It's 7.56pm Wednesday, and in a modest red-brick community hall in the backstreets of Richmond, a man best known to ardent Tiger fans, and talkback sports radio listeners, as "Trout from Woodend", drops to his knees clutching a small tub of paint and brush. An artist is at work. A ringleader of the Official Richmond Cheer Squad, he dabs finishing touches to a banner. Six straight black lines are painted. Every tiger needs its whiskers, especially before a big game.
"He looks like a cat," says Trout, standing up to admire his handiwork. "Adam, could you get the hair dryer and dry the whiskers?"
Welcome, Tiger fans, to a long night of arts and crafts that is the making of the run-through a weekly football tradition from the late 1930s that's created one of the game's most colorful spectacles. It was at the 1939 Grand Final, between Collingwood and Melbourne, that a Sporting Globe reporter was moved to note: "The respective races were decorated with club colors" in a paper lattice so low that "Umpire Coward, on visiting the Collingwood room, had to crawl on his hands and knees for fear of breaking (the banner)."
Since at least the 1960s, Richmond cheer squads have made crepe paper run-throughs to mark the entrance of players onto the arena. Nowadays, it's a central part of the color and movement of the pre-match ritual, and the most visible, prominent activity of a football cheer squad.
"It's our message to the players, to try and inspire them as they run onto the ground," says Alicia Almeida, 32, the squad's chief artist, who makes the banner's creations. "I like to think the caricatures congratulate players on reaching milestones, and it's a way of acknowledging our appreciation for them putting their bodies on the line, what they do for the jumper."
Beneath fluorescent lights, 37 people in socks or barefoot now step gingerly on rolls of black crepe paper woven into a patchwork sheet 25ft high and 60ft long (7.6m by 18.3m) that fits tightly into the hall. It looks a big quilt, each square glistening with sticky tape, criss-crossed lengths 75mm wide, although considerably thinner on 'the door' where the players run through.
"Once they come onto the ground and break the banner, it's game on," says Alicia.
Construction tonight is a carnival atmosphere. The room is filled with volunteers, jokes are shared, with spirits high, and Alicia's five-year-old daughter, Katia, hands out lollies in a plastic lunchbox. Almost all clutch scissors and rolls of sticky-tape, waiting for instructions to be called and words to be stuck down.
“I need an ‘E’,” says Alicia, laying down large letters cut from yellow card that make the slogan. “And I need another “W”. And I need an apostrophe, please. Adam, can you do an apostrophe, please?”
“Everybody off again, it’s not flat,” she says. “Top line only to be stuck!”
It’s a cue for the band of loyal helpers to descend with their tools of the trade and fill the hall with the shrieking noise of pulled sticky-tape. “We’re like one big, happy family, all pitching in,” says Mandy Woodward, 51, from Briar Hill, and a cheer squad member for the past three years. “My job is to cut out the numbers and letters. And cook the sausages.”
Most banner-makers are regulars and usually make up the 24 people permitted onto the ground to raise the aluminium poles supporting the run-through. There’s jovial one-upmanship among the group – a loose, self-appointed hierarchy to their crafts.
“The night starts off with the senior weavers, and then the senior stickers,” says David Ward, a long-standing organiser and committee-member. “And then the apprentice stickers come in.”
I’m calling myself a master weaver,” says Sri Lankan-born Yogi Thurairatnam, 38, from Epping, a member for the past five years and also on the committee.
Many hands tonight make light work, with heightened early-season anticipation attracting a good turn-out from the cheer squad’s 694 members. “It gets finished whenever we finish, depending on how many words or the artwork, or how many people turn up,” says Alicia. “Usually we’re done by about nine o’clock, but a few years ago there was a night when only about three of us turned up. We still got it done.”
New faces among tonight’s crowd include David Hoyle, an anaesthetist from Essendon, here with his 10-year-old daughter, Genevieve. They’ve been Official Richmond Cheer Squad members for three months. “Genevieve switched from supporting Hawthorn to Richmond when she was eight. And, this year, I’ve decided to embrace her jumping on the Tigers band wagon,” says David.
Genevieve’s favourite player? “Dustin Martin,” she says, unequivocally. Why? “I like the way he gets about, and I like his tackles.”
Gerard Egan, 48, the cheer squad’s chairman, who joined as a junior member in 1977, says the group can be rightly proud of the banners it holds up each week. “We’re the only cheer squad in the league that does its own artwork. All the other clubs pay a professional artist to create their images, but we do it all in-house.”
And the slogans? “About three or four of us come up with those each week,” he says. “But we’re open to suggestions. If anybody has a good idea, they can always let us know.”
Egan says cheer squad members are sworn to secrecy about the message on each banner before they’re unfurled on the ground. But, with a particularly popular ruckman having played 99 career games, and become a Tiger cult hero, it’s no big secret as to who might be on the banner this Friday night. Thing is, what words rhyme with mullet?
Tiger, tiger burning bright.
*Truth is, the sum total of my helping was sticky-taping down one “R”, and taste-testing Mandy’s sausages. They’re good!
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