Radio Australia Today Editorial

An apology from a football tragic

5 July 2010

Football tragics never apologise.

They never apologise because they know everything there is to know about football. When a player, under the threat of being pummelled from fourteen gorillas, decides to side-step to the right, the football tragic will scream that he should’ve stepped to the left.

Yes, tragics are unforgiving. We saw that today when the Brazilian soccer team returned home after their quarter-final exit at the World Cup. The fans were ferocious. They pushed and shoved; they insulted, they threatened the well-being of the players so much that the team’s security team had to sneak them out a side door. Even then, one player was spotted by these former fans heading towards his father’s car, and only just managed to make it out of there.

I am a tragic in a different football code: Australian Rules. My team is the Richmond Tigers.

Now my team has had some pretty lean times of late. No premiership for thirty-odd years (and they have been very odd years), and this year was a disaster. After nine rounds, Richmond had not won a single game. The newspapers were running stories on whether this would be the first team in 45 years to go through an entire season losing every week.

I was one who was baying, in true tragic form. The new coach, to my eye, was a total disaster. Damian Hardwick had come to the club with the promise of a new ‘technique’ on the field, a strategy that was guaranteed to give results. Hardwick was appointed after many rounds of interviews. I wondered what questions they put to Hardwick in those interviews, because it was becoming apparent that very few of them had anything to do with winning a game of football.

Hardwick kept his nerve and asked Richmond supporters to be patient. His was a young team that was finding its feet. The wins will come, he promised, and we all scoffed. Hell hath no fury like a footy tragic scorned after losing his hard-earned entry fee week after week for no pleasure.

And then you know what?

The team started winning.

In the last five weeks the Tigers have won four games, including the last three in a row, and that was against some pretty stiff competition, including the Sydney Swans yesterday.

So I humbly eat my words. Even if Richmond win no more games this season, this young team have proven that they can play, and that Hardwick can coach, and that footy tragics and their emotional thinking should be kept miles away from football decision-making.