FANS JOIN IN RICHMOND PARTY
DUSTY Martin can’t remember last night.
It’s his opening line after he turns up on stage at Richmond’s family day celebration at Punt Rd to try some standup comedy.
Dusty looks, well, dusty. He wears the white shirt of the previous night. He had wanted to go to Swan St, he recalls, where the feet of a fan poked from a wheelie bin and effigies were set alight. But the police said no.
That gets a roar. Martin is on a roll.
“We don’t care who gets the touches and who kicks the goals, even though I kicked four today,” he says, apparently unaware that it is now Sunday.
His teammates on stage ribbed Josh Caddy for his partying, whereas captain Trent Cotchin felt so “emotionally drained” that he has put aside his celebration until he has a “quiet glass of red” with his family.
Celebrating, Richmondstyle, takes many forms.
As club legend Matthew Richardson sucked Crownies, and senior officials hinted of their hangovers, chief executive Brendon Gale spoke about going to his office on Saturday night to listen to music with his family.
President Peggy O’Neal, meanwhile, went home to watch a replay, the first of several viewings over the weekend.
Marlion Pickett had a quiet night, too, home by 12.30am to be fresh for his four kids.
The problem for Pickett is that he now has another new home — in front of media cameras — which happens when, as Martin put it, you become the “greatest story in AFL history”.
Pickett is “unassuming”, everyone says, so easy going that he forgot to bring his jumper for yesterday’s stage presentation of the team. It seems unlikely that he’d care for the social media memes contrasting his singular success with legendary players who never won a Grand Final.
Club officials recalled the softly spoken arrival a few months back.
Pickett didn’t have much to say.
But he was not intimidated on Saturday. Yesterday, the gravity of his feat — to play a Grand Final on debut, and to play so well — had not sunk in. He spoke about coming on in the first quarter as a kind of release.
A crowd of 100 or 100,000 makes no difference — he blocks them out. “I just feel calm,” he said of playing the game.
Pickett was grateful for the support of a club that recruited him at 27 despite his criminal past, and its patience as his finger mended from injury. Melbourne struck him as “cold” on his arrival, and he stayed with Martin for a time.
There’s a recent history of players lodging with other players at Richmond.
Both Martin and teammate Brandon Ellis have lived with Cotchin.
It goes to the phrase Cotchin yesterday used to describe Richmond’s success: the “brotherhood across the association”.