It is one of league football's most enduring rivalries.

It stretches back nearly 100 years.

It has fuelled a multitude of tough, ferocious, enthralling contests.

It is Richmond v Carlton . . . 

These two clubs love to hate each other and, traditionally, attract huge crowds to their on-field battles.

The strong Richmond-Carlton rivalry surfaced around the time the Tigers started to put their initial stamp on the league football competition, which was about a decade after leaving the VFA and entering the then VFL in 1908.

A struggling Richmond lost its first 24 league matches against Carlton (1908-17), but by 1920 the Tigers had become a force to be reckoned with.

Tickets to the Round 1 Season Opener against Carlton are available now

They captured their first VFL premiership, when they knocked over another bitter foe, Collingwood, in that season's Grand Final.

The following year Richmond made it back-to-back premierships, downing Carlton in a dour, low-scoring Grand Final by just four points . . . and a rip-roaring rivalry was born.

In 1932, Richmond captured its third league premiership, when it beat the Blues by nine points in a hard-hitting, thrilling Grand Final.

Three years later, the Tigers defeated Carlton by 21 points in the first semi-final of ’35, but that was to be the last finals encounter between the two clubs for more than 30 years.

Richmond broke a 20-year finals drought when it made the September play-offs in 1967, and no prizes for guessing who the Tigers met first-up! 

A Richmond team, with no previous finals experience, under the astute guidance of second-year league coach Tommy Hafey, lined up against Carlton in the ’67 second semi-final.

With teenage key-forward sensation Royce Hart leading the way (six goals in a dazzling display), the Tigers whipped the Blues by 40 points, en route to their first premiership in 24 years.

The Richmond-Carlton rivalry, which had bubbled beneath the surface during the Tigers’ lengthy spell in the football wilderness from the 1950s, up until the late 1960s, was about to reach boiling point . . .

In the ensuing seasons, ‘Hafey’s Heroes’, as they became known, thrived on the big-occasion matches against Carlton.

Tiger big guns such as Bill Barrot, Kevin Sheedy, Francis Bourke, Dick Clay, Kevin Bartlett, Michael Green and Royce Hart seemed to save their best for the Navy Blues – and their best sure was something to behold!

'Bustling' Billy Barrot's eight-goal effort, after being shifted to full-forward in a crucial late-season clash with Carlton in 1969, at the stadium formerly known as Princes Park, springs immediately to mind. 

A month or so later, Barrot strutted his stuff on football’s biggest stage, booting three goals in the Grand Final against the Blues, after another mid-match move to full-forward, and helping lift the Tigers to their seventh premiership. 

Mike Green dominated in the ruck that day against Carlton colossus John Nicholls, while Kevin Bartlett was his customary ball-magnet self, providing the team with enormous drive.

Four years later, K. Sheedy's three-goal first quarter blitz against Carlton in the 1973 Grand Final provided the impetus for Richmond’s ‘Day of Atonement’, along with ‘little’ Laurie Fowler’s flying knockout of the Blues’ inspirational leader ‘Big Nick’ (John Nicholls), only minutes into the epic encounter.

Get all the match day information for the Season Opener against Carlton

The Tigers were never going to lose that ’73 premiership-decider, following the shock defeat at the hands of their traditional rivals in the previous year’s Grand Final goal-feast. 

Sheedy kick-started the Yellow and Black engine that day, Neil Balme provided the physicality in no uncertain manner, and Royce was Royce – bloody brilliant, notwithstanding the fact he was nursing a nagging knee injury.

Fast-forward to 1980 . . .

Hafey had departed Richmond by this stage, but the Tigers, under Tony Jewell’s coaching stewardship, were roaring again following a brief decline.

At the forefront of Richmond’s resurrection was the seemingly ageless Kevin Bartlett, who had reinvented himself as a damaging half-forward, after being one of the competition’s premier rovers for many years.

