Comparisons
Roach's average of 3.03 goals per game rates with the best, but he never placed in the club's best and fairest award. Although player depth is a must for a strong team, the situation with Taylor and Roach competing for the one position ultimately worked against both players and the club. Fatefully for Roach, he was too often played away from full forward, by far his best position. In the five seasons when he was fit and exclusively the full forward (1979–1981 and 1985–1986), he scored 430 goals in 102 matches, almost four per game. This included ten bags of eight or more goals in a game. He was leading goalkicker for the club seven times and today the club awards the "Michael Roach Medal" to its highest goal scorer for the season.
Throughout the 1990s, Roach worked at Punt Road as a specialist coach, was team manager of the reserves and a highly visible figure in the Save Our Skins campaign of 1989–1990 that saved the club from bankruptcy. Controversially omitted from Richmond's Team of the Century in 1998, he was inducted into the club's Hall of Fame four years later. All the while he continued to maintain strong links with Richmond, living in the suburb and he had a great thrill when his son Thomas was drafted to the Tigers under the father-son rule, in 2004. Unfortuately for the younger Roach, he was delisted at the end of the 2006 season after only a handful of senior games.
Read more about this topic: Michael Roach (footballer)
Famous quotes containing the word comparisons:
“Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“The surest route to breeding jealousy is to compare. Since jealousy comes from feeling “less than” another, comparisons only fan the fires.”
—Dorothy Corkville Briggs (20th century)
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)