How ‘wild man’ Martin Pike helped lift the Lions

WATCHING the impact Brisbane’s mature-age recruits are having this year has got me thinking about one of my favourite ever teammates, Martin Pike. Pikey arrived at Brisbane before the start of the 2001 season with a bit of a reputation as a wild man but it wasn’t long before every one of us greatly appreciated how important he was to our club — even the younger players who he had a bit of a habit of terrorising. We have all admired what Mitch Robinson has done since he has been at Brisbane and particularly this season when he has taken his game to new heights. Pikey and Robbo were both on the scrap heap when they arrived at Brisbane after being punted from their previous club. They were both capable of putting the wind up our opposition and the way Robbo is going since his positional switch this season – they played their best footy for Brisbane as slightly unconventional wingmen. And the perception of both players internally was far different to how the outside world saw them. I remember the first time I became aware Pikey might be heading North. Leigh Matthews had called a couple of senior players to gauge our views on his potential recruitment and I decided to do a little digging on my own to find out a bit about him. I’d heard he loved a beer and could be a bit of a larrikin and the story about his axing from North suggested he had delivered some pretty pointed feedback to coach Denis Pagan about his son Ryan, who had made a controversial debut for the Kangaroos that season. I rang an old teammate and close friend, John Blakey, who was a premiership teammate of Martin’s at North Melbourne and told him we were thinking of throwing him a lifeline and asked him what he thought about that. “Absolutely, get him up there, he is a ripper.’’ Coming from a guy like Johnny that was enough for me and I quickly passed on my support to Lethal. It turned out Brisbane were the only club who even nibbled at Pike. He didn’t quite match-up to the external perceptions although he reminded me yesterday not to go overboard painting his halo given he head butted our CEO Michael Bowers as dawn broke after one big end-of-season wind-up.