“I’m hoping we win, I’m pretty positive,” says Wendy Kelly, 65, before the bounce, the two of us seated in a wheelchair bay behind the Coventry End goals. Not more than 15 seconds later and Brett Deledio gathers the centre tap, wheels around, accelerates, and kicks a goal on his right from about 65 metres out.
We look at each other. This day might be very special. I’m with Wendy. Both of us wear Yellow and Black. We’re behind the goals. We’re at the football.
I had met Wendy at a training session and, as is the way, we talked about football and Richmond. It’s our common language. She was in a motorised scooter adorned with Tiger stickers and keepsakes, including a fluffy toy tiger in a Richmond jumper. I was wearing a homemade Tiger T-shirt.
I took a photograph of her at Punt Road standing with Trent Cotchin, her idol. A sticker on the back of her scooter reads: “I’ve been COTCHED!” She’s member No. 159 of the ‘Cotch Crew’. Her other favourite player is the “Push-up King”, but she likes ‘Cotchy’ more because he “used to play football in Reservoir”, the suburb she calls home.
Wendy goes to all games in Melbourne and has followed Richmond since she was eight. We arrange to see a match together, which finds us in the wonderful circumstance of sitting behind the Richmond cheer squad, participating in something that’s a pleasure for us both – watching the Tigers play a game of football.
**
Sunday’s game was a deeply satisfying win. I had wanted to sub-title this week’s posting “in acclaim of the back six”, but again I cannot ignore the efforts of Luke McGuane. Other players were better, accumulated more possessions, took more marks, laid more tackles, kicked more goals, but there’s something about ‘Cool Hand’ Luke in these past three weeks that’s irresistible. Long may it continue (but more on that later).
Good things happened mostly all afternoon. Watching with Wendy, I ask her opinion of players as they weave into the action. Deledio? “He’s magic”. Shane Edwards? “He’s grouse, he gets in and has a go.” Jake King? “He’ll get in and have a go, he’s not scared, he’ll jump for the ball. He’s just a champion.”
I tell Wendy I really like watching Tyrone Vickery. I say I think he plays the game with dignity, and athleticism, and I love watching him split open packs. “My son-in-law loves him too,” she says.
In the second and last quarters, with Richmond pressing the Lockett End, both of us admire, close up, the tenacity and fearlessness with which Steve Morris attacks the ball. “C’mon Stevie,” says Wendy. She says she met him once at training and told him he’s a champion, just like his father. “He said to me, ‘I’ve got a bit to catch up to him’.”
On my notebook, random thoughts are recorded.
An Alex Rance overlap. Dan Jackson’s tackle on Tory Dickson. Shane Edwards’ spells at full-forward (“the bloke’s a livewire, he’s dangerous”). Deledio’s third-quarter running goal (“he’s the icing, can do things others can’t”). Chris Knights’ first game in Yellow and Black (“looks a readymade footballer”). And, Ivan Maric’s work around the ground (“playing with light feet”, texts ‘Auntie Donnie’, whom with usually I watch the games).
I record the half-time score against: 3. 3 (21). It’s a shut-out. Hardly ever do you lose a game of footy conceding only three goals in a half.
One of these goals had come from a Dylan Grimes error, and this is noted. “Ball bounces off DG’s chest late in the second, his first mistake in almost six quarters of football. What do we learn? The man is fallible.”
My observations of Dylan otherwise are all about how he kicks into space, his mapping of the play, his understanding of spatial orientation, and that he and Alex (Rance) are trainee pilots. “Are aviators better footballers?” I write. “Do any other footballers know the meaning of yaw?”
I also write in my notebook: “How good is Troy Chaplin?” It’s a rhetorical question, of course, because we all know he’s very good. Last week I had the privilege of watching the game with his parents. This week I watch his game with special intent.
The football department’s match review sessions no doubt discuss his body work off the ball, his defensive spoils, tackles, and clean ball delivery to a good option. Watching a replay of the game, a Foxtel commentator offers two succinct appraisals of his game --“steady head”, “good ball use” – which seems fair comment.
But in the aesthetic of football – and like all spectator sports, this game is all about the visual – he looks a throwback to an earlier time. Troy Chaplin could be from a 1920s footy card. Fancy hair cuts, tattoos and fluorescent boots are not for him. To me, he is as a dour defender should look – all broad shoulders, and as if pulled from an advert for Brylcream, or boot polish. Here is a hard-working and honest footballer, unswayed by the game’s gimmickry.
Shaun Grigg plays his best game of the year. Chris Newman is all poise and polish. Dustin Martin is unstoppable.
**
Wendy tells me she was the youngest of six children, growing up in Dorcas Street in South Melbourne. Her father drove horse floats for a trainer, her mother worked in the peanut butter factory in Port Melbourne. The family moved to Reservoir, where she lives now with her two daughters (one barracks for Collingwood, the other Richmond), and four grandchildren.
She says she fell from a taxi about 15 years ago, damaging her knee, and putting her in a scooter. Then, in October 2008, she was struck by a car coming out of a driveway. It smashed her femur and, she says, gave her a “very bad knock to the head”.
