Richmond’s Jack Riewoldt has given some insight into the club’s off-field indiscretion that occurred last week.
Tigers pair Sydney Stack and Callum Coleman-Jones were suspended for 10 matches and the club fined a massive $100,000 after they were involved in an incident on the Gold Coast where they broke COVID-19 protocols.
The situation has seen the reigning premier attract plenty of negativity with sections of the media and general public labelling the club as arrogant and lacking in humility.
Star forward Riewoldt spoke openly and at length about the incident and how the Tigers are working to reclaim the respect they’ve lost in the aftermath.
“It’s been a pretty difficult and sombre mood around the hub up here,” he said on SEN’s Tiger Time.
“We’ve had two young men make a lot of very poor decisions and the easy thing to do is to ostracise them from the group and say, ‘That was their choice’, but the sign of a good football club and the sign of a good organisation is that we own it.
“‘The Chief’ (Brendon Gale) came out and spoke the other day and said clearly it’s not ideal and us, the fans and the people out there reading the articles and seeing this unfold, we are gutted about how this has gone down.
“We know that it affects us and affects us all in many different ways. Directly affecting us is that our football club has copped a pretty decent whack and deservedly so because we’ve stepped outside of the guidelines.
“I think The Chief said, and I agree with him, is that we’ve lost some respect from people in the media circles, people in the football fraternity. That’s the thing that cuts the deepest.
“We feel like we’re a great organisation and we’ve had a couple of young men that have made the decision to pull against the fabric of our organisation.
“It really hurts.”
Riewoldt insisted that the club is now on “heightened alert” as they sit precariously in regards to sanctions from the AFL if they happen to transgress again.
“The culture has been questioned by outside people,” he added.
“The majority of our actions, and I mean 99.99 percent, are of a solid, good-cultured football club and a club that is built on respect, connection, love and care for each other.
“These two young men made some really poor decisions but that’s not going to define us in the back-end of the season.
“We’ve got to learn our lesson from it. We’re in a position where we are right on the borderline of going over into the next stage of punishments which are pretty severe.
“We’re on heightened alert. We know we need to maintain the regulations, as every side does up here.
“For us, it’s a very expensive lesson and it’s been pretty a damaging one for the brand of the club and we are pretty disappointed about that.”
Responding to claims of arrogance, Riewoldt said a term like that would cut deep with a lot of people at the club who have worked so hard to not only win two premierships on the field, but the work that has been put into significant organisations such as the Korin Gamadji Institute, the Alannah & Madeline Foundation and the Black Lives Matter movement.
“I completely disagree with the word arrogant at this football club,” Riewoldt said further.
“We’ve got some extremely humble people in here and they would cringe at hearing that. I would cringe about them saying that about our people.
“The brand has really been affected. It’s a brand that we do so much work on. That’s the hard thing for us, is we look at this and go, ‘That’s really hurt our brand’.
“Yes the brand has been affected and yes we’ve lost some respect from people in the industry and other supporters. Our own supporters would be feeling down about the way the club’s been painted at the moment.
“Culture is about what you do next. How do you bounce back? How do you prepare and put this behind you and get ready for Friday night and a massive game of football?
“How do you look after your people and get them going again? The culture will be what pans out over the next period of time. That’s not the back-end of the season but that’s into the future.
“I have a firm and strong belief that the leaders we have around this club, and that’s players, Peggy (O’Neal), Brendon, Dimma (Damien Hardwick), everyone that’s in a senior management position is pushing in the right direction.
“We’ve had a couple of slip-ups and a couple of massive blues, but we are pushing in the right direction. We learn, we grow and we’ve been planted again.
“It will be the true showing of culture.”
The Tigers will look to put the difficult week behind them when they take on the in-form Geelong at Metricon Stadium on Friday night. A win would go a long way to securing a fourth straight top-four finish.