Round 11 – Sydney v Richmond: Return to Sin City

 

 

 

 

RETURN TO SIN CITY

 

by John Green

 

The last time that Richmond played Sydney at the SCG, back in August 2016, I was staying at the Ashwood Hotel in Preston, England. I woke up on the Sunday morning and went online to see how the Tigers had fared on the other side of the world.

 

I was still tired from the day before in which I had travelled on a supporters’ bus to see local team, Preston North End, play an away fixture against Ipswich Town in the Championship, the second tier  of the English Football Association competition. I had endured a fourteen-hour round trip to make the journey from Lancashire to East Anglia. Preston suffered a 1-0 defeat. But the Preston supporters were buoyed by an encounter with Burnley fans on the journey home that night when we stopped for a quick take-away meal at the Norton Canes services on the M6. The neighbouring communities of Preston and Burnley are bitter rivals when it comes to soccer. Burnley had gone down 3-0 to Chelsea in London and the Preston diehards were considerably cheered by the fact that their defeat was worse than Preston’s.

 

The Sydney v Richmond clash at the SCG was the final round of the AFL season. The 2016 campaign had been disastrous for the Tigers after successive elimination final appearances in the previous three years. And here was the ultimate proof staring at me from my laptop screen. Sydney won by 113 points and Buddy booted seven. I suppose it was better to receive the news in one Bandaid-ripping moment than to suffer through a two-hour torture session on TV as I would have done if I was home in Melbourne.

 

Perhaps the most beloved of all Australian poems is Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country. She wrote it as a homesick nineteen-year-old when she was visiting England in 1904. What if she had been a Richmond supporter?

 

The love of field and coppice

Of green and shady lanes

Of ordered woods and gardens

Is running in your veins

 

 

Strong love of grey-blue distance

Brown streams and soft, dim, skies.

I know but cannot share it

My love is otherwise

 

 

I love that Tiger country

The hands of Andrew Raines

Of rugged Alan Grainger

Look out for Aaron James

 

 

I love her for James Theissen

The Tonys Jewell and Free

Of John and Michael Perry

The wide gold sash for me.

 

 

Unlike Dorothea, I couldn’t say that I was suffering from homesickness. I was certainly enjoying my time in the UK. But as for the footy, what did it matter? The Tigers were out of contention anyway and the Swans had finished on top of the ladder. I would resume my allegiance to Richmond in 2017 and steel myself for the years of painful struggle that surely lay ahead of us. I logged out, gathered up my dirty laundry in a green rubbish bag and headed out to the laundromat across the road from the Ashwood.

 

And now, six years after my English sojourn and having experienced a revival in Richmond’s fortunes that was beyond anything I could hope for, I’m in Sydney with my wife to witness the Tigers’ return to the Sydney Cricket Ground.

 

I wonder how the Aussie Rules culture is surviving in the city with the big harbour.

 

We’re staying at a hotel opposite Alison Park in Randwick. In the foyer we meet a Sydney-supporting dad with his two daughters. He is taking a photo of his girls in their Swanny colours and my wife offers to take the snap so all three can be in the picture. He gladly accepts her suggestion and remarks with a grin that “Dusty’s supposed to be joining us, isn’t he?”

 

We catch the light rail from Randwick to Moore Park. Melbourne kept its trams while other cities around the world dismantled theirs to make way for cars. For us, it was something to do with the generous width of the roads that the founding fathers laid out in their town planning. We could keep the trams and allow the new-fangled automobiles to share the roads with them. Now Sydney has followed cities such as Manchester and revived their old tram system in the form of light rail. Sydney’s models are several carriages long and are able to bend their way around tight corners. It’s a different experience. The light rail takes all the space on narrow Devonshire Street in Surry Hills.

 

There are a lot of Sydney supporters aboard. I haven’t been in a situation where Tiger fans are in a minority among Swans since the days when my dad used to take me to see Richmond play at the Lake Oval. The kids in red and white are loud and excited and their euphoria continues as they run across the park to the stadium.

 

We take our seats and are surrounded by a large group of teenage girls. They obviously come from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds, as there are Sudanese, Somalis, Afghans and Lebanese among them. We learn that they hail from Liverpool, in Sydney’s far west, and are participating in a ‘sports excursion’. The boys in their year level are at BlueBet Stadium in Penrith watching an NRL clash between the Panthers and the North Queensland Cowboys. While their parents have come from the four corners of the earth to make their homes here, these girls are typical Aussie teenagers. When the faces of individual Swans players are displayed on the big screen they squeal and cheer for the good-looking boys. Chad Warner and Isaac Heeney attract the most approval.

 

The game begins and it’s clear that they haven’t got a clue as to what the rules are. My wife explains the scoring system and how contact above the shoulders results in free kicks. The girls express their appreciation and discuss the information with each other. They tell us that they might be quizzed later by the teachers and asked what they had learned.

 

I’m hopeful that I can see Richmond prevail in the waratah state. How exciting it would be for us and all the little groups of Punt Roaders in the outer to come all this way and see a Tiger victory. Not to mention the supporters who actually live in Sydney.

 

The first half is immensely satisfying. The Tigers are deadly accurate. They lead at half time with a score of 11-2 (68) to 6-7 (43). Astonishingly, for the team that sits on the bottom of the free kick differential ladder and whose supporters come up with all sorts of conspiracy theories to explain why their team is victimised by the umpires, the Tigers actually win more frees than Sydney. In a manner not seen since 2017, they are rewarded with holding-the-ball decisions when they tackle, especially in their forward half. This makes a huge difference to Richmond’s chances.

