Hoodoos can be banished

RICHMOND coach Damien Hardwick says the Tigers are playing a brand of football suited to ending hoodoos in tonight’s qualifying final against Geelong.

The Tigers have lost 13 straight matches to the Cats dating to 2006 and have gone 16 years without a finals win, including successive elimination final heartbreaks between 2013 and 2015.

Rather than playing down the enormity of the MCG clash against Geelong, Hardwick has invited everyone associated with the club to embrace it.

“We accept that we haven’t had a great record,” he said yesterday. “This is our fourth attempt in five years.

“What I am pleased about it is that we consistently give ourselves an opportunity. “This is a different side. “It’s by far the best side I’ve coached. The way they play the game I think stands up to a finals brand.”

The Tigers have had great returns this year from their big four — Brownlow Medal favourite Dustin Martin, skipper Trent Cotchin, spearhead Jack Riewoldt and four-time All-Australian defender Alex Rance.

An unorthodox attack that includes a host of fleet-footed smaller types playing alongside Riewoldt has also paid big dividends.

But for Hardwick all the good stuff starts at the back.

“Defensively we are an incredible side,” he said.

“You look at our pressure numbers and our pressure rating, and we haven’t performed like this before.

“Offensively, we’ve allowed some things to happen and for the players to play to their strengths which is great.

“But our one-wood is our defence and we know that.”

The Tigers will enjoy the bulk of the support from a heaving MCG crowd that is expected to top 95,000.

“We’ve put ourselves in a fantastic position and we want our supporters to a be a part of it,” said Hardwick.

“They’ve ridden the bumps along the way and they’re part of the passion.” GREATG T and d gracious G Geelongl Flyer Bob Davis gifted me one of my very best experiences as a passionate, lifelong Richmond Tiger.

He so very generously allowed me to shadow him for the Geelong Advertiser on AFL Grand Final day, 2007.

From the North Melbourne breakfast to the siren and the song I was privileged to witness the Cats premiership player, coach and immortal being greeted and feted by an extraordinary rollcall of the game’s other greats and everyman fans.

On that sentinel day he was also part of the pre-match formalities, which lined up a cavalcade of club champions on the ground with their premiership cups.

When Bob and others made the move from the dining room down the lifts to the assembly point for the ceremony I tagged along, thrilled to accompany them into a kind of footballing nirvana. The muster point was the Tigers’ locker room.

Gathered in that space were 30 or so of the game’s biggest names, their faces and statures so familiar from across the decades reaching back to the Sunday ritual of watching grand old World of Sport.

And among those names were some of the biggest heroes a boyhood Tiger tragic could have — Francis Bourke, Royce Hart, Kevin Bartlett, Michael Roach, Geoff Raines, Barry Richardson, Billy Barrot.

Putting pen asided f for a l littlel indulgence, I met them all amid the merry din, a zealot in paradise, and with the names of other Richmond generations on the lockers all around it was a treasured unintended experience.

The yellow Tiger sash runs right over the heart, and so it has for me since formative days — part paternal inheritance, part fraternal influence, whole devotion to this club from Struggletown and its gladiators from across the years.

Hell, I reckon I kicked 9000-odd goals as KB in our back yard in Ararat, and saved as many as St Francis at the other end, with accompanying commentary.

Disco Roach was covered in Contact and perched with the ball on Kelvin Moore’s shoulders on the front of my school folder for at least a couplel off seasons, and as crescendo rose to glory in 1980 the No. 7 was on my back. Mick Malthouse was Tiger Tough.

Now, suddenly, we’re 37 years on from the day those lads held our newest cup aloft.

It hasn’t quite been a football wilderness since then but it has been a bit wild from time to time, riding what has become a characteristically dramatic Richmond rollercoaster. Exultation and hyper anguish, all in a season, a match, a quarter, a contest’s dying act.

To be a Tiger is to know a particularly vivid spectrum of emotions, and surely the weight of any expectation is magnified by the voice of the supporter juggernaut mobilised by the prospect of success.

From time to time we’ve dared to dream, and emerged severely scalded. Straight sets finals capitulations in 2013-1415 make painful contemporary exhibits A, B and C.

Yet still we’re there, unfulfilled in September but with unflinching faith.

This time one year ago planet football might have identified Richmond as having totally lost its axis — we weren’t even ninth — but here we are now with a double chance and a qualifying final against the Cats that could barely be bigger.

Summer’s long hard look at the team’s mechanics has by any measure proven shrewd.

Josh Caddy and Dion Prestia have been important additions bringing welcome grunt and skill to the engine on the ground, but the significance of the recruiting of the sage old Subiaco Superman Neil Balme — back home in Tigerland — and