Richmond’s Trent Cotchin and Damien Hardwick hold up the 2020 AFL premiership cup. (Inset): The cover of “The Hard Way”.

Journalist Konrad Marshall has certainly raised the bar on the standard of writing about AFL football in recent years, for which he’s been rightly acclaimed.

His investigation into concussion for “Good Weekend” magazine last year won the Quill award for best sport feature, and Marshall was named the 2019 Harry Gordon Sports Journalist of the Year.

It’s been his work embedded with the Richmond Football Club for which he is best-known in the football world, though.

And while the timing obviously couldn’t have been better as the Tigers incredibly hauled themselves from nearly 40 years in the wilderness to now three premierships in four years, it’s Marshall’s skill as a researcher, interviewer and writer which have made his accounts of this golden era for the club so compelling.

“Yellow & Black”, the inside story of Richmond’s amazing 2017 season and first flag for 37 years, remains the best football book I have read, offering remarkable insight into how what had for so long been an impoverished, strife-torn operation came together as one with a thoroughly different approach both on and off the field.

“Stronger & Bolder” was the account of the Tigers’ 2019 win in which we were now familiar with the club’s embracing of vulnerability, its commitment to making the game fun, its embrace of concepts such as mindfulness and the always-entertaining motivational methods of coach Damien Hardwick.

And the phrase “when you’re on a good thing …” certainly comes to mind here.

Richmond chief executive Brendon Gale has clearly embraced it. Gale joked to Marshall that another instalment in what has become a riveting series simply had to be written because: “We only win when we’re being chronicled”.

And so has arrived chapter three in these extraordinary Tiger tales, this one entitled “The Hard Way”, taken from a tweet Gale posted minutes after Richmond had defeat Geelong in the 2020 grand final at the Gabba.

If another sequel wasn’t already going to be hard enough, the 2020 version offered challenges the scale of which you couldn’t possibly have envisaged thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.

A season shortened under dramatically altered conditions was announced literally on the eve of the commencement in March. We saw all of one round before it all went into recess for who knew how long.

And by the time we finally got underway again in mid-June, the ground was still shifting seemingly every day, Richmond players, like most others, ultimately consigned to hubs in Queensland, where much of the remainder of the season was played out. Like so many of us chroniclers of the game, Marshall couldn’t be there in person.

So by necessity, this isn’t another “fly on the wall” tome. And yet “The Hard Way” is no less gripping than its predecessors, and in a way even more of a tribute to Marshall’s talents.

It is the product of extensive interviews with key participants in Richmond’s third leg of a premiership trifecta, Gale, Tiger president Peggy O’Neal, general manager of talent Blair Hartley, general manager of football performance Tim Livingstone, mindfulness coach Emma Murray, culture and leadership guru Shane McCurry, high performance manager Peter Burge and long-time Richmond employee and veteran footy journo Tony Greenberg.

Marshall might not have been present for the moments that roll call of key Richmond personnel describe, but his skill in eliciting the great stories and the reactions to a seemingly never-ending catalogue of logistical challenges the club faced take you there anyway.

Richmond chief executive Brendon Gale with journalist and author Konrad Marshall. Photo: AFL MEDIA

Rather presciently, the theme for 2020 upon which Richmond had arrived at its pre-season training camp well before the pandemic threw all the best-laid plans into disarray was “Sisu”, a Finnish word which has no direct English translation, but was loosely speaking, the concept of resilience.

The Tigers had to find plenty of that quality as they started the season poorly, then along the way grappled with the difficulties of compromised training programs, shifting home bases and more than the odd off-field incident, most memorably the shenanigans of Sydney Stack and Callum Coleman-Jones on the Gold Coast which resulted in both being fined and sent home.

Even Hardwick himself in the early stages of the season had to confront his own negativity and scepticism about the measures which had been put in place throughout Victoria to combat the spread of coronavirus, finally snapped from his funk by a stern talking-to from Gale and Livingstone.

