Sydney/Richmond 27 August 2016
The shadows were lengthening at the SCG but the sky was blue and the day was a beautiful one for the last round of season. The swans were taking on the tigers and while the the swans had had a year to remember; the tigers had had one to forget. Richmond had started the year being talked about as a team what would push deep into finals. Sydney on the other hand had been told that they they were too old and too slow and their kids too young. If the swans did this, they were minor premiers. If the Tigers lost badly, they would finish a year in which they had shown both the promise and disappointment that we had had learnt to expect from the Tigers of new.
Still, they had beaten the swans more times than not in recent years and who knows what would happen if they really tried to show the public how good they were.
The siren blew and within a minute Aliir had hand balled over the head of a dozen players to Rohan who ran half the ground to kick the goal. Before you knew it, the swans had kicked five goals to a couple of points. By the 20 minute mark, my son was complaining that this game was just a training drill and it didn’t really get any better for the Tigers. They were five goals down at quarter time and when Buddy loped in on a couple of steps and kicked a lazy 50 early in the second; it did seem all over. And it was.
My friend Neil said that the greatest tragedy in the world is to be a Richmond supporter. He was right about that. If the Tigers were all bad, you could wait until the draft brought them back up the ladder. It wasn’t as if they had a hopeless team either or a tiny group of supporters. But today they showed nothing.
It was junk time by the end of the first quarter and the tigers were lining up Monday’s beers by the end of the second. Martin, Cotchin and Rance showed glimpses but the swans just harried them out of the game.
There are many synonyms for woeful and they all would have been appropriate. But even a dozen of them stacked in alphabetical order could not have done justice to the Richmond performance. By the third quarter, it seemed that the team really were trying to get the coach sacked. They showed a bit in the last quarter with five goals but when the siren came you got the sense that the tigers had stopped playing a long time before.
Still, there were some nice moments. It was nice to see two Sudanese players take each other on. Aliir won that pretty easily but at least Chol was trying which was more than you could say for his teammates. It was nice to see McGlynn kick five after dropping in and out of the team but the swans were great all over the ground. They deserved the win but the crowd deserved something better. By the end it was 113 the difference and probably that didn’t even do the chasm justice. A confident burst into the finals for one. A year of ashes and a long preseason for the other.
SYDNEY SWANS 5.6 14.9 22.11 25.14 (164)
RICHMOND 0.5 1.6 2.8 7.9 (51)
GOALS
Sydney Swans: Franklin 7, McGlynn 5, Rohan 4, Hewett 2, Kennedy 2, Mitchell, Parker, Heeney, Jack, Richards
Richmond: Cotchin 3, Hampson, Riewoldt, Lloyd, Edwards
Malarkey medal
Sydney Swans: Kennedy 3, McGlynn 2, Aliir 1
Richmond: Cotchin 3, Rance 2, Martin 1
Umpires: Kamolins, Harris, McInerney
Official crowd: 36,570 at the SCG
oh sydney was awash with that overwhelming love they all have for Dimma.
hit the Dimmer. we are done for. best to merge us with Gold Coast, to fix two problems.