WELL, another footy season is over and the mighty Hawthorn Hawks achieved a THREE-PEAT of AFL premierships over the hapless West Coast Eagles.
Leading up to last Saturday's grand final, it seemed the perfect time to reflect on the glorious past of my beloved Richmond Tigers, who got knocked out of the finals race in the first week.
The Tiges were great once - back in the 1960s and 70s - but they haven't been a force in the AFL (or the VFL as it was known in the good ol' days) for 35 years.
What better way to reminisce about Richmond than read autobiographies (well, sorta...both are of the "as told to" variety) about my two favourite Richmond sons, KEVIN BARTLETT and MATTHEW RICHARDSON.
It's ironic how similar both these players were - in talent and on-field demeanour - and yet how different their career trajectories turned out, purely due to circumstance.
Bartlett was a member of five premiership-winning teams (1967, 1969, 1973-74, 1980), played a whopping 403 games from 1965-83 and kicked 778 goals. He also won a ton of club best and fairest awards but never a Brownlow Medal, the ultimate personal achievement for a footballer.
Richardson played in 282 games from 1993-2009 but never played in a grand final, let alone won a premiership. He kicked 800 goals but probably could have kicked a lot more if he'd been accurate. He won a ton of B&Fs for the Tiges and came heartbreakingly close to winning a Brownlow in 2008, but wound up equal third to Adam Cooney of the Western Bulldogs.
Bartlett was ridiculed for his receding hairline and inability to handpass to team mates.
Richardson was ridiculed for his incredibly poor kicking for goal and his constant spitting the dummy on the field: at umpires, opponents and team mates.
Bartlett was nicknamed "Hungry" because of his selfishness on the field. But fans loved him because he was a champion player in a team of champions.
Richardson was plain old "Richo", but he also found it difficult to share the ball around, trying to do everything himself to lift his hapless team to victory week after week. Fans hated him for years, but eventually grew to love him because they could see he was a champion player trapped in a shit side.
Bartlett and Richardson would never have survived playing in the modern game of 2015. Coaches would have quickly banished them to the B grade, then traded or delisted them at the end of the season because they weren't willing to follow set plans and be team players.
KEV (pictured above with champion Richmond coach Tommy Hafey, left) was my idol growing up as a Tigers fan in the 1970s. He was probably the sole reason I stayed a fan after they started sliding down the premiership ladder in the early 80s due to one management cock-up after another.
I picked up KB: A Life In Football (as told to his son Rhett Bartlett) a couple of weeks back for next to nix in a Mildura bookshop. I didn't realise till I started reading it that the low price was because the photo-heavy memoir was four years old.
Still, it was a fun and easy read, full of fantastic action shots and pix of Tiges and KB memorabilia.
It's just a pity it wasn't written five years earlier - by 2011, Kev was reconciled with the Richmond Football Club and a beloved Tiges legend. But it wasn't always that way. He'd turned his back on the club for the previous 20 years after he was sacked as coach in 1991 (after a less than stellar four-year coaching stint, I might add). Bad blood ran deep and I'm sure an autobiography in 2006 would have been darker, more bitter and would have had a few well-aimed barbs at key management figures who paid a part in his coaching demise (and also tried to sabotage him at times during his playing career). But that was all water under the bridge by the time Kev co-wrote KB.
In the end, the impression of Kev I got from this book was that he's a funny, self-deprecating raconteur who adores the Tigers, even if the relationship has been rocky at times.
Some classic KB moments
This is a more traditional autobiography and a pretty mediocre one at that. The problem is that Richardson is a taciturn guy; he let his footy do the talking. Which meant he has little to say.
Questions about his career are met with stonewall replies. You can sense Flanagan tearing his hair out in frustration on every page. Anecdotes are shot down before they can start, facts are confused or dismissed with one-line answers - Richo is actively unhelpful in trying to tell the story of his life.
Flanagan is forced to fill chapter after chapter with stories about Tasmania (Richo's home state) and the even the history of football. And there are numerous comments from Richo's friends, family and former team mates and coaches to give us a picture of the big man. They all say the same thing: he's a loyal, hard-working guy with a good heart, who was completely untrainable and selfish on the oval because of a single-minded desire to try to win games by himself.
It was only late in his career - after he'd been publicly lambasted for a 2002 incident where he abused a first-year footballer, a team mate no less - that Richo made any effort to become more of a team player. Not that he succeeded, but at least he tried.
Eventually, the fans - from Richmond and opposing teams - began to realise what a phenomenal talent Richardson truly was. In another team or era (perhaps playing alongside KB and other greats) he would have been a legend. As it was, punters knew he was in the wrong team at the wrong time.
That fact still didn't stop me - when I received an email invitation to fill in a club survey at the end of every season - to get to the question, "How can we improve the club's on-field performance next year?" and I'd each time I'd write, "Sack the coach. Sack Richo."
Please don't misunderstand me, I loved the guy, but it was obvious to me (and pretty much everyone else) that Richo was a bad fit for the Tigers and vice versa.
But just like his premiership-winning dad Barry, Matthew was a Tiger through and through. Started with the club, ended with the club. More's the pity.
Ironically, this book would have been better if it had been written five years later. Nowadays, Richo has developed into a respected TV commentator who adds great insight to the footy games he covers. He's opened up and is very comfortable chatting to players with a microphone in his hand. One can only wonder how much more insightful and entertaining his autobiography would have been in 2015 now he's had this media training.
Perhaps Richo will think about penning a second autobiography down the track - it couldn't help but be better than this one.
Some classic Richo moments