RICCO’S STILL ON THE BALL
PETER Riccardi reckons he was born loving footy.
Like many more before him, his obsession with the game began as he sat on his father’s shoulders at Kardinia Park watching Geelong play.
Unlike most of those kids whose dreams and hopes were limited to the outer, Riccardi lived his dream and played 288 games for the Cats.
Now the reigning GDFL premiership coach with Bannockburn, Riccardi’s love for footy flows.
But there was a period in the early 2000s when the silky left-footer began to doubt whether he should be playing the game at all as his sister Michelle battled stomach cancer.
“It was probably two or three months where I wasn’t playing good footy because my mind was elsewhere and you think ‘What’s more important — your actual life or playing footy?’” Riccardi said.
“When she got told she had cancer I went through that process of dealing with that and trying to play footy at the same time. The passion just wasn’t there.
“She was awesome, she was only young. She was only 20 at the time and I sat down and talked about it with her and she said ‘Get back to what you love doing’.”
Riccardi would find that passion again, even after he lost his sister to the cancer at age 22.
“When she got diagnosed with cancer she got a timeline on her life and that’s when my mind started to waver and you think, ‘What’s important here?
Is it life or footy?” he said. “But in the end, footy was my life.”
Footy was everything to a young Riccardi, who would race home Saturday afternoons from Kardinia Park to watch whatever quarter replay was shown on the television that night. He would sleep with a ball in his arms and wake early the next morning to play Corio Little League.
In the backyard he would imitate wingman Robert ‘Scratcher’ Neal, a sign of things to come for the outside runner.
As a teenager Riccardi would sit with his mates behind the cheer squad to get a good look at Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson.
Using that deadly left foot to effect, Riccardi began to poll well in league best-and-fairest awards as he grew. After performing well in a school game umpired by legendary Cats recruiter Stephen Wells, he found himself part of the Geelong under-19 squad.
“I think there were three of us that got asked from that game to go and train with the under-19s and I was one of them, so I was in the right place at the right time,” Riccardi said.
“There was a game in 1990 that I got called up to play in the reserves.
“I trained Thursday night with the under-19 boys and then got told I had to go train on Friday with the senior group.
“I was nervous as hell just walking in there. I wasn’t even driving a car yet and I was walking in and seeing all these legends.
“I vividly remember we were just doing some lanework and Gazza (Gary Ablett Sr) kicked the ball to me and I swear to God he nearly knocked me over and I’m thinking ‘ Wow, this is amazing’. You’re trying to be cool, but you’re not, really.
“It was a dream come true. If I didn’t do anything after that, it was already the boyhood dream achieved running around there on a Friday night.”
The ultimate success of a premiership eluded Riccardi through his 15-season senior career from 1992-2006 — he played in losing grand final teams in 1992, 1994 and 1995 — but he did win the 1998 Carji Greaves Medal and was named in the VFL/AFL Italian Team of the Century.
He would boot 286 goals in his time at the top level and is now a life member of the club he used to watch from his father’s shoulders.
Now running things at Bannockburn, Riccardi still sits in the stands at GMHBA Stadium and loves the game as much as ever.
“I’ve got kids now that are playing footy, one is 15 and one is 12 and I go watch them every week,” he said. “Once I finish coaching, I’ll live my footy career through them. I was probably born to be a footballer and I’ll probably die watching the footy.”