Did Richmond’s 1967 Premiership Begin Before Tommy Hafey Took Over?
Richmond people can name the faces of 1967. Tommy Hafey, Royce Hart, Francis Bourke, Kevin Bartlett and the players who ended a twenty-four-year premiership drought.
But a premiership machine needs more than the men who appear in the team photograph.
Before Hafey coached the flag, Ray Dunn had formed Richmond’s first coterie support group, become club president and helped preside over the move of home games from Punt Road Oval to the MCG. Those were administrative decisions on paper. Their consequences reached money, scale, recruiting capacity, crowds and the club’s sense of what it could become.
The danger is to turn that sequence into a neat causal myth. Moving grounds did not kick goals, and a coterie did not win clearances. But ignoring the institutional platform can make the football story look as if it began later than it did.
Did Richmond’s 1967 premiership machine start being built before Tommy Hafey became its famous face?
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