Terrific Troy

Troy Simmonds a boy from Melbourne suburb Lilydale began his career with Melbourne and was best known for being the object of a vicious hit by Michael Long in the 2000 Grand Final against Essendon.

Simmonds was traded to Fremantle after that and found himself in a less than ideal situation. Troy is a ruckman who can go forward. Fremantle had the good fortune to have the league’s equal tallest player the 211 centimetre giant Aaron Sandilands on their list and this meant that Simmonds was played as a forward who occasionally rucked.

When Brad Ottens left Richmond to play for Geelong the Tigers were a ruckman short and Troy Simmonds was lured to Richmond with 3 carrots, one was the ability to live and play in his city of origin, two was the promise of being played predominantly in the ruck and three was the security of the almost unheard of 5 year contract. It was the third factor that became the source of anger and frustration amongst supporters who did not see the wisdom behind offering any player a 5 year deal.

Troy copped a lot of criticism in his first year in the yellow and black, the most common comment being: ‘looks like Tarzan, plays like Jane’. For his size Simmonds seemed remarkably gentle, he also spent more time in the forward line that rucking around the ground and his kicking for goal was far too wayward. He was moved into the ruck later in the season and improvement was seen almost immediately.

This year Simmonds has been acknowledged as one of the league’s big improvers. He has hardly played a bad game and been a tower of strength in the ruck, forced on more than one occasion to ruck an entire game as the Tigers only option. Although Trent Knobel was there to assist him against Geelong, Troy did it mostly on his own. Not only did he easily account for the Cats big man division of Brad Ottens and Cameron Mooney, but he also kicked 3 goals and collected a heap of possessions, plus a few goal assists, like the one late in the last quarter to Chris Hyde that ultimately won the game for Richmond