.
We go again this weekend because there are things about football, about life, he must learn for himself. If you fear loss it’ll find you. We need to be strong, bold, to take the game on. We need to support our players like we’ve never supported them before.
It might be magical. It might again take us elsewhere. It’s football, anything can happen.
**
Bree McAullay: “I was too young to remember the 1980 premiership. My love of the Tigers was born out of togetherness and emotion through grit and struggle. I love the Club. I feel emotionally attached to it, and ride the emotional rollercoaster every week. I can’t get off the ride and nor do I want to.”
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