You may remember in one of my earlier posts I mentioned that I was going to the footy to see my beloved Tigers play – welll boy was I for disappointment. The team was a rabble from the opening bounce and were convincingly beaten by what I thought was an average side. Of course it cannot be expected that one’s team is going to win each and every week, but you would think that the team would at least have a red hot go at winning each match. Richmond’s lack of ferocity was evident throughout the match and it appeared to me that our boys were psychologically as well as physically inferior to our oponents. I suppose that’s what over 20 years with limited success will do to a club.

It’s only Round 2 so it’s too early to complain too much or become the stereotypical Richmond supporter who has already written off the season and spend the next 20 weeks complaining about how crap Richmond are… but I must admit I was really with worried with what I saw last Friday. This week we play St Kilda, a team on the rise who have soundly beaten us in our last few encounters. It’s funny, we have developed a reputation as the team to beat whenever an opposing team has some sort of special occasion – last year it was the Kangaroos game, being Jason McCartney’s comeback match. We had that game in the bag until 10 minutes to go. Come to think of it we did the same in another recent game against the Kangaroos when Mick Martin’s father was on his deathbed and again Richmond was able to snatch defeat from the claws of victory. Similarly, last year we played St Kilda at another milestone game – Nathan Burke’s last game. Perhaps the common factor is not that the other teams were psyched for the milestone/occasion, rather that Richmond ARE crap. This is a concession I am not yet prepared to make. I wouldn’t be a true Tiger supporter unless I held the naive optimistic belief that we are only a couple of games away from turning it around and returning to the glory days of the late 60s and early 70s. Well, I can dream…