The circus comes to town - a football report

We went to see Richmond play North Melbourne at Bellerive Oval on Saturday. Here is the piece I wrote for Tiger Tiger Burning Bright, a collaborative website I started last year with Dugald Jellie.

Today I am going I dodge the real issues at Richmond. Everyone who reads this will have seen the game or at least be familiar with the score. We have lost four of the last five to teams that no-one would have considered finals material, until they played us. I had a marathon vent on Twitter about that last night and I feel that is out of my system now. 

Yesterday was the first time Richmond have played for keeps in my home town of Hobart. I saw them play Hawthorn in Launceston in Buddy's first season, maybe 2007. We went in hot favourites and were shown up as pretenders. Long drive home. 

So I had been looking forward to this since the draw came out last year, and feeling increasingly tense over the last month as our form went flat. If I had gone alone, I would have made an effort to catch up with all the visitors to town that I know through TTBB and Twitter, but it turned into a whole-family event, which of course was fantastic in its own way. There was the usual torrent of pre-game puff as always when the big league comes to town, but for it to feature the Tiges was novel.

Continued over on TTBB