Richmond great Joel Bowden on those famous two rushed behinds
Richmond great Joel Bowden changed the face of AFL when he conceded two points against Essendon rather than take kicks and risk a goal and a loss. He remembers back to 2008 and the rule change he caused, with STEVE VIVIAN.
IT was a sunny but cold day in mid-July, and the clock was about to strike 3pm.
Cruising the MCG turf with a comfortable five-goal margin, the Richmond players were having a moment.
These are the kind of days, diamonds in the rough and sludge of Melbourne’s punishing winter, where the chill of Antarctic winds, and their bitter precipitation, land on a players’ skin like a baptism from the football gods.
I was on the bench with about three minutes to go, so I knew how much time was left in the game.
I asked the bench coach to hurry up the rotation and get me back on the field — I wanted to contribute to winning the game …. When I came on to the field and took possession of the ball, I knew I was going to do.
The time ticked past 3pm, and Richmond’s opposition, riding the crest of a four-game winning streak, snapped into another gear.
That’s when the sun, as if knowing what would happen next and too afraid to watch, slipped behind the clouds, and the MCG lights flashed on.
The year was 2008, the round 16, the day Saturday, the kick off time 2.10pm, and the Tigers’ opponent a traditional foe, Essendon.
With the sky now an ominous shade of grey, that comfy Tigers’ lead was no longer.
Essendon had piled on six goals to one to be up by seven points at three quarter time.
After getting the bounce on Essendon at the beginning of the fourth quarter, and re-establishing a two-goal lead, Richmond again found itself, like a jockey riding blind on the tundra, holding on for dear life.
And it was critical the Tigers did hold on: the match was a pivotal game to keep the club, at the height of its mid-2000s mediocrity, in finals contention.
This was a young Richmond side, long relegated to the kid’s table in matters serious football, and the Tigers sorely needed an adult in the room.
Enter: Joel Bowden.
With 25 seconds to play, Bowden takes a mark 30m out from the Essendon goal, with Richmond clinging on to a six-point lead.
The umpire calls ‘play on’, and Bowden obliges, winding up to kick the ball long.
But in that moment Bowden decides that is too risky a play: Essendon could quickly regain possession, launch another attack, kick a goal, and thus draw the game.
Bowden then turns into a kind of football janitor, mopping up time, and Essendon’s hopes of victory, by slowly walking the ball across the goal line (of which more later).
The move — a ‘rushed behind’ — which concedes one point to Essendon, is a simple calculus.
The catch for Bowden, is that by giving up the behind, he has imperilled Richmond’s slim lead, bringing it under one goal to five points.
But all Bowden cares about, however, is the clock.
So he does it again. Standing in the goalsquare, Bowden winds the clock down to two seconds before rushing another behind.
The Tigers’ lead is down to four points, but the game is over.
Their faces a kind of sickly crimson, indignant Essendon fans hurl abuse.
But they don’t know quite where to direct their anger. Do they boo towards Bowden for his cunning?
Has some undefinable yet palpable sense ‘sportsmanship’ been breached?
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Or do they shake their firsts at an AFL rule book that, even after 150 years of adaptation and amendment, there remained so incomplete as to not legislate against this exact scenario?
“You know what everybody will be talking about tomorrow? Should we bring in three points for a rushed ball?” said commentator and ex-Collingwood captain Tony Shaw on the telecast.
“I think the only discussion is this: smart play,” retorted Shaw’s co-commentator and Brownlow medallist Gerard Healy.
Little did they, or anyone of the 56,000 people at the ground that day, know that from that moment, football, and Bowden’s legacy, would change forever.
TWO RUSHED BEHINDS MORE MEMORABLE THAN BEST AND FAIRESTS
“AS I say to people who like to talk about it and raise it with me, I say it’s better to me remembered for something, than for nothing at all,” rationalises Bowden, who while taking a family holiday in London and a short break from his post as Unions NT general secretary, talks on a FaceTime connection much foggier than his almost total recall of the day in question.
“It’s very interesting that even you’re writing an article now about it, that I’m remembered for doing something on the MCG in 2008 that’ll probably stay with me for a long time.
“My father won a premiership for Richmond, and I rushed a couple of behinds.”
When reminded of his two Jack Dyer Medals (Richmond best and fairest awards), two All Australian jackets and 265 games of services rendered, Bowden demurs.
