Oh we're from Tigerland
Stories of being Richmond
ALICIA ALMEIDA, 34, NORTHERN SUBURBS OF MELBOURNE
All-time favourite player:
Matthew Richardson: “He bled yellow and black. He played with passion.”
Current favourite player:
Brett Deledio: “He’s a great athlete, hard at the ball. There’s never a question about his second efforts.”
There is unfettered joy in the winning; a lightness of being that comes with being part of the belief, part of the confidence – a sharing of what a team can do; what a group of young men can achieve. But for many who return to the football this Friday night at the MCG, the winning is only part of the story.
Alicia Almeida is the daughter of a former Richmond player – a birthright that sets her apart from most in the crowd – but it was her mother, Carolyn, who brought her to the football, who took her to the cheer squad, who introduced her to a Tiger way of life.
“It was our thing we did together, me and mum,” she says.
As the family story goes, a famous back pocket plumber attracted Alicia’s mother to Punt Road. “Mum lived next door to Kevin Sheedy. When he got drafted to Richmond she begged grandma to take her to the MCG to watch him, and they’ve been going ever since.”
It was 1967, and Sheedy, a De La Salle boy who played for the Prahran two-blues in the VFA, came to Richmond and Alicia’s mother – a Malvern girl who spent her childhood on the netball court, swimming at Harold Holt pool and playing tennis at Kooyong – was swayed to the yellow and black.
As a young woman, she attended the football on Saturdays with her mother, Brenda, and after games found herself often at Punt Road Oval. This is where, in 1970, as a seventeen-year-old, she first met under-19s player Graham Gaunt. Two years later, in round 20 against Fitzroy, he played his first senior game for Richmond.
Left to right: Artist at work: Alicia, on her regular Wednesday night activity during the football season, banner-making with the cheer squad; Childhood portrait: Alicia, the Tiger cub that she was, by the fence at the MCG where she could be found most Saturday afternoons in winter with her mother.
Before the 1976 season – with Graham having returned to Richmond after a stint with Oakleigh in the VFA – he and Carolyn married. Two years later, he switched to the Dees, where he played 69 games, kicking 32 goals in five seasons.
“He went to Melbourne, but mum always stayed with Richmond,” says Alicia.
So when Alicia was born, mid-winter in 1980 (Richmond’s last premiership year), her father was playing with the likes of Robbie Flower and Carl Ditterich, but there was never a doubt about her football loyalties. “My mother was Richmond, her mother was Richmond, so I was Richmond.”
It was a maternal link to Tigerland – a motherly tie that binds – broken 18 months ago with the death of Carolyn. She had had cancer. She had turned 60. So many seasons of football were ahead of her.
At her funeral, under a burning January sun, her coffin waiting between the gothic bluestone arch of a Catholic church in Kilmore and a black hearse, the Richmond Football Club’s theme song rang out and a crepe paper banner was raised. In drugging heat, a ritual of football life in Melbourne became a ceremony for the dead.
Carolyn Gaunt was carried through her epitaph – CHEERING ON THE TIGERS FROM HEAVEN – by pallbearers who included her footballer husband, her Tiger-supporting son, and her daughter, Alicia.
It was a loss that for many remains raw and deep. “She was my best friend,” says Alicia. “It’s been extremely hard going to the football without her, but I keep going because the kids love it and I love it, and I know mum would want me to keep going.”
“I know she’s there with me.”
A Tiger family reunion at the MCG last year after Carolyn's death: (L-R) Alicia's brother Aaron holding son Harley, grandma Brenda, Alicia, Katia and Sebastian, and her dad, former Richmond player Graham Gaunt.
The grief is salved partly by the football, and partly by the Richmond cheer squad stalwarts who made Carolyn’s banner, travelling as a group to her funeral at a church beside the gates of Assumption College. For them, football is more than a game; and that day was about saying goodbye to one of their own.
“The cheer squad is my second family,” says Alicia. “We’re all there to support the team we love, but also to support each other.”
Carolyn Gaunt was a regular in the cheer squad and every Wednesday night, all through Richmond’s years of longing, she was part of the group who make the team’s run-through banner. Alicia has followed her mother’s footsteps. She’s a cheer squad committee member, and now brings along her two children.
Alicia’s grandmother, Brenda Palmer, a sprightly 84-year-old, still lives in Malvern and catches the train to Richmond to see her boys. “She loves her Tiges,” says Alicia. “She goes every week.”
This Friday night, against West Coast, in what all Richmond people hope will be a glorious homecoming after their feats in Perth on that Friday night so long ago, Brenda will sit by the boundary in the Olympic Stand pocket, and Alicia will be behind the goals in the cheer squad at the Punt Road end. As always, they will join and sit with each other for at least a quarter.
What is unspoken is the void between them; the loss of the woman who links their generations. If there are angels in football, maybe Carolyn was one of them.
Alicia Almeida barefoot on the banner with daughter Katia, 7, and son Sebastian, 3, before the game against the Fremantle Dockers.
She is no longer with us, but she also is. It is written in the night sky: when the banner is raised on the grass of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, when the players run out onto the field this Friday night, she’s there in the letters and words, and in what the message might say.
Alicia Almeida, among others, will have laid those letters out – yellow card on a black crepe veil – flagging her support for her team; her belief. She barracks just as her mother once did. And she barracks just as her 7-year-old daughter, Katia, one day might do.
Like mother, like daughter, like grandmother – it’s all in their Tiger family.
Go Tiges!
If you would like to nominate a Richmond fan who has a story to tell about their barracking please email Dugald Jellie with details: dugaldjellie@gmail.com