“I was probably the worst,” Hardwick says. “We’re hearing all this, what I thought was propaganda, and I was going: ‘I can’t see it – I’m not seeing zombies walk down the street’. I was struggling to get my head around it, and the reality is if I’m struggling, the players are certainly going to feed off that energy.

“I think I was at my very, very worst, early days. The fact of the matter was I thought I made a crucial mistake at the start of it, and I thought our form reflected it.”

Even as the win-loss ratio improved, it still came against a backdrop of problems, a series of behavioural indiscretions leading to a popular media and public narrative that Richmond had lost its humility and was drowning in hubris.

And the now-customary run of injuries, the likes of Tom Lynch, skipper Trent Cotchin, Dion Prestia and Toby Nankervis all sidelined for long enough periods of an already-shortened season.

The book tells how the Tigers regained their mojo and rediscovered the bonds which had held them tight for four years, in part as a result of their residence at the Gold Coast’s KDV Elite Sports Academy, where they initially quarantined.

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Whilst originally the plan had been to move to the Royal Pines Resort once quarantine was over, they ended up staying at the academy, the trappings more spartan, but a place they had to themselves, and in which there was more scope to adapt surroundings to suit.

Like ruck coach Ivan Maric, whose room became a de facto social club where players could hang out, playing games or just shooting the breeze, partaking of snacks and drinks like small goods, pickles and red wine.

Soon enough, players had built a fly-screen door for the “lounge”, a faux gold chain across the entrance to give it a nightclub feel and a sign above the door which read “The Gherkin Lounge”.

There were social groups like the keen fishermen Nathan Broad, Kamdyn McIntosh and Kane Lambert, who set up the “BML Fishing Tours Company” as they encouraged teammates to join them on the hunt for bream and whiting in the various canals and creeks in the district.

Of course, Richmond’s finals campaign, in which this time it took … yes, the hard way, after losing the qualifying final to Brisbane, is given pride of place in this book.

But it’s those little anecdotes from beyond the playing field those who were there recount that offer an important insight into the connection among these Tigers which enabled them to bounce back from that reversal, and then again, crucially in the grand final against Geelong, overcome a deficit of 22 points shortly before half-time to end up winning by 31.

Richmond’s by-now unshakeable faith in its method was never more valuable than when the group entered the Gabba rooms at half-time in the big one.

It wasn’t just that Dustin Martin’s first of four goals in another Norm Smith Medal-winning performance had reduced the gap at the long break to only 15 points. It was that while the Cats may have won the second quarter, it was Richmond which had actually dominated play, if not the scoreboard, for the last 7-8 minutes.

“I walked in and my first thought was: ‘It’s like we’re 15 points up in here’,” Gale recalls in the book. “(Hardwick) pulls them all in and says: ‘OK, this is where we’re breaking down, this is what we’ve got to do about it, these are the changes we’re going to make, and we think it will give us what we need. We’ve been in this position before, so you can draw on your experience – you can think it, you can feel it – now let’s go and do it’.”

And they did. As has Marshall once again, albeit similarly up against far greater logistical difficulties.

This is another great book, and again, not one just for Richmond fans basking in the premiership glow.

I must have told virtually anyone I’ve spoken to from every club in the three years since the release of “Yellow & Black” that it should be a “must” for anyone connected with an AFL club.

Of course, as has become customary, we’ve seen AFL rivals since plunder Richmond’s stocks of off-field coaching and managerial talent in the quest for success.

Had they taken note, however, they might have realised the secret of the Tigers’ resurgence hasn’t been necessarily about individual names, but a collective buy-in to an ethos which is still proving the perfect formula for premiership success.

Good on Richmond for having cracked the “people” code. And good on Marshall for continuing to document that success so brilliantly.

*“The Hard Way”, the story of Richmond‘s 13th premiership, by Konrad Marshall. Available all bookstores and HERE, RRP $24.99