In the qualifying final of 1980, Bartlett, despite being in the twilight of his magnificent league career, bamboozled the Blues with a brilliant six-goal performance, which inspired the Tigers to an upset win, and sent them on the path to their 10^th league premiership three weeks later.

The startling quarter-time stoush in that ’80 qualifying final, between respective coaches Jewell (Richmond) and ‘Percy’ Jones (Carlton), further heightened the rivalry between the two clubs.

From 1969-1982, Richmond and Carlton furiously fought each other in four Grand Finals (’69, ’72, ’73 and ’82), for two premierships apiece, along with a stack of other gripping finals clashes.

Although Tigers v Blues finals meetings have been scarce in the two decades-plus since, it’s clear this famous rivalry is still intense.

We eagerly await the next chapter in the rivalry, which will unfold at the MCG on Thursday, March 24, when the two teams kick off the AFL’s 2016 season.

In the meantime, for a fascinating insight into just how powerful the Richmond-Carlton rivalry was throughout Tommy Hafey’s decade-long, coaching reign at Tigerland, take a look at these quotes from some of the key protagonists from both clubs at the time, courtesy of Elliot Cartledge’s excellent book, ‘The Hafey Years’ . . .

Three-time Carlton premiership star and later Richmond coach Robert Walls:  “With Carlton-Richmond games you wanted to earn respect.  If the opposition didn’t like you, you knew you had begrudgingly earned their respect.  There were plenty of Richmond players who didn’t like me and I didn’t go out of my way to socialise with them.  I didn’t want to get to know them . . . They were filthy that we had beaten them in ’72 and whatever . . . whatever, they were going to win in ’73.  Nicholls got knocked out, Southby got a broken jaw, McKay got knocked around.  I would think from that point on, there were Carlton players who were not prepared to speak to Richmond people, ever.  I wasn’t that way.  Mind you, I didn’t like them much, but time moves on.” 

Dynamic Richmond administrator Graeme Richmond:  “I’ll tell you quite truthfully . . . of the magnificent premierships we did win, and the magnificent players who played in them, they were some I truly expected us to win.  But the memories that hold the deepest, bitterest . . . cut into me . . . are the ones we lost in ’72 and ’82 (to Carlton).  Because we had sides that were good enough, and we blew it.  And somehow or another, losing at Richmond was a philosophy that we never had any part of.”

Three-time Carlton key premiership player David McKay:  “From a Carlton perspective, we always found Richmond to be a tough and difficult opponent, particularly in the early 1970s.  Graeme Richmond was a very ruthless person and would send blokes out to damage you . . . Francis Bourke would have to be the toughest competitor I saw.  He hated losing and would do anything to win.  He may not have been as blessed with the same talent as some of his teammates, but he more than made up for it with absolute sheer determination . . . The clashes between Carlton and Richmond really set a benchmark for the way football was being played.  It gave the future of football a terrific foundation.”

Three-time Richmond premiership hero and Team of the Century member Kevin Sheedy:  “I had a disease; I knew exactly what I was doing.  I was ruthless and calculating and I don’t hold back on that at all.  In ’73 that was the deal.  Shit happens.  Move on.  It was a tough, ruthless game back then.  It was war between the suburbs.  That’s what made people go there and watch there and think, ‘What’s going to happen?’  There’s no way known you would go there and think Laurie Fowler is going to run through ‘Big Nick’.  There’s no way you’d think Neil Balme would do what he did to Southby, but it happened.”

Dual Richmond pivotal premiership player Neil Balme:  “It wasn’t revenge so much as deliverance (in the 1973 Grand Final).  It wasn’t vengeful . . . it was just that we felt we should have won the year before and we weren’t going to let that happen again.  It was a much more aggressive, brutal game back then . . . I never did anything on the football field in a bad temper and I’m not an aggressive person.  But footy’s footy and it’s very competitive and I was part of a team that thrived on aggression . . . We went out and played and it was us against them . . . it was part of our intimidation and aggressive nature of our team.”