Maurice Rioli Jr on track to follow in famous family footsteps by landing on AFL list
Maurice Rioli Jr looms as the next AFL player with his famous surname — and one coach says he ‘could be the best of the lot’. Three AFL clubs are vying to win the exciting prospect’s commitment before this year’s draft.
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As one Rioli returns to the Northern Territory in Richmond colours, another is edging closer to following in his trailblazing father’s footsteps with the Tigers.
Maurice Rioli Jr – the son of the late Richmond and South Fremantle champion Maurice Rioli Sr, and cousin of current Tiger Daniel Rioli – is generating hype among recruiters after starring for AFLNT club St Mary’s over summer.
Dreamtime game rivals Essendon and the Tigers, who face off in Darwin on Saturday night, both have priority access to Maurice Jr in this year’s draft – the Bombers via their Next Generation Academy and Richmond as a father-son pick.
Fremantle also can take him as a father-son choice.
But the 175cm small forward, who boards at Melbourne’s Scotch College and is aligned to NAB League side Oakleigh Chargers, favours a move to Richmond, where his dad is a club great as a three-time All-Australian, dual best-and-fairest and the first Indigenous player in the league to win a Norm Smith Medal, and fellow Tiwi Islands product Daniel has claimed two flags.
St Mary’s co-captain Shannon Rioli said Maurice Jr had classic Rioli traits that their other cousins, ex-Hawthorn star Cyril and West Coast goalsneak Willie, possessed: fierce tackling, repeat efforts, pace and an eye for goals.
“He’s a jet,” Shannon told News Corp.
“We keep saying with every Rioli that comes through, but he ‘could be the best of the lot.’
“He’s already been doing stuff with Richmond and I know other teams would be keen on him – they’d be silly if they weren’t.
“We knew he was pretty handy and from a young age he was always better than most kids his age, but last season he did some pretty special things.
“The way he’s going, it’s looking like Richmond.”
The hype around Maurice Jr grew in February after he kicked four goals in a best-on-ground performance in a semi-final for St Mary’s, where his dad began his career. He is now shaping as a later-round pick in the draft.
Former AFLNT talent manager Brenton Toy called Maurice Jr a ripping young man who had come a long way over the past two seasons.
“He’s always been around footy and showed glimpses of brilliance, but as he grew into his body he showed he had everything – the attitude, intensity, footy smarts and cleverness around goals, but like his dad, his tackle pressure was outstanding,” Toy said.
“He’s one of the better kids I’ve seen come out of the Territory in the past few years.
“Richmond are investing a lot of time into him and Daniel’s there already, so there’s a natural link.”
Maurice Jr spent last season playing for Scotch, Northern Territory and St Mary’s, only lining up in a pre-season trial for Oakleigh Chargers, before Victorian competitions were shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“He does some really flashy things and has got great ball control … and he would’ve played Round 1 for us, for sure,” Chargers talent manager Jy Bond said.
The national draft is tipped to be in December, which will mark 10 years since Maurice Sr’s death from a heart attack on Christmas Day, 2010.
Shannon said if Maurice Jr made it to the AFL, their family would be proud, no matter which club took him.
“He lost his father at such a young age and it was so tough on the family … and it still really hurts,” he said.
“He was a leader in our community and, as the first one to go and play AFL, he was our hero.
“Hopefully Maurice Jr can have a successful career in the AFL and if he can follow in his father’s footsteps, it’d be really special.”
AUSTRALIA’S MOST REMARKABLE FOOTY FACTORY
It was a visit to the Tiwi Islands in 1974 that first brought football legend Kevin Sheedy in touch with Indigenous Australia.
“I went on that trip with Neil Balme and (Brian) “Whale” Roberts – they dragged me, when I was Richmond’s development officer when I was a player, to come up and have a real look at the talent,” Sheedy recalls to News Corp.
“It was ‘come on you little white guys in Chapel St, Prahran, get out of Melbourne and come see the real Australia’.
“They took me to see (South Adelaide great and Indigenous Team of the Century member) David Kantilla and I couldn’t believe how tall he was – I’d never seen an Aboriginal hardly in my life, living in Melbourne.
“David was a beautiful person, a great footballer and made me feel welcome to the Tiwi Islands.
“That was my first hello to Indigenous land – the Dreaming land.
“That’s what the game did to me – it took me around my country to meet the people from my country and I’ve never forgotten it.”
That learning experience and many others with Indigenous Australians inspired Sheedy.
