With Jade Rawlings’ appointment as Richmond’s caretaker coach for the second half of the ’09 season, Tony Greenberg has unearthed some different facts about him.
· Jade Rawlings becomes Richmond’s 36th senior coach in its 101 years of AFL/VFL football – 37th if you count Verdun Howell, who filled in for one match when Tommy Hafey was coaching the Victorian State side in 1970.
· Rawlings was just five months and 23 days old when the man he replaced as Richmond coach, Terry Wallace, started his 501-game league football odyssey, debuting for Hawthorn in the opening round of the 1978 season.
· At 31 years and eight months of age, he is the Tigers’ youngest coach since Barry Richardson in 1977.
· He is the youngest coach at any AFL club since Mick Malthouse, at Footscray, in 1984.
· Rawlings is two and a half years younger than the oldest player on the Tigers’ senior list – his brother-in-law, Matthew Richardson.
· He is the first Tasmanian to coach Richmond since Paul Sproule in 1985.
· He is the first Jade to coach Richmond (and any other league club for that matter), although the Tigers’ last premiership coach was a Jewell.
· He is the third caretaker coach in the Tigers’ history, joining Jack Titus (1965) and Jeff Gieschen (1997).
· Rawlings’ wife, Samantha, is now rivalling Fay Tuck (wife of Michael, mother of Shane and Travis and sister of Gary, Geoff and Kevin), and Edna Daniher (mother of Terry, Neale, Anthony and Chris) as a league football matriarch. Samantha’s father Alan “Bull” Richardson was a key member of Richmond’s drought-breaking 1967 premiership side, her uncle (Bull’s brother) Rodger, played one senior game for the Tigers (in 1964), her brother, Matthew, is recognised as an all-time Tiger playing great, and now her husband, Jade, is the Club’s senior coach.
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