Kevin Sheedy the footballer wasn’t overly fast or tall.
In the rough and tumble, semi-professional days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, “back-pocket plumbers” – as his coach at Richmond Tom Hafey once described him and his type – were a dime a dozen.
It was a time when footballers with average ability got by because they were smart and could scrap. Sheedy was better than average. And he was smart and could scrap with the best of them. There was no better school of football, or school of life, for that matter, than Punt Road.
Sheedy rolled the dice to play League football in the first place. He crossed from Victorian Football Association club Prahran to Richmond without a clearance in 1967, a move that resulted in a five-year disqualification from the
VFA. It was the Tigers or bust.
So he lobbed at Punt Road, feisty and determined.
Those traits have remained with him at every stop throughout his journey in football, which reaches 1000 games as a player and coach at Skoda Stadium on Saturday afternoon, when Greater Western Sydney plays Port Adelaide.
Sheedy arrived at Richmond with a chip on his shoulder. Other good footballers from his South Yarra neighborhood in Melbourne’s inner south-east ended up having a run with Melbourne, but for Sheedy, there was never such invitation forthcoming, which might partly explain the feistiness.
And it was his mother, Irene, who was always on his back about the consequences of a failed League career, the likely spark for the ruthlessness and absolute determination to get the best out of himself that has been another hallmark of his time in football.
Some 251 games, two best and fairest awards and three premierships would suggest he extracted all he could as a player.
It has often been said of Sheedy that his best emerges in the aftermath of defeat. He played
great football in the 1973 and 1974 finals as the Tigers rebounded from the surprise loss to Carlton in the 1972 Grand Final.
The sneaky, over-the-top handball to Michael Green in the goalsquare in the 1974 Grand Final pretty much said it all. Innovation and rat cunning.
And the seeds for some of his greatest coaching triumphs were planted in the moments after seemingly catastrophic defeats.
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