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Stories of being Richmond

Faouzi Daghistani, 46, Thomastown (via Richmond via Tripoli)

Favourite all-time Richmond player
Michael Roach - “I don’t have many favourite players, I just love the team, but he was an excitement machine.”

Favourite current Richmond player
Trent Cotchin - “It has to be him, he’s grown on me. Some of the stuff he does is just pure, freaky skills. He’s gone through hard times, in terms of criticism of his leadership, but he’s worked through that. I don’t think he’s appreciated enough.”

This story is personal. I know Faouzi – or at least knew him – when our lives crossed at a Melbourne newspaper. All these years later, the football and Richmond bring us together again, and I catch a train to Thomastown, up the South Morang line, the heart of old Collingwood country, and there’s a mosque by the station and I ride my bicycle through brick veneer suburbia to his front door and cannot help but smile when he opens it.

Faouzi has this effect. It’s been twenty years, and his four children have taken the day off school to meet me, be in a photograph. His three girls, they’re gorgeous. His eldest, a boy, he looks a Tiger.

He makes a cup of coffee and I apologise, knowing it’s Ramadan and he’s fasting, no food or drink from sunrise and sunset. Pray for little mercies: it falls over winter solstice. Nights are long, days short.

But first, there’s football to talk, and his wonderful Richmond stories. Faouzi grew up in the suburb, knew its streets, shortcuts, mingled with the local kids, the ratbag Carlton supporters – miscreants, all of them – and came to know all the ins-and-outs of its footy club, including the intimate contract details of its players!

He’s that sort of bloke, Faouzi. Finds his way to the heart of a matter, trusting and trusted, personable, funny, with a mischievous glint. He tells me he bailed-up the AFL chief, Gillon McLachlan, at the league’s annual Iftar dinner. Gave him feedback on pre-game entertainment. But that’s another story.

“We used to regularly go to the club after school and just hang around,” he explains. “It was our backyard.”

“We used to think it was normal to just sit around in reception, I remember its glass door, and we’d watch the players come in-and-out. The lady at the desk, I think her name was Leonie, she had no problem with it. She let us sit there until 6.30 when she closed-up. Then it was time to go home.”

As is the way with Faouzi – right spot, right time – and soon enough bigger doors opened.

Tiger smiles: A proud dad at the footy with two of his girls, Rhaneem and Mariam.

Faouzi Daghistani was born in Tripoli, Lebanon, a place he has no childhood memory of. He was two when his parents migrated (his three brothers are all Melbourne born). His father took work at CUB breweries, then a job with the tramways – as a conductor, then driver – based at the Kew Depot until retirement.

Faouzi was raised in Richmond, in a sixth floor flat in a Housing Commission tower on Highett Street, then a weatherboard house on the slopes of Richmond Hill, in Union Street, one west of Lennox. He began school at Richmond West Primary; moved in Grade 4 to Yarra Park Primary on the crest of Punt Road.

Football was the lingua franca of the playground, he remembers. It was the late 1970s and north Richmond was a hub of multiculturalism, with the newest Vietnamese arrivals adding to layers of Turks, Yugoslavs, Greeks and Cypriots in the public housing towers.

“We didn’t judge people on nationality,” says Faouzi.

“My best friend in the flats was a guy who had just come from England. They were your friends or they weren’t, and that was about it.”

Unfortunately, he says, many of his classmates at Yarra Park Primary were Carlton supporters, and when his school was chosen to play on the MCG for the Big M Little League, he wore blue and red.

“We represented Melbourne, we played Fitzroy.”

At Richmond High (now Melbourne Girls College), Faouzi found loopholes into the game, and into Richmond. At first, it was through selling Saturday afternoon Herald’s at the MCG, twenty cents a paper, to the outgoing crowd. Faouzi took the initiative. A roller door on the Southern Stand opened at three-quarter time, allowing free admission, and he ducked in, to watch the footy and sell his bundle of fifty papers. Most other paperboys waited outside.  

“I saw Richmond play in the 1982 Grand Final. I went to my friend’s house on Rowena Parade, off Punt Road, and we watched the first half there. Then we went to work, selling papers when the doors opened at three-quarter time. I was eleven.”

Several years later, he found himself as a witness to the inside workings of a club. “Everyone was required to do work experience at the end of high school, and I thought the only place I was going to do it is Richmond Football Club,” he explains.

He lodged paperwork, and was given two-weeks assisting Russell Cox, the club’s then football manager. Come the end of his stint, Russell appreciated Faouzi’s passion and work ethic. “He said he couldn’t pay me, but if I was willing to come in after school he’d have work for me every day. I ended up staying another six months.”

It was 1986, and Richmond were lowly on the ladder, and struggling off-field – burdened with heavy debt and decrepit facilities – unrecognisable to the club they are now.

“I’d finish school, go straight over to the club, do whatever they wanted me to do.”

This included filing documentation, all manual work, including clip ring binder folders with sensitive trade secrets. He was asked regularly to fetch and file the player’s contracts, and he’d see the incentive clauses, how much they were paid per game, some with goal-kicking bonuses. A different game back then.

“Russell’s job was to help with all the recruiting,” says Faouzi. “I remember one afternoon being in his office and he was on the phone having this intense conversation. I didn’t know what it was about. Two days later they were having drinks and celebrating some guy called Michael Mitchell they’d signed from Claremont in the WAFL.”

