Konrad Marshall, the 2019 Harry Gordon Sports Journalist of the Year, began his journey inside the Richmond Football Club in 2016 and he was embedded in the club through the premiership season of 2017 and the club’s successful finals campaign of 2019. He understands the club and its methods better than any observer, other than those who are part of Richmond’s day-to-day life.

The Hard Way - the title came from Richmond CEO, Brendon Gale’s description of the journey to the club’s third premiership in the last four seasons - covers the journey from the club’s pre-season camp, through those early weeks in Melbourne, the 82-day closure of the season after round one, the adjustments that needed to be made as the club moved holus-bolus to a Queensland hub, the down-and-up finals campaign, and the Dustin Martin effect. Was one player’s genius the difference between success and failure?

The Hard Way is the perfect addition to Konrad Marshall’s books Yellow & Black and Stronger & Bolder, the stories behind Richmond’s 11th and 12th premierships.

Below is an edited excerpt from Marshall's chapter on the long lockdown the industry faced following the conclusion of Round 1...

'The Hard Way: The story of Richmond’s 13th premiership' is now available through the Tigerland Superstore

The Lockdown

The long lockdown began. The season was suspended, club were shuttered, players and coaches retreated to their homes, and a skeleton staff inside Punt Road grappled gamely with the new reality. The normally bustling football department was reduced to eight figures: Hartley, Livingstone, Hardwick, Burge, Hickey, club physio Anthony Schache, and the wellbeing team of Nadine Haidar and Ivan Maric. It must have seemed a ghostly place, were it not for the intense conversations and debates that ensued.

“The headaches were huge,” says Hartley. “I was going to Livo’s place some days, and we just worked until 10 at night, thinking of the logistics of standing people down, but also looking after our players and training them in a way that they would be able to come back and perform at a level that’s AFL standard. And we had no return date to work with.”

The players were encouraged to come into Tigerland and grab what they could for use at home, from the plates and bars of the weights sets to gloves and mitts and medicine balls. They stripped the place bare. “Honestly, 90 percent of the gym was removed and taken home,” says Burge.

“Dustin Martin arranged to take apart a squat rack, and got it transported to his place, and set it up to train.”

The Government allowed professional players to train in pairs, in parks, but they couldn’t go into gyms or the club. And they dispersed to all parts of the country. David Astbury drove to his family farm in regional Victoria. Marlion Pickett went back to Perth with his family, into quarantine with his kids, and sat in a bedroom for two weeks, keeping fit by going outside and doing shuttle runs in a tiny backyard.

Some of them got on the tools. Jack Graham went back to Adelaide and worked with his dad, as did Noah Balta in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. Football staff including Anthony Fagan, Ryan Ferguson and recruiter Will Thursfield found work on building sites, and Jake Aarts did the same, because the small forward is only a rookie, on a set contract of $85,000 per year. Soon enough that figure was cut in half once the AFL Players’ Association agreed to a pay cut. “We fully encouraged him (Aarts) to train when he could, but to go and get some money on the tools, to get himself through,” says Hartley. “For him to finish the season with 14 games after what he went through this year was phenomenal. A real credit to him. It’s staggering to think, but this was all in the middle of a football season.”

The coaches and players stuck loosely to a football training program by doing classes and circuits over Zoom, guided by people like Burge, trying to make everything as much fun as possible. “Because it got to the point where it was obviously quite depressing for people,” says Burge. “We had to take the piss out of the situation.”

***

Richmond was also careful not to expect too much of its players during the hiatus. “We tried to maintain contact, but not too much contact,” says Burge. “Some clubs were doing mandatory once-a-week team meetings. We didn’t do that. We knew that whatever was ahead was going to be quite long, and the season was going to finish a lot later than usual, so the thought was: ‘We’ve got time—let’s not go too hard too early’. We didn’t smash our players after that lockdown after round one. We gave them a break: go easy, build again.”

Hartley believes this was one of the most important decisions the team made in 2020. They kept hearing the bad news rolling toward them in uncertain waves from AFL HQ—we’re not back quite yet, maybe a little longer yet, it might be a month, it might be eight weeks, could be 10 weeks—and understood such “news” was simply not reliable enough to plan around. All they could do was stay in touch. “The players were getting tired of it, all the Zoom meetings, but they worked so hard,” Hartley says. “Working with the leaders, we gave those guys little groups of players to monitor. They would report back to us, and I remember Kane Lambert basically sent through an essay on his group, as to where they were at and how he was going to help them. It was phenomenal. And those were the sorts of things that made you feel like maybe we were going to be all right.”

In the end, because of the disruption, there was no Richmond system left to trust—but they could always trust their people. “Football is a little bit about going back to what you know, and how things have been done, but there’s never been anything like this,” said Hartley. “So I remember going to bed at night and thinking ‘Far out, we could be stuffing this right up’. But then you go back to your people, and why they’re doing it, and the thought processes behind what we came up with, and that gives confidence. Absolute confidence.”

For Shane McCurry, the lockdown provided a moment of inspiration, and the first opportunity to draw on that notion of sisu that the group had embraced on their preseason camp. Sisu being a Finnish term, he encouraged them to consider another facet of that place, namely the mid-summer—that stretch of days around the solstice when bonfires burn and maypoles spin, and the white night comes and the midnight sun shines, and people enjoy cookouts and saunas and a mass exodus from the city, into quieter country places that might at least feel immune to the strain of the city.