“Because of the accident I wasn’t able to come to the footy for a while,” she says. “I had to wait for the TAC to buy me a new scooter.”
Wendy parks her scooter at the football most weeks besides Con, another Tiger in a wheelchair, whose passion is undimmed by cerebral palsy. And, sitting to my left, is Darren Kent, 45, from Swan Hill, here today with his son Tobias, who is celebrating his eighth birthday.
Among the crowd’s roar in the third quarter – as it rains goals at our end – I have ears only for Darren’s story. He was up before seven o’clock to catch a train to Melbourne. “It’s 14 hours of travelling, just for the game,” he says. “We’re going home tonight, we’ll be back at midnight.”
He tells me he was working as a rigger at the Sydney Entertainment Centre in 1991 when a workplace accident changed his life. “They winched the lights up too quick,” he says. “I was underneath doing the plugging when four tons of lighting truss fell on me. I was 10 months in a coma and didn’t know who I was when I woke up.”
After the accident, Darren moved to Swan Hill, from where he regularly journeys to Richmond games. “I’ve been coming to see the Tigers play since I was about five years old,” he says. His son says his favourite player is Jack Riewoldt (“because he’s a really good kicker, he’s got a lot of skills”). Darren has four children and a loving partner. Her name is Hope.
**
I could write an essay about the way Trent Cotchin, Brett Deledio and Dustin Martin played on Sunday, but I won’t. These three can raffle the Brownlow votes. There’s ample opportunity to write about them as the season unfolds. Besides, the real measure of a player is in times of adversity. The winning is easy. It’s the losing that’s hard.
My indulgence this week is (again) for Reece Conca. I wrote last week of his enthusiasm for congratulating teammates with a hug when they kick a goal. He is of Italian heritage. He is not shy about displaying emotions. On Twitter, before the game, one Richmond supporter created a hash tag (#concacuddle) in his honour. I believe it should be made into a T-shirt.
What I loved on Sunday was his hugging of the opposition. His bear-hug tackle of Brett Goodes in the second quarter epitomised the team’s defensive pressure all day. Dan Jackson nailed six tackles. Shaun Grigg, Shane Edwards and Reece all had five. He is 20 years old. He plays with a maturity beyond his years.
My indulgence is also for Jake King.
Martin Flanagan, the country’s best writer about the culture of a game so many of us cherish, in The Saturday Age wrote of the sport’s high drama. “A football ground is a psychological space like the stage in a theatre,” he said. “Great players – Dermott Brereton and Robert DiPierdomenico to name but two – grow to fill that space.”
On reading this, I thought at once of Jake King – of his high trapeze act the other week, of how the crowd adores him, and how he commands space on a football field significantly larger than his stature. Halfway through the third quarter on Sunday, about to be tackled in the forward pocket, he rose in the air and punched the ball clear to his unmarked captain.
It was an act perfect in its simplicity. He read the game around him, worked out the angles, and knocked a handpass from Tyrone Vickery onto Trent Cotchin, who delivered to Jack. In the sequence of play, Jake King was the only player not to gain a possession – but he was the one who created the play, who imagined how it might be. It was a deft touch, another ‘Kingy’ cameo.
And, lastly, Luke McGuane. I shouldn’t write at length about him again,* but his game was another standout. Danny Frawley, in the commentary box, sang his praises in the second quarter. “The thing about Luke McGuane, he attracts the ball,” he said. “He just leads. He’s a leading machine.”
When he crashed into the hoardings, in the second quarter, Wendy says: “He hit that hard”. Another in the crowd calls out: “Is the fence okay?” I could hear the Luke McGuane Appreciation Society growing. A hitherto bit player in the backline has now become an attacking cudgel. These past three games, he’s played like a man with his back to the wall. He’s got nothing to lose. He’s going for broke. He rightfully can be proud of the player he’s made himself into.
**
After the game, in an on-ground piece-to-camera with Barry Hall, our captain is cautious in his celebrations, and offers encouragement to old Footscray supporters. He “can see some good signs for the Bulldogs,” he says. It’s a diplomacy that speaks of his measured nature, his maturity, his understanding of how these things are.
He knows there’s nothing to be gained in gloating about drubbing another club that has its off-field uncertainties and last season struggled on the field. Football is a fierce game, a brutal pursuit, and like all games it is unbecoming to rejoice overly in another’s misfortune.
Next Saturday, my team plays the largest sporting club in Australia. It is a powerful entity, with a proud history and an admirable culture. It is a club steeped in folklore, that looks after its own, and extends its arm of acceptance to all. It is a club that deserves respect.
Sitting beside Wendy in seat S56, directly behind the goal posts, both she and I think our team can beat Collingwood. I am sure they will. And, when they do, I hope all who walk from the MCG late on Saturday afternoon will do so with humility and dignity. We’ve had our time at the bottom, we know how hardship feels.
Next Saturday, if our song is to be sung, I will think of Wendy, and how she might feel in being part of the new-found success of our club. She’s a kind-hearted woman. She is a loyal woman. She’s a Tiger woman. I hope it’s her time to sit in the sun.
Tiger, tiger, burning bright.
*Unless he kicks five goals on Saturday, and assists in many others.
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