 

Despite the fact that Sydney have more forward-50 entries, Richmond take their lead out to 33 points at the 19-minute mark in the second quarter when Maurice Rioli evades two defenders to gather the loose ball and pop it through. We’re on here!

 

A long-range goal to Jayden Short in the opening minute of the second half takes Richmond’s lead out to 31 points. Just give us a couple more and we can take the four points home with us! Short’s strike is followed by a ten-minute period where the ball is camped in Richmond’s attacking zone. But there are no goals. The holding-the-ball frees disappear from the game and there are numerous stoppages, which appear to suit Sydney more than Richmond. Then the momentum changes and the Swans kick the next four goals to work their way back into the game. The crowd gets behind them and I begin to experience that sinking feeling that comes when the momentum is heading in a direction that you don’t like. Callum Mills is dominating as a sweeper in defence with the assistance of Warner, McInerney and Lloyd.

 

The pressure builds. Josh Gibcus had kept Franklin quiet in the first half with help from Grimes and Tarrant. But Buddy can break the bonds and turn a game on its head. He’s been doing it for years. He  scores a team-lifting goal in the third quarter and adds another three in the final term, making it five for the evening. Mistakes creep into Richmond’s game. I watch in abject horror as Gibcus passes across the face of goal to Baker, but his kick is wayward and puts Baker in difficulties. He passes it in turn to Daniel Rioli, but again the kick misses the target. Rioli slips, the Swans assault him and the ball is handballed to Wicks in the square, who simply can’t miss. It’s hard to arrest the slide when something like this happens. Franklin’s major at the 16-minute mark puts the Swans in front by four points. Richmond attack again but Bolton (twice) and Edwards miss shots that would have put them  back in front. Dusty’s attempt sails out on the full.

 

Hardwick sees the need to introduce another mobile, leading target in attack and throws Josh Gibcus in there. He takes the mark and kicks his first goal in league footy. Richmond supporters dream for a moment of what Gibcus could do as a key forward once he has served his apprenticeship as an intercepting defender. There’s just a goal in it in time-on and Richmond continue to fight in a final quarter that lasts for 36 excruciating minutes. The ball is thrown in on the opposite side of the ground around 65 metres out from goal and the siren finally sounds. The home supporters are jubilant and I rue yet another close loss for a side trying to stay in the hunt for a place in the top eight. I can see that Martin and Riewoldt are involved in a tense discussion with an umpire and wonder what’s going on. It’s Prestia’s free kick. I get it, I think. Although Dion has no chance of making the distance the Tigers are insisting that he take his kick anyway. It’s a message of defiance. Prestia’s kick falls way short, of course, and we make our way to the exits. A Sydney supporter sarcastically thanks me for coming but I completely ignore him. I’m defiant too.

 

It’s not until we return to our hotel that we learn that Chad Warner had deliberately kicked the ball out of bounds in celebration after Prestia had been awarded the free kick. We couldn’t see it from our vantage point. That’s a 50-metre penalty every day of the week and would have brought Prestia within scoring distance. Warner had given away a free to Prestia for holding on and had assumed that the Richmond on-baller would not bother to take his kick, as he was too far out to score. Riewoldt and Martin were demanding the 50-metre walk. Instead, Umpire Howarth had deliberated with some luminary through his earpiece and been convinced that the ‘common sense’ approach was to forgo the penalty, as Warner had failed to hear the whistle due to the noise of the crowd.

 

An extraordinary decision. Did they ask Warner, and would he have told the truth? And even if he didn’t hear it, what excuse is that?

 

But it was no good being bitter about it. The fact is that Richmond were unable to defend the five-goal lead they held in the opening minute of the third quarter. Buddy Franklin’s star blazed in the night sky and the Tigers couldn’t contain him in the second half. There was an accuracy role reversal after half time where the Tigers could score only 4-8 (32) to Sydney’s 10-3 (63). Richmond tend to lose the close ones these days and it’s the third time this year, following defeats to Carlton and St. Kilda, where they’ve surrendered potentially match-winning leads and been overrun.

 

Still, my wife and I have a day to explore Sydney tomorrow. We may not get to Dorothea Mackellar’s old home in Point Piper, but we can do the Bronte to Bondi walk and have lunch at a favourite café of ours in Darlinghurst. We might even head into Circular Quay tonight to see the city lit up with the laser light shows of the Vivid festival. Some compensation, I suppose, for the disappointment of seeing the Tigers go down in an epic struggle.

 

 

SYDNEY            3.4     6.7     10.10    16.10 (106)
RICHMOND      5.0     11.2    12.4      15.10 (100)

 

GOALS
Sydney: Franklin 5, Reid 3, Hayward 2, Parker, Campbell, Rowbottom, Papley, Heeney, Wicks
Richmond: Ralphsmith 2, Edwards 2, Short 2, Graham 2, Martin, D.Rioli, Riewoldt, M.Rioli, Bolton, Prestia, Gibcus

 

BEST
Sydney: Franklin, Warner, Parker, Rowbottom, Ladhams, Mills
Richmond: Baker, Prestia, Cotchin, Short, Graham

 

INJURIES
Sydney: Nil
Richmond: Nil

 

LATE CHANGES
Sydney: Nick Blakey (illness) replaced in selected side by Colin O’Riordan
Richmond: Marlion Pickett (illness) replaced in selected side by Hugo Ralphsmith

 

SUBSTITUTES
Sydney: Robbie Fox (unused)
Richmond: Noah Cumberland (unused)

 

 

 

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