We started off with real hope after signing Hopper and Taranto after a 2022 season where we were pretty good but lacking in midfield grunt.
We learned, pretty early on, that you can’t enter a new season after having spent an offseason trying to fix last year’s team. You need to look forward, not fix what happened in the past.
Our best pressure forward, Jason Castagna, retired very late in the offseason because he was constantly abused for no reason. He was like the Skylar White of the Richmond dynasty.
Our best young key position player, Josh Gibcus, had a hamstring injury that lasted longer than Lost and ended more hopelessly.
Our best key forward, Tom Lynch, broke his foot early and never took the walking boot off for the rest of 2023.
Our coach left citing burnout and was linked to Gold Coast more quickly than you can say marketing manager at Richmond.
Two of our greatest ever players and leaders played their last game together then drove out of Tigerland like they were Thelma and Louise.
We head into season 2024 with just 9 of the Richmond premiership team from 2017 still on the Tigers’ list and the prospect of a brand new coach.
One of those players is Dan Rioli who named in the forward pocket in that grand final, and who is now one of the game’s best running defenders.
One of the others is Dustin Martin, named at centre half forward in that grand final.
Jesus I am glad to see him.
Reports emerged over the last couple of days that Dusty would undoubtedly be staying at Tigerland at least through season 2024. Sam McClure, who I can only assume was tied up like he was in Abu Ghraib until he wrote this article, said that “Dustin Martin will see out his contract at Richmond”.
He rebelled from his captors by adding in that Dusty is “open to finishing his career on the Gold Coast.”
McClure has taken the never wrong just early approach to Dusty leaving the Tigers for the better part of the last three years, and he’s still holding the door open in an article that says, definitively, that he’s going nowhere.
Thank goodness for that.
I think if Dusty were to leave after a season of so much uncertainty, so much upheaval, it would have a genuine effect on the psyche of the Richmond faithful. I suspect that in season 2024, Dusty will take over the mantle that Richo had and then passed onto Jack before the glory years: the reason to go to the footy.
If he were to have left at the end of the season that you could drill the final nail into the coffin of the dynasty it would have been a pretty swift return to the hopelessness that defined my early years as a Richmond supporter.
The feeling that we got our good thing, and now we’ll never get it again.
The younger and newer fans would be stuck feeling like Tony Soprano in the first episode of The Sopranos when he says “I came in at the end. The best is over.”
I think Dusty specifically would have engendered this reaction because of two factors: firstly he’s the talisman that defined the dynasty; and secondly, because of how good he was in 2023.
It was outrageous that Dusty wasn’t an All-Australian last season given the year that he had playing 86% game time as a forward. He was first among forwards for possessions, contested ball and forward 50 ground ball gets and fifth for score involvements.
He was also first among in offensive 1 v 1 win percentage among all players with at least one offensive 1 v 1 per game at 49%. That number was 4% than Gary Rohan at number 2, who had basically half the amount of offensive 1v1s.
He finished the year with 25 goals from his 20 games.
He’s more of an actual forward flank than Christian Petracca has ever been.
This was also the year that Dusty fully embraced the Leo Messi inside him. He walked for large portions of the game. He did nothing defensively. He understood that he was Richmond’s best, and often only, avenue to goal through most of the stretch run of the season and conserved his energy for those moments.
He averaged half a tackle inside 50 per game, and I bet if you went back and watched them, most would be him jumping on top of piles. He knew that wasn’t his game and he didn’t play it.
The sort of game that he has embraced as he has aged is even more reason why he will be so important to Richmond people in 2024. He’s going to do something outrageous most weeks and give us something to cheer about in a season that threatens to be pretty bleak.
He’s also going to give us another reason to look back on the glory years when he plays his 300th game in yellow and black. We’ll get to see the highlights, him swearing on national TV when being interviewed by Richo post-2017, the way he grabbed his jumper in each of the three grand final victories.
We’ll get a reason to celebrate the best player that most of us have ever seen.
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