181 DAYS LATER
THE last time Richmond was at the MCG it was a shemozzle.
You can blame arrogance, their mindset of failed belief, but the best team in the competition was savaged by Collingwood. When the mindset is askew, as it was that day, that’s what can happen — and it did.
The week leading up to the preliminary final was no better.
Dustin Martin had a wonky leg, a corky which had bled into the knee said coach Damien Hardwick, but football manager Neil Balme said in the same week there was “nothing wrong with him’’.
When commentator David King suggested there could be an issue with the knee, Balme ripped into him. “David King … he’s got someone to whom he answers who says, ‘You must get a story, I don’t care whether you make it up, you’ve got to get a story’,” Balme said. “He’s pulled it from … somewhere I can’t mention.’’
Martin’s preliminary final performance, where he was clearly hampered, was one of his worst games of his season.
No one has an issue with club personnel halving the truth, but smacking the media when halving the truth is a bit rich. That noted, the five weeks leading to the preliminary final debacle were arguably where
The Tigers knew, probably after the Pies win, they would finish first or second and played accordingly, in a sense the job had been partly done. The mindset was softened.
Compare that with the hunger we saw the year before on their way to the premiership. They played every week with aggression and desperation and with a momentum that swept fans and all football folk along for the ride. It was furious football and damn exciting. But not last year. Added Pagan: “It’s going to be exciting to see what Damien [Hardwick] does to get their minds on the job and play in the present and not get involved in the future.’’ The future never eventuated. This is not a ping at Collingwood, who were magnificent, but this was not the real Richmond.
Even after a so-so performance against Hawthorn in the first final, the belief within the Tigers had them thinking they could flick the switch, find the fury and connection when it was needed most.
Yet, what drove them in 2017 deserted them in 2018.
This was new territory for the coach, too. Did he lose the eye of the tiger like his players did?
Did the club as a whole? Was there an environment of semicomfortableness? Only Hardwick knows, in retrospect, if he let the foot off the pedal.
It is too frivolous to say the Tigers will learn from last year, but if they are in a similar situation this year, which is top two from five weeks out, they will be better equipped to deal with it. It is why premiership coaches talk about being the hunter and the hunted. It is a mindset.
And it is why Hardwick’s recent comments comparing this year’s preseason to last year’s were intriguing.
“I look back at last year and maybe I think we were a little bit too advanced at this time of year,’’ he said. Remember, they belted Essendon by 90 points and North Melbourne 70 points. It’s clearly an early mindset play, which is not so important now, but will be if — and probably when — the Tigers make September this year.
Pagan would probably hate it that we are talking finals in March.
“Don’t get ahead yourself, son,’’ he’d say. And he would be right.
Nothing can be done about 2018 and the embarrassment against Collingwood, as opposed to 2019, a kind of season of redemption which starts tonight against Carlton. Expect to see real Tigers from the outset.