The day after Faouzi finished high school he found work – the first of a series of jobs that took him to the Age newspaper, to our connection.

Again, it’s typical Faouzi. In mid-1989, he walked into a CES job office on High Street, Preston, found a card for printing work in Spencer Street, and an interview was arranged. The following morning, he fronted up to security at the offices of The Age, 250 Spencer Street, for his appointment.

Reception called human resources. They had no record of an interview.

Faouzi telephoned the CES job office, they said, yes, it was Spencer Street, but in Preston.

“I said the only Spencer Street I know is in the city.”

Making apologies at the security desk, a woman from the newspaper’s HR called down and asked to speak to him. “She said, ‘I don’t know what you’re here for because there’s no interview for you and there’s nothing in printing, but we’ve just had some people leave the mail room, and if you’re interested you can have an interview this afternoon.”

He had the interview, was asked back for a medical (Sister Margaret, he says, had him do push-ups and give a urine sample), and the following day was in the maelstrom of a newspaper’s mailroom in print journalism’s heyday.

“It was not unusual in those days for us to sort through twelve mail bags a day.”

Diligence to a task had him elevated soon enough to the editorial floor, as an assistant. Nothing got passed Faouzi. “We always knew who were the workers, who were the hiders,” he says. “We knew there were a couple of them who were professional hiders.”

It’s a delicate craft, making oneself invisible in an open-plan office, and Faouzi tells a hilarious story of one cushy journo (he insists the name be off-the-record), who while sneaking out a back exit one afternoon was spotted by the news editor, Sean O’Connor, a gruff South African with a sense of humour as dry as the Kalahari. He hailed him over. Had a late job for him. A breaking story. Needed him to go up to the ski fields, stay overnight, go looking for a group of schoolboys lost in the snow.

We talk about the sports reporters and he remembers them all. Rohan Connolly, Patrick Smith, Stephen Reilly, Greg Denham (“a real, real gentleman”), Greg Baum, Ashley Browne, Martin Flanagan (“he’s fantastic, I saw him about a year ago and he just walked up to me in the crowd, ‘g’day Faouzi’, fantastic guy”).

Lebanon's finest: a centre-half-back line of faith and conviction - Faouzi, Bachar and Faouzi's dad, Gassan.

It is why I’m at his house, to talk sport, and Richmond, and for this week what it might be to be Muslim and a barracker at the football. First up, his thoughts on Bachar Houli?

“I really, really respect the guy, total gentlemen,” he says.

“He is such an obvious representation of a Muslim player, with the beard. There’s never as much talk about [Gold Coast player] Adam Saad being Muslim. Bachar’s gone out there, he’s had stuff written about him that he’s gone to Hajj [the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca], he organises the Iftar dinners. The focus is on him.”

Faouzi has attended two of Bachar’s Iftar dinners, a celebratory evening meal held at sunset to break the daily Ramadan fast. One was at the Richmond Football Club, the other at the MCG. He says he thinks Houli is judged harshly sometimes by other fans, because of his faith.

“Bachar does everything good, but during Ramadan, if he has a miskick or makes a mistake, it’s often blamed on his fasting. I hear it in the crowd, read it on fan forums, the religious aspect of Bachar is mentioned in a negative light.”

“I think he’s had a huge effect on a lot of our players. I think those players are all better for having Bachar around.”

I tell Faouzi I’ve always wanted Bachar and his family to come over to my house to taste my homemade babaganoush. 

**

Faouzi runs a pizza shop in Coburg. Newlands Pizza. A family business, owned by him and his brothers. Life looks to have treated him well. He’s come a long way from the Housing Commission towers in north Richmond, met many people along the way, is remembered, has a family he loves and cherishes, with his eldest boy soon to finish school and start life like he once did.

On the day we meet, he’s preparing to host a family dinner at sunset; his parents, brothers, all the cousins, all celebrating their togetherness, faith, their blessings. In part, it’s what Ramadan is about; a month for cleansing the soul, appreciating what is important – family, happiness, good health, football.

The Daghistanis get together and it’s a common migrant story. All his brothers, all their children, they’re all Richmond crazy, and their father hardly knows what the fuss is about.

“I think we’ve dragged my dad to three or four games in his whole life.”

Hallowed turf: Faouzi and Rhaneem on the MCG at the Punt Road end for kick-to-kick after a game (with cameo in the back from cheer squad stalwart, Yogi).

Ramadan ends on Saturday. Sunday is Eid, the festival of breaking the fast – and the football. Bachar will be there, on the ground. Faouzi will be there, in the stands with his family, like he is for every home-and-away game in Melbourne, with his Premiership Circle reserved seats, behind the goals at the Punt Road end.

As with all of us – whoever we are, whatever our stories may be, however strong our ties with Richmond – he’ll be barracking. Harder than ever this week, expunging all the torment of Carlton, putting them to the sword, hoping – come sunset – we all sing a song, feasting on victory.

Go Tiges!

And go Faouzi and his family and all Richmond supporters celebrating Eid this Sunday!

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 some fine words and votes for ‘the Benny’ by Sean Ross (and his sparkling comments on Shai Bolton), and country football filmmaker Malcolm McKinnon’s lovely reflections on Richmond and a father-son relationship, see www.tigertigerburningbright.com.au