'He's here' — The Day I Played on Plugger
The I in that title isn't me. It's John Origlasso, a fellow zero-gamer who went through the mill with me at Hawthorn. This is about his day playing on Tony Lockett at Skinner Reserve in Sunshine.
John Origlasso is one of the best friends I made through footy. He went unbearably close to playing seniors for Hawthorn. On the 21st of July, 1990, he was first emergency for the game against Richmond and would have made his debut had not Dermott Brereton played with an inflatable lifevest to protect his broken ribs. Dermott kicked 11.2. Ora never came as close again. He was delisted at Hawthorn in 1991, and in 1992-3 trained at Richmond, attempting to get re-listed.
This story takes place during that time, when Ora is wearing the yellow and black of the Tiges and trying to catch John Northey’s eye in the preseason of ‘93. Tony Lockett had kicked 132.58 the previous season, and was on his way to becoming the highest goalkicker of all time. Given it’s the last day of pre-season, I thought I’d sneak this one in, to celebrate all of us whose AFL careers and stories peaked in the preseason, and becasue Ora tells footy yarns as well as anyone I know.
We recorded this while I was doing interviews for my Allan Jeans biography, which comes out in March next year through Hardie Grant. My published footy history book is 1989 The Great Grand Final and you get 20% off as a paid member of this Substack.
Tony: But you also played on the greatest full forward of all time, didn’t you?
John Origlasso: Well, that was when I was at Richmond … Peter Schwab was coaching the reserves in 1993, and I'm trying to make the senior list at Richmond, and … you will remember Richmond's fairytale run through the Fosters Cup that year? <laugh> That young group that got all the way to the final. So what that meant was, the reason I bring that up is that on the Tuesday night, Richmond was playing Essendon in the Fosters Cup final. And on the Saturday there was a practice game organised between Richmond and St Kilda. Now had the seniors not won the Fosters Cup [semi], they would've been playing against St Kilda that day. But the seniors won through to the final, so none of the seniors were available to face the Saints that day out at ... what was the name of the ground in Sunshine?
Tony: Skinner Reserve.
John Origlasso: Skinner Reserve ... where careers went to die!
Tony: I lost my Rolex. I had a TAG Heuer that dad got at a conference, and it got stolen out of my bag at Skinner Reserve. [laugh] Yeah, happy memories.
John Origlasso: Wasn't a friendly place to go. It was really ...
Tony: It's one of the great marks of all time that Carey took at Skinner on Mick Martyn. Have you seen the Carey over Martyn photo?
John Origlasso: Skinner is one of those places that if you ever got to win a premiership, people never saw that you had to toil at Skinner. You know what I mean? People didn't see the pain at Skinner Reserve. I mean, driving to Skinner Reserve was bad enough, but anyway …
So Richmond had to cobble together a team to play St Killda this day because, as I said, the seniors were unavailable. So it was the reserve grade players and those of us that were striving to make the list. And I was playing fullback, I'd been playing fullback in the practice games. [Richmond reserves coach] Peter Schwab had me playing there. And so we are playing the Saints. But before the game, there was talk of who was going to be playing for St Kilda. The St Kilda seniors are playing and we were in the rooms getting ready, and people would come in and say, ‘Stewie Leowe's here!’ And then they'd say, ‘Robert Harvey's here!’, and ‘Nathan Burke's here!’ And these were filtering through to the rooms, right?
Now there was a rumour that Tony Lockett might play — it was obviously the last practice game with the Fosters Cup finishing and the season proper was about to start. Plugger hadn't played a practice game. There was a strong rumour that he was going to play —which wasn't sitting well with me, in terms of if he was to kick a lot of goals on me, which was likely, my career would not be furthered! [laugh]
Anyway, not long before we ran out, someone came into the rooms and just said these words — ‘He's here’. Now. I'm not sure if that's the words they said or that's how my brain took in those words, but I was being hyper-aware of, I don't think anyone else was as worried about him playing as the person who was about to play on him.
So we run out, and we are doing our warmup laps. And then St Kilda run out and of course all our heads turned like meerkats to see who is actually wearing a St Kilda jumper. And all the aforementioned names were there — including Tony Lockett.
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