While the Tigers play Collingwood tonight I will be airborne, flying back from Perth to Canberra. I will be restless in my seat not knowing how we’re going. How’s Jack playing? Has he settled down this week? Is Lids stepping up? Has Jake King snared a couple again? Has Jackson shut down Swan? Is Mick Malthouse irate yet (there is such a sublime pleasure watching Mick Malthouse lose it)? Are we winning? Have we won? Round and round these questions will spin.
It’s absurd in this age of high technology, but when flying there’s no way of knowing the live football scores unless one is prepared to hassle the pilots to radio a control tower somewhere to get an update. This may have been possible before the terrorist locks were added to the cockpit doors. A quietly desperate Tigers fan could use the cover of using the forward toilets as an opportunity to knock on the door, get into a brief discussion with the pilots about the weather then the flight then sport then AFL then say ‘oh by the way, big game tonight, any chance of a score update?’. Knocking on the cockpit door these days probably sees one wrestled to the ground by other passengers who would obviously assume the anxious Tigers fan carrying on up the front is actually a nervous terrorist.
I’ve been on the road for work this week. On Monday and Tuesday I was in Alice Springs. The central desert region is green at the moment, and incredibly so. There’s been so much rain in the centre. The water has freshened everything up, including the oval at Traeger Park, Alice Spring’s main football ground. That was where the Tigers were to play in the pre-season. The game was cancelled because of the weather. Because of the threat of severe wind and rain. By that standard, every match ever played at Waverley Park should have been cancelled. It was a bugger because I was in Alice that week too, and as an absentee fan, I was cruelly robbed of a rare and precious chance to watch a game.
There’s an oddly persistent connection between my love of Richmond and the Alice Springs / central desert region. My work takes me out there often. In May 2005, I was staying at Yulara at Uluru after a trip out to work with remote Aboriginal communities in the region. It was Round 10 of the AFL Season that week. I was on my own watching the Richmond-Melbourne game live when Nathan Brown’s right leg and his career snapped in two. We’ll all remember how shocking that was. Like Robert Walls, I had to switch the telly off. I headed out to the lobby where I found one of the local traditional owners relaxing. No TVs or radios in sight. We got talking footy and I asked if he’d seen Nathan’s leg break. He looked across at me and, dead pan, said ‘No, but I heard it...’!
On a recent trip out to work with one of the town camps in Alice, I was reading the ‘Richo’ biography by Martin Flanagan. (If you haven’t read that yet, you’re missing out big time.) At their request, I was going out to help the residents to get their heads around some Western ideas of property ownership, control and management. I decided I’d take the Richo book out as a physical prop, something I could use to demonstrate some of the concepts. At one level, this was a great move because for hours the conversation flowed - with Richo stories, opinions about Richo, favourite Richo moments, hilarious Richo recollections, and the unanimous agreement that Richo was a genuine champ and special bloke. A bad move at another level because we didn’t get very far with the real business of the day... By the way Richo, if you’re reading this, that mob hounded me to bring the real Richo out on one of my trips. Are you up for it?
Now RFC runs the ‘Tigers in the Territory’ program, and as I understand it, has a staff member based in Alice. Next time I go out to Alice, I’ll see if I can catch up with the program and blog an update for us all. Intuitively, I sense there’s going to be a great affinity between Richmond and that region. I think the local traditional owners are ‘singing’ Richmond into the region so their young boys may get their chances...
As I fly back home from a busy week away, granted I won’t be able to follow tonight’s game live, but I’ll be barracking, quietly slipping into the usual long flight sleepy trance to the mantra ‘eat them alive, Tigers, eat them alive’.