Three decades later, he was an architect behind Dreamtime at the ‘G, between Richmond and Essendon, the side he was coaching when the game was first played in 2005.
He had seen the word ‘Dreamtime’ in a book by South Australian artist Ainslie Roberts, a white man who interpreted Indigenous legends and showed their connection to nature in his works, and loved it.
“We should never stop kids from dreaming, particularly Aboriginal kids, who can feel like they don’t get a chance,” Sheedy says.
“Look at the Goal of the Years from the last 20 years – 13 are small players and most of them are Aboriginals.
“You don’t have to be big to be a superstar in the AFL.
“I think Eddie Betts has won three Goals of the Year – he probably has a car yard by now.”
The Dreamtime match has become a cornerstone of the AFL calendar and this year it will be held outside of Melbourne, in Darwin, for the first time, due to Victoria’s coronavirus crisis.
On Saturday night, two Tiwi Islanders – Richmond’s Daniel Rioli and Essendon’s Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti – are set to be among the stars on show.
“With (Norm Smith Medallists and fellow Tiwi products) Michael Long and Maurice Rioli (playing for Essendon and Richmond), why wouldn’t you take the game up there,” Sheedy says.
“The two best in grand finals from a drop-in-the-ocean island.
“It’s an amazing story what’s come off those islands, guys like Tipungwuti, Cyril (Rioli) – it’s not as if it’s a town called Bendigo or Ballarat or Wagga Wagga or Albury-Wodonga or Mount Gambier.”
The Tiwi production line, which also includes Willie and Dean Rioli, Ronnie Burns and Austin Wonaeamirri, is remarkable, considering the islands have a population of about 2500.
Bathurst and Melville, the largest of the islands, are about 80km from Darwin, and it is a two-and-a-half hour ferry ride to get there.
Brother John Pye introduced football to the region in the 1940s and the game took off.
“Football matches with their talents,” former AFLNT talent manager turned Tiwi Bombers assistant Brenton Toy says.
“I see things in their everyday life … their hand-eye co-ordination, their agility, their speed, their ability to judge depth, distance and angles, especially around hunting – everything they did made a lot of sense in terms of playing footy, so it’s not a surprise they’re brilliant at it.”
Darwin-based AFLNT club St Mary’s was established in 1952 to provide an opportunity for Tiwi footballers to play organised matches.
In 1969, the islands formed their own competition then 38 years on, the Tiwi Bombers joined the NTFL.
The team was created not just to give islanders a shot in the NTFL, but to tackle social issues like trying to reducing high youth suicide rates, as well as health and education matters.
Tiwi won its sole premiership in 2011/12.
Last year, 12 months after retiring from the AFL at the age of 28, Hawthorn great Cyril Rioli returned home to be an assistant coach for the Bombers.
He played once, kicking the winning goal as the Bombers prevailed by a solitary point at Wurrumiyanga Oval on Bathurst Island.
“Him playing that one game on the island was special,” Tiwi Bombers’ general manager Leigh Crossman says of Cyril, who will be a development coach at the club next season.
“The people on the island really appreciated it.”
Cyril’s feats are well-known but Crossman says the Tiwis have produced several other players with just as much talent.
“Do you know much about Ross Tungatalum? He was on St Kilda’s rookie list for one year (in 2009) and the fact he hasn’t played 150 games of league footy is a blight on the game in my opinion,” he says.
“We have a running debate up here of ‘who would you take? Ross Tungatalum or Cyril Rioli?’
“Feel free to watch Ross’s highlight reel – it’s unbelievable.
“But just under that there’s a heap of other talent who, for a variety of different reasons didn’t make it to the big time.”
AFL social inclusion and policy general manager Tanya Hosch says the NT has a rich football history “not just by virtue of the talent we see at the elite level of the game but at the local, community level” and she is excited at the chance to bring the Dreamtime game to Darwin.
Toy believes the match will be a little bittersweet because the crowd will be reduced from 10,000 to about 5500 due to COVID-19 restrictions, but massive for the Territory.
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“All the communities are just lit up knowing those two teams are coming to play here,” he says.
As for the Tiwis?
“We’ll have two of our own out there,” Toy says of McDonald-Tipungwuti and Daniel Rioli.
“Tiwi Islanders have definitely exceeded expectations in footy, but if you ask them, they just play the game they love.”
Originally published as Maurice Rioli Jr on track to follow in famous family footsteps by landing on AFL list