“The Finns put down their tools, move away from their day-to-day life, and have a breakaway, just to reconnect with who they are as people. Clearly that’s linked to that notion of sisu,” says McCurry. “We talked about the lockdown not as the break we were forced to have, but the break we needed to have, in order to bounce back stronger, and make us all the more grateful for what we weren’t getting during that period—that physical proximity and connection, the way we thrive on being around one another.”

The players returned to training in May, but this was no return to the way things once were. The football department had been gutted. At the club, there was no dietician and no chiropractor, no gymnastics instructor and no Pilates teacher because of protocols. Particular physiotherapists and strappers, familiar faces to many, were missing. Gone too, for the 2020 season—stalwarts like Ilmar ‘Drac’ Tiltins, the boot studder for four decades, and the many volunteers who prepare water bottles and wash guernseys.

But beyond that were the staggered training sessions, with the players filtering in and out of the complex throughout the day. Allowed only to train in small groups, around eight players at a time, they had to create six “hub” areas within Punt Road, utilising the AFL rooms and VFL rooms, the women’s rooms and the umpires’ rooms, the match committee space and the recruiters’ area. And the coaches had to coordinate each group as they moved from skills work to weights to line meetings in such a way as each group never overlapped. They created a marked pathway, and placed reserved seat signs within the auditorium, to ensure proper social distancing. Each group carried cleaning buckets for wiping down weights stations and benches before moving on. There were shower changeovers, and set arrivals, and temperature checks, and coronavirus tests taken three times per week, and cameras put in place to monitor and prove the protocols were being met.

Burge shakes his head at the amount of time and planning that went into the reconfiguration of their working life.

“I remember being stressed. There was just so much administration, so much to set up, and within a few days it would all change. It was like a gigantic jigsaw—and I usually love doing that kind of stuff—piecing it all together to make something work. But this was on another level. There were moments where you realised you were giving so much to that and so little to your home life. It just wasn’t balanced, or sustainable. There were times I spent the entire day on the oval, because you had to get every one of the groups through with their 90-minute session on the grass, one after another.”

It’s an interesting point, this notion of the footy department firing and functioning well into late afternoon and early evening, because that’s anything but standard operating procedure. We may have images in our mind of football clubs in days gone by, of players peeling into the car park at night after work and getting changed and trotting out onto the surface to train under lights, but in the modern era, they get their work done early. The players arrive around 7am, get changed, move into meetings, and push through the heavily orchestrated system that is their day, often departing before 3pm. In an ordinary season, if you walk into the Richmond footy department one afternoon at 4:30, you’ll find a mostly deserted space, with perhaps a few odd boffins and administrators diving deep into personal projects, but the bulk of the day’s work is finished long before a standard 9-to-5 shift is over.

Only 24 football department staff were allowed into the main complex, and Hartley was not one of them. He works in talent identification, after all, which can be done remotely. And so he found himself, along with the likes of Neil Balme, now with the dragnet title of ‘Senior Club Adviser’, and scouts, and administrative managers, and even people like opposition analyst Jack Harvey, consigned to a portable office at the northern end of the ground.

“I actually thought that was a really strong call, because it meant we had another physiotherapist on the team, which is more important than me, to immediate performance,” Hartley says. “But it was really odd, because we weren’t allowed into the main facility. We were 100 metres away, but it felt like we were 100 kilometres away.”

The enforced separation began to take its toll. A training environment, usually so full of fun and contact and connection, became dour and disengaged, and isolated. Each group would shuffle through their program, hardly seeing another colleague. Everywhere the football bosses looked they found a protocol roadblock, and if they sought and found a new path, a new rule would come in and that path would be taken away. A simple thing like a “Richmond Man” session just wasn’t possible. I’ve sat in those sessions before. The Graeme Richmond Room at the club fills with players and coaches, and because of all the people the temperature warms as the activities unfold. It seems unthinkable now, the idea of 60 people in a small tiered theatrette, gathering in little clusters to brainstorm, being asked one by one to go up to the front of the room, as part of some presentation or another that ends with the full playing list in a group hug, with backslaps and tousled hair.

Hartley says McCurry ended up running the sessions outside, because it was the only option. “It was freezing cold, and we sat in the old Jack Dyer stand. But no one could really hear, so we got a PA system,” Hartley says. “But it was still difficult. Still not natural. It felt like we were grinding. Nothing was coming easily.”

Says McCurry: “They couldn’t touch each other. They couldn’t shake hands. They couldn’t high-five. They couldn’t do the things that they are used to doing. If someone was struggling, you couldn’t put a hand on their shoulder to say, ‘I’m here with you, I’m here every step of the way’. Most of us found that quite challenging, and naturally the performance of the team was below where it needed to be.”

That might be an understatement. When the games started again in June, after 82 days of emptiness, all those struggles seemingly found their way onto the field, in sluggish and undisciplined performances. A draw against Collingwood. Losses to St Kilda and Hawthorn, alarming more in the manner of the defeats than in the scoreboard itself. Richmond’s mindfulness coach, Emma Murray, was incredibly worried by what she saw and heard. The absence of ‘normal’ had cost the group dearly. “What we do so well is create an environment that feels really good. When you turn up, it feels great, and you want to be there,” Murray says, “But this felt awful. There were all these barricades and rules and regulations. It was tough.”