Tiger Royalty Heads Bush — And Nobody’s Shocked It Worked

So a bloke who’s played 300 games of AFL football, kicked goals in granny finals, and probably can’t walk past a servo without being asked for a selfie is now going to be turning out on some suburban or bush oval under the watch of a former teammate. Lovely story. Genuinely. I’m not even being sarcastic yet — give it a paragraph.

Because this is the bit of footy that never makes the six o’clock news but probably should. A 300-game superstar doesn’t just vanish into retirement doing golf days and boundary riding — eventually plenty of them want one more kick, one more changeroom, one more reason to strap the boots on of a Saturday. And when a mate who played alongside him in yellow and black rings up and says ‘come and have a run with us’, well, apparently that’s still a pitch that works.

The Richmond production line keeps giving

I’ve watched this club go through every conceivable version of itself — the wooden spoon years where we’d have been lucky to beat a reserve grade outfit, right through to three flags in four years where blokes who used to cop abuse on talkback were suddenly getting their jumper framed. Through all of it, Richmond has kept churning out players who, once their AFL clock runs down, still clearly love the game enough to go and do it for nothing — or next to nothing — in front of a few hundred people and a sausage sizzle.

That tells you something about the culture Richmond built in that era, whatever you think of the club’s administration or the way some of that success got talked about by outsiders who never liked us anyway. The blokes who came through under Hardwick still ring each other. They still rope each other into things. One bloke gets a job running a local footy club and within a season he’s got a 300-gamer lining up at full forward for him. That’s not an accident — that’s a culture that outlasted the premierships.

What a 300-gamer actually brings to a local side

Let’s be honest about what this means on a footy level, because it’s not really about the bloke kicking six on a Saturday arvo — although he probably will, at least for the first month before everyone works out how to tag him. It’s about everything around that. The way he trains. The way he talks to seventeen-year-olds about defensive pressure like it’s the most important thing in the world, because to him, after 300 games, it genuinely is. The way a club’s second-string ruckman suddenly stands a bit taller at training because there’s a premiership player watching him do his craft.

You can’t buy that. Well — technically you can, that’s sort of the point of this whole signing, but you know what I mean. The value isn’t on the stat sheet. It’s in every kid at that club who now has a genuine AFL great walking the same race as them, giving them tips, setting a standard for what