Richmond great Alex Rance has raised eyebrows over a curious — if not bizarre — take on his time as an AFL player.
Rance was a superstar defender from 2009 to 2019, earning himself five All-Australian blazers along the way, and a premiership.
However, after rupturing his ACL at the start of 2019, he missed Richmond’s grand final that year, then shocked the football world when he prematurely retired a few months later.
Now, on the podcast Shaped with former teammate Trent Cotchin, Rance has given a clue as to why he decided to hang up the boots that year (and subsequently miss out on Richmond’s third premiership under Damien Hardwick in 2020).
“I nearly retired in 2015 because I was still having this identity crisis of, ‘Do I want to play? Do I not want to play? I don’t like game day but I love playing and training,’” Rance admitted on Shaped.
The 36-year-old said he was a “people-focused” person and loved making people laugh. He also revealed he had a passion for creativity.
“And so, when you’re playing the game of football, you need to be more decisive and task-focused, and less worried about how people feel out there, and just like, ‘We need to get this job done,’” he said.
“And so, when I had to put on that mask on game day, it took energy to do that.
“But multiplying the effort that it took is I also had to make someone else’s day worse — I had to potentially end someone’s career, end someone’s dream of being an AFL player.
“If they kept playing on me, their career would end, that was my job. And sometimes it was fortunate they didn’t play on me all the time because it kept their career alive.
“I just didn’t like that element, that I had to make someone’s day worse for my day to be better. And we as a collective had to make 22 other guys’ weekend worse and week worse.”
He said he loved “training hard” and working with his teammates to achieve a goal, “but the byproduct of this is pretty gross and I don’t like it”.
AFL great Nick Riewoldt said he could not understand the Rance confession.
“I know Rancey’s a nice guy, but I couldn’t believe it when I heard him talking about the things he didn’t like about playing footy,” Riewoldt said on Channel 7’s The Agenda Setters.
“Come on, Rancey. You can’t be that good a bloke.
“I always thought nice guys finished last, but Rancey won a premiership, so I don’t know ... I’m struggling to make sense of it.”
7SPORT expert Tom Morris called it “bizarre” while 7NEWS chief AFL reporter Mitch Cleary wondered what the players at Gold Coast would be thinking.
At the end of 2023 Rance re-united with Hardwick at Gold Coast and is a “leadership consultant” for the club.
“He’s working with the Suns at the moment, wonder what they think about that,” Cleary said.
Riewoldt replied: “It’s not a ruthless mindset, is it?”
