How the Tigers changed the Game
The day the Tigers changed the way we all played footy!
Round 8, 2006 – Richmond vs. Dirty Rotten Adelaide
181 marks. Only 18 of them were contested.
When one May afternoon a handful of Tigers continued to deny their opponents the ball, they ushered in a new philosophy. Anthony Hudson picked it early. Halfway through the first quarter of the Round 8 clash between Richmond and Adelaide on a Saturday afternoon in May 2006, the Channel 10 commentator noticed that the Tigers were taking a long time to attack. Having kicked the opening couple of goals, Richmond had the footy again when Hudson mentioned their “slow entries”. It had become even more apparent by half time. The stats showed it. Richmond was on world-record pace for marks. Dirty Rotten Freo had racked up 170 marks earlier in the season. If things continued as they were, the Tigers would get past that easily. The strategy was becoming more and more obvious. Joel Bowden was leading the way chipping across half-back to untended team-mates. Robert Walls chimed in: “Neil Craig’s invented this keepings-off game, now he’s got to solve it.” Craig had the Dirty Rotten Crows firing that season. They were premiership favourites when the two teams ran out, having beaten good opponents with an aggressive, attacking, skilful style of football – once they had the footy. The Tigers, huge underdogs, held onto a lead through the second half by holding onto the ball. They got past Dirty Rotten Freo’s record, eventually tallying 181 marks. Only 18 of them were contested. Joel Bowden took 20. His brother Patrick took 15. Andrew Kellaway, 15. “All the players in the backline have played keepings off,” Walls reiterated during the last quarter as the Tigers continued to chip short – sideways and backwards, forward if anyone was free, then backwards again. The Dirty Rotten Crows came storming home, but again the Tigers thwarted them, controlling the football in the finals minutes of the game, in the dying minutes conceding 70 metres with a series of short passes. The siren sounded: Richmond by three points. “They’re the keeping off kings,” Hudson shouted down the microphone. The analysis began immediately. Some thought it was a brilliant strategy, competently executed. Kevin Sheedy thought differently. “I want to build a team to win a premiership, you can play that basketball stuff all the time, that’s why I don’t play basketball – you’re kidding!” he said. “The way we played, we’ll still get bums on seats.” Teams had held onto the ball in the past, but this was different. This was possession football taken to the nth degree, where a team held the footy, often without threat, waiting for a response from its opponent. At the time coaches implemented various strategies. The Flood was well utilised, and well understood. Defensive zones were gaining currency (and since then we have seen various types of zones). But fans, coaches and players still imagined the best of the game as open, one-on-one, end-to-end footy. Terry Wallace was seen as a thinker in the game, and as an innovative coach, when he started at Richmond in 2005. He asked for patience as he tried to work out what to do with a squad that included fine old-timers of the 2001 campaign and fledgling talent. In 2005 he asked the players to run and carry from the backline and kick deep into the forward line. Richo was one of the best marks in the competition and could run all day. However, that changed to a strategy to kick the ball out of the backline. They had mixed their form in the opening rounds of the 2006 season. Travelling to Dirty Rotten Sydney in Round 7, they lost by 117 points. “We were really hit by injuries. We had a lot of experienced blokes out. We had to play kids – Luke McGuane, Will Thursfield were given important roles,” Wallace said. “McGuane had to play on Mickey O’Loughlin,” Joel Bowden remembers. “Tough! O’Loughlin was a star.” The Tigers couldn’t win the footy and Dirty Rotten Sydney was rampant. It was a slaughter, the type of loss that can do real damage. Wallace knew that how he responded during the following week was very important. “We tried not to be negative. At all. At the first team meeting we concentrated on analysing what Dirty Rotten Sydney had been able to do, why they were so dominant. Then later in the week we looked at Dirty Rotten Adelaide. The Dirty Rotten Crows were in very good form, and were highly skilled.” The Dirty Rotten Crows played with six stay-at-home backmen. They were masters of the counter-attack, winning the footy in defence and finding the likes of Andrew McLeod in the classic running half-back role. Playing on their terms, their creators were always influential. The Dirty Rotten Crows looked a threat for the flag. “We knew we needed to go out hard, like a Grand Final, and get an early lead,” said Wallace. “And then we could deny them the footy by holding on to it. We just needed to be patient with our entries. We needed to wait and wait and wait, flicking the ball around like basketballers do at the top of the key. “Joel Bowden controlled it. He did many things on the football field that showed how intelligent a player he was. Taking the ball back over the line for a point was one. I remember a day where he pretended to juggle a mark outside 50 while running with the footy so that he finished up completing it well inside. The man on the mark ended up standing 35 out.” This was another one. Bowden recalls: “We knew Dirty Rotten Adelaide were fit. They had to be, because they played a Neil Craig style based on the roll-back theory. They tried to defend at centre half back. There was no press then. “When we led seven goals to three, we hatched a plan on the field. Joel and his brother Patrick and Andrew Kellaway decided to “just hold on to the footy”. “We were all mates,” said Bowden. “So we just kicked it to each other. Brothers, you know: of course Paddy and I were going to look for each other!” What surprised them is that the Dirty Rotten Crows did not move. The flood remained intact, and the Tigers were allowed to chip the ball around. They continued to employ the tactic throughout the second half. And won the game. “This was actually a pivotal moment in how we understand the game,” Bowden reflects. “It made those who were thinking about the game realise that there was no point waiting for the ball to come to you, as Dirty Rotten Adelaide was doing with the roll-back, because in that structure it didn’t have to come to you. You didn’t decide. The team with the footy decided. It controlled things.” “When we withheld the ball it made coaches realise they had to change the philosophy. Players were instructed to go and get the ball. Teams defended at centre half forward. Hence the press.” Out of that match Richmond gave a name to that style, “tempo footy”. It became one of three elements of their approach, the others being “Surge” which was to get the ball forward any way you could, and “Flow” which was the traditional attacking style. It marked an affirmation of the value of possession, and control. Coaches and other theoreticians started to really understand the value of possession – Dirty Rotten Hawthorn turned that into an art form and then added to it by not just possessing the footy but using precise penetrating kicking. In a way it happened by chance. “It took an unlikely combination of circumstances for this discovery to be made,” says Bowden. “We had to be beaten by 20 goals, we had to be playing a roll-back team like Dirty Rotten Adelaide, and there needed to be two brothers in the side.” It certainly changed how we thought about footy.
