Oh we're from Tigerland
Stories of being Richmond

Lucy Sweetman, 9, East Melbourne

Favourite player
Trent Cotchin - “He’s a really good player and he’s the captain and his number is nine and I’m nine [years old]”.

“It was a night game and it was quite scary at the start to go on,” she says. “But it was fun at the end because you could run around the MCG giving everyone a high-five.”

Welcome to the wonderful football world of Lucy Sweetman, nine years old, and she’s debuted on the MCG already, at an Auskick game last year, and oh boy she’s excited about her first season of girls footy this year with the Parkside Devils in Alphington. Her coach says he’ll put her in the ruck. She’s got all the makings of a star.

I met Lucy in the crowd last Thursday night, my eyes only for those in yellow and black, as she stood beside the players’ race cheering on our team (and later that night I spotted her on the TV replay!). At the game with her mum and granny, their story was of three generations of Richmond love, passing from a daughter, to a daughter, to a daughter.

Tiger mum and her girls: Katherine off to a game with her two cubs, Olivia, 11, and Lucy, 9.

But their Tiger tale begins elsewhere, in Kalgoorlie, West Australia. It’s where Lucy’s great-grandfather was born in 1905, the son of a miner, and where he barracked for Boulder City – ‘the Tigers’ – a foundation club in the now five-team Goldfields Football League. He came to Melbourne during the Great Depression, looking for work, transferred his football loyalties to Richmond’s Tigers, took odd jobs, then took off to fight the Japanese in Papua New Guinea. On return, he got work at a post office, became a father to a daughter, and settled into a life in Reservoir.

“It was all black and white around there,” says Leonie, Lucy’s maternal granny, who turns 70 the day we play Brisbane in Round 4, of her childhood home in the heart of Collingwood’s old metropolitan recruiting zone. “All the local kids were Magpies, and my mother was a Carlton girl, but I followed my father’s team.”

And ever since, none in this linage have looked elsewhere.

“I don’t think we had any choice, I think mum brainwashed us as soon as she could,” laughs Katherine, 41, Lucy’s mum and the middle of Leonie’s three daughters, all of whom are Richmond.

“Dad goes for Geelong, but I guess mum got us first before he had any chance.”

Unlike Leonie, Katherine fell for a man who followed her beloved Tigers. It was 1995 and she was a 19-year-old student at La Trobe University, and Richmond were having a breakout year and she met her husband-to-be, Brett, an Adelaide boy who’d moved to Melbourne and was swayed to Tigerland by an old family friend, Reg Henderson, who in the late 1930s played 28 games and kicked eight goals for the yellow and black.

Their two daughters could only ever go for one team.

“Mum and dad and my older sister are all Richmond, so I didn’t really have a choice,” says Lucy.

Sometimes it’s in the blood, and that’s all there is to it.

 
Carn the Devils!: Lucy showing off her orange mouth-guard (her boots are pink) and Parkside Devils playing top for this upcoming season.

In Grade 4 at Alphington Primary School, Lucy enjoys going to the footy with her family where at the MCG they sit near the players’ race. She’ll be there again this Thursday night (“I’ll miss swimming again”), with stars in her eyes, high-fiving the players as they come-and-go from the field, dreaming of what one day might be.

Lucy is a player. She’s 144cm tall, weighs 35.6kg, is a right-foot kick (about 15 metres, but getting longer all the time), and last season joined about 50 other girls for her first season of Auskick. Now she’s to play in the ruck for the Parkside Devil’s U10s side.

She watched the recent AFLW games, and at half-time during the Carlton vs Brisbane Lions women’s match was on the ground at half-time playing exhibition game. She hopes one day Richmond might have a team in the league so there’s a club she can aspire to.

“The best thing about the game is playing with all your friends from school, and you get to know a lot more friends,” she says.

MCG debut: Playing an Auskick grid game last season.

It’s an opportunity to participate that was unavailable to earlier generations of women. Leonie, a retired teacher living now in Eltham, recalls wanting to play the game when at school at Merrilands High in Reservoir in the early 1960s, but being thwarted by her father. Girls at the school put together a football team for a one-off game against Collingwood’s VFL team, raising money for charity, but her dad wouldn’t let her join.

“He was very strict and didn’t think girls should play,” she says. “All my girlfriends played and I had to be a trainer for the team. I was devastated.”

Not that it’s stopped her active involvement in the sport, as a Richmond barracker and de facto recruiter. She went to school with Len Thompson (a Collingwood club captain, Brownlow medallist, five-times B&F winner), trained at Coburg Teachers’ College with Peter McKenna (Collingwood’s leading goalkicker 1967-74), but through her work she’s always been an active agent for Richmond.

“I had a little boy from a Collingwood-mad family in my class once and her mother complained because one day he changed over to Richmond,” she says.

“We used to have a tipping competition because I decided it was good for their maths. I used to convince the whole grade that if you didn’t have a team you barrack for Richmond.”

Teaching at Eltham North Primary, she also had contact with Richmond player Nick Vlastuin and his family. She taught Nick’s older brother and sister, and knows his mother well from her role as school council president.

“I didn’t teach Nick, except in the odd lesson,” she says, before adding, with a grin: “He was a naughty boy!”. 

All in the family: Lucy by the boundary hanging out with her Tiger pals. 

Now to this Thursday night, and the continuation of a rivalry that seems as old as the river that runs from Collingwood to Richmond.

For Katherine, being at the game with her mother, her husband and their two daughters, is reward enough. “I love watching my girls watching our players and getting inspired by them. We’re always positive with the girls and our players, whether we win, lose or draw. We want to encourage them to be the very best they can be.”

“I’d like to see them win a premiership, but for me seeing them out there is enough, enjoying the experience and playing as a team. That’s what I enjoy most about being a supporter.”

Nine-year-old Lucy says that’s all good and fine, but she also wants another win!

“I hope they can do it. By ten points.”

We hope so also, Lucy, but let’s make it by twenty!

Go Tiges!

If you would like to nominate a Richmond fan who has a story to tell about their barracking please email Dugald Jellie with details: dugaldjellie@gmail.com

For reading on Carlton’s wrongheaded banner last Thursday night, and all the ways we love Dusty, see www.tigertigerburningbright.com.au