“Those don’t come that up all that often to be honest,” he says, chuckling.
“The guys I meet don’t want to talk about that, they didn’t want to know what was it like playing on Anthony Rocca when he was 20kg heavier and five inches taller.
“They just want to know what was happening on that day against Essendon when I walked backwards across the goal line.”
CONCEDING A POINT TO AVOID A GOAL
DESPITE the deliberate rushed behind rule being known colloquially as ‘The Joel Bowden Rule’, Joel Bowden, the past president of the AFL Players Association, AFLNT Team of the Century member, ex-AFLNT football operation manager, and the once mooted replacement for Warren Snowden in the seat of Lingiari, refuses to take all the credit.
“My younger brother Pat had tried the exact same thing in a game up in Brisbane in 2007,” Bowden recalls.
“That didn’t get the fanfare (the Essendon game) got because it wasn’t late in the game, and the game wasn’t close.”
But Bowden, one of Richmond’s greatest defenders of the millennium, remembers where his team started to get the idea of using the goal line as insurance against greater losses.
“This was one of the things we’d actually practised (as a team) at training a few times from full back,” he said.
“We had pretty tight knit unit in the backline. What we were able to do was, probably 18 months prior to that, start working together to how best rebound the ball.
“One thing we came up with as a group was giving up a point for kick-in, which is free possession of the ball, 10m out from goal.
“In our minds, the cost of a single point, to avoid the risk of giving up a goal, was worth it.
“What happened the first time I went through he goals was I took a mark about 40 metres (Bowden was actually closer to 30m out*) out and slowly cribbed my way backwards 40 metres across the line.
“The fact the Essendon players didn’t know that I was going to do and I was able to walk back slowly and chew up as much time as possible made it a lot more advantageous for us, because we were in front.”
TAKING WHAT HE HAD DONE TO THE EXTREME
TEN weeks later, Bowden sits among 100,000 other footy fans at the 2008 AFL Grand Final.
No much for the man had changed: that peculiar finish to a home-and-away match against Essendon in July had receded long in the rear-view mirror.
The brash, streaking Hawks, jet packed up the ladder and into a grand final, and the formidable Cats, going for two flags in a row and led by a Gary Ablett Jnr just coming to grips with his hereditary powers, were duelling it out on the MCG.
Deep into the final quarter, Hawthorn, holding onto a still assailable 23-point lead, had already conceded through a world record 10 rushed behinds.
But the most ludicrous of them all was yet to come.
With six minutes to go, Mark Williams marks the ball 25m out from his own goal. Slowly, in a manner somewhere between sheepish and smug, Williams screw kicks the football 40 metres back into the City End grand stand, registering his team’s 11th rushed behind.
The ball lands just metres away from knowing, nodding Joel Bowden, who was witnessing his own patented caper spread like wildfire.
“I was at that game,” Bowden said.
“Mark Williams snapped it back for a behind almost directly to me.
“The tactic that day, you could assume that the Hawks had planned to restrict the ball from Geelong, and the way to do that was to concede behinds.
“What Hawthorn did was take what I had done to the extreme, but this time it was in a grand final.”
PAYING HIS PENANCE
WITHIN months, the AFL had legislated against players deliberately rushing the ball over the goal line.
Since 2009, it has been illegal for players to concede rushed behinds when they are not under any pressure from the attacking team.
If the rule is contravened, a free kick is awarded to the attacking team from the goalsquare, all but ensuring an automatic goal.
What Bowden had done was turn the refuge of the goal line, a safe haven in enemy Territory, into a flaming tightrope.
“After I retired I had to, as some would say, pay for my sins,” Bowden reflects.
“My penance was to go onto the AFL Laws of the Game Committee for three years.
“What the (deliberate rushed behind rule) did was keep the game moving and speed the game up.
“And now, when the ball is kicked in, the rules have removed the necessity to wait for the umpire to signal a score, or to even stay within the goalsquare before kicking out.
“I think now what we’ve seen was the changes, the game is so fast, handball is the number one skill for getting out of trouble, and the players are so skilful, which is absolutely sensational.
“I love it, I think it’s good, it’s created a lot of interest and it means the game is on knife’s edge all the time.
“As soon as the game is close, and this is the great thing about sport, when there’s tension in a game, and people are on the edge of their seat: that’s the greatest thing in sport.
“I think these rules have made the game better, and created more tension around each passage of play.”
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