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“I felt I had an impact,” he said. “I just encouraged them to do the things their values dictated. To make it simple. They were already doing a lot right. How I fitted in was terrific and in a sense it was easy because it felt like I was coming home.”
LegendBalmey will be let go at seasons end.
"It was at a casual pre-season lunch hosted by Brendon Gale where Neil Balme, another key player from the Richmond premiership epoch, learned that his time at the club was about to come to an end.
In a conversation Balme described as briefly awkward, always caring but ultimately definitive, the Tigers CEO and his football boss Blair Hartley made it clear that season 2024 would be Balme’s last at the club.
Eavesdropping fellow diners at Richmond’s Rowena Parade Milk Bar would not have realised the significance of the conversation at first. Gale, Hartley and Balme have been part of a passing parade of Tigers’ staff and players at the cafe for years.
Breaking bread and drinking coffee, the Richmond bosses asked Balme about his health and well-being and plans for the future. They talked about how much he deserved a proper holiday. At some point, the penny dropped.
Balme, speaking exclusively to this masthead about the decision, said he had come to terms with his subtly enforced exit but admitted it had not sat comfortably with him for some days afterwards.
“I think they were making the point they want me to retire rather than move me on,” he said, “and in a sense that takes the pressure off all of us. For a day or two I did feel a little bit uncomfortable, but the reality is I’m out of the decision-making area, and it’s kind of like a changing of the guard.
“What they were saying was I’ve done my work at Richmond without any doubt. And while they have enormous respect for my relationship with the Richmond community the reality is I’ve been a bit crook and a bit weird.
“I’m not as strong mentally as I used to be, and I struggle with my emotions sometimes.”
Balme was diagnosed with epilepsy in 2020 after his first in a series of frightening seizures. Still very much a media frontman for the club and a highly effective conduit with sponsors, coterie groups and other heavy hitters, Balme was removed from the football department and its day-to-day processes in 2021 partly due to soft-cap constraints but remained an influential player in the Tigers’ fledgling AFLW program.
Although he was Melbourne coach when the teenaged Adem Yze was recruited to the Demons, Balme was not included in the coaching process to find Damien Hardwick’s replacement. He was not explicitly told, but it became clear over the pre-season he would no longer sit in the coaches’ box on match days.
“I’m not really part of match committee any more,” said Balme, “and they made a conscious decision not to have me involved [with Yze’s appointment] and I accepted that.”
A famously outspoken critic of the AFL and its processes, Balme, whose equally old-school football values have never prevented him having a positive impact on players and football departments, remains acutely self-aware about his diminishing role as a full-time football official in the era of increasing compliance.
“What I have to say doesn’t always suit them,” he observed of both club and head office. While Balme has a relationship with the new coach, “he doesn’t regularly come into my office and ask my advice”.
Gale, too, looks certain to depart Richmond to take over as inaugural chief of the new Tasmanian team, but he will ensure Balme receives a fitting send-off towards the end of 2024.
Whether he chooses to share his effective wisdom on a part-time basis with another club, work on another biography or share his stories as an after-dinner speaker, Balme will remain one of the game’s most fascinating and ultimately heroic characters.
After two premierships as a Richmond player and a successful coaching career at Norwood in the SANFL, Balme came close at Melbourne. He came close, too, on several occasions at the helm of Collingwood’s football operation. Sacked the first time, he moved to Geelong where the under-performing Cats won their first of three flags under his football stewardship.
Sacked the second time by the Magpies in late 2016 he moved to Richmond. If he could single out one key success over the past seven-and-a-half years it remains the drought-breaking 2017 premiership.
That came off the back of a 2016 review where Gale restructured the football department and placed Balme in charge and Peggy O’Neal fought significant political unrest. The only thing O’Neal’s board and the two separate groups of challengers agreed upon was that the club needed to bring back Neil Balme.
“I felt I had an impact,” he said. “I just encouraged them to do the things their values dictated. To make it simple. They were already doing a lot right. How I fitted in was terrific and in a sense it was easy because it felt like I was coming home.”
With so many key players going and gone from the Tigers’ premiership era, Balme still insists he holds no fears for the club which before 2017 had endured 37 years without a flag and for many of those years existed in a relative cultural wasteland.
“No I don’t,” he said. “I know people say this, but culturally they’ve never been in a better spot. Adem [Yze] and Tim [Livingstone] and Blair [Hartley] reflect the values and behaviours that they and others before them had put into place.
“It can always fall apart if you put the wrong people in of course, but I don’t see any danger of that happening here. There will be challenges on-field as we re-build but the attitude to training and the general feeling about the place is terrific.”
As he enters his 73rd year, Balme remains torn about his football future. He came close to leaving Richmond towards the end of 2021 when Mark Ricciuto led an Adelaide push seeking a football mentor for the relatively inexperienced new coach Matthew Nicks and his football boss Adam Kelly. But Balme’s medical specialist urged him not to make the geographic career change.
He calls Richmond home and sees his return for eight years as a football administrator and later ambassador and influencer at the club as his ultimate legacy. But he still believes he has something to offer.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever work full-time at a footy club again,” Balme said. “It’s a challenging job working in a footy club. They’re challenging places. But I’d love to keep helping others and in a lot of ways I’m ready for another challenge even if it’s on a consultancy basis.
“If I had to sum it up I can say I’ve come back to the club I called home for eight years, and we’ve had some success and everything comes to an end.
“This is just another part of the changing of the guard. I might have been a bit disappointed for about five minutes but in the end in their position I probably would have done the same thing.”
Football historians and Richmond supporters will look back and debate the final domino, which fell to end the Tigers’ premiership era.
Some will point to 2022, when a grieving Dustin Martin lost his football appetite and the club lost him for the best part of a season. Others to 2023 and the not-so-pleasant May Sunday morning when Hardwick told Gale he, too, had lost the hunger – at least for Richmond. Or in August, when a tearful Trent Cotchin and Jack Riewoldt walked from the MCG for the final time in Tiger jumpers. Premiership president Peggy O’Neal had stepped away in 2022 with Gale set to follow by the end this season.
But history should also register the recent February lunch down the road from Tigerland where Neil Balme pondered his football mortality and accepted, not without some difficulty, that his time, too, at the club had come to an end."
The casual lunch that brought a club favourite’s time at Tigerland to an end
Neil Balme, a key part of Richmond’s return to AFL prominence, talks about the “briefly awkward” discussion that made it clear this would be his last year at the club.www.watoday.com.au
