The story of AFLW player Pepa Randall
The They Might Become Giants podcast are doing a history of women’s footy and this week they kindly covered the story of Pepa Randall, as told in my book Never Surrender. Read it below.
Pepa Randall was drafted by Melbourne in the first season of AFLW. She didn’t get to play.
‘One day in a contest I went up for a spoil. I was getting close to selection. I remember in my head thinking, I’m going to fucking go for this. And it was one of those ones when at the last moment you realise: you’re not in the right spot in the air. Someone cleaned me up from underneath. I landed awkwardly, with someone on top of me. I had ankle and tib and fib [tibia and fibula in the lower leg] fractures and all sorts of things.’
During her recovery from that injury she also had a heart operation. A condition she’d always carried had flared up when she started to subject her heart to the rigours of elite football.
By the end of the season Melbourne assured her she’d be kept on the list. Something changed their mind. ‘I got a phone call out of the blue, saying: “We’re probably going to trade you for Ash Guest [then playing with the Giants] and if you’re not on board we won’t be keeping you on our list.”’ Left without much of a choice, she came to Sydney for the second season of AFLW.
At that point in time, Randall’s focus was on getting a game. Her previous highlight of her football career was being drafted for one of the exhibition games between Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs. She didn’t play on the day, but she did get to fulfil the runner’s duties for the team. ‘For anyone else it would have been the most embarrassing experience ever to not play and be the runner, but I was having a BALL,’ she said. The Giants offered her another chance. ‘Obviously the Giants didn’t do too well in that first year, but it still didn’t bother me [that I was coming up here]. I was so personally driven by this point, I just wanted to play. I didn’t care if we were going to win. I didn’t care if we were going to lose. I just wanted to get on the park. I wanted to get my jumper.’
Randall made her debut in the first game of season two, against her old club Melbourne. The Giants lost by six points after leading by five at three quarter time. The second season saw the Giants improve on their first, winning three games and drawing one of the seven played. Randall was happy with her season personally and pleased to be at the Giants.
Then, it all fell over. She suffered with mental illness over the winter.
‘I came back despising footy. It was quite a drastic turnaround, but I think it was something I’d been building towards for a long time. It all crashed down, I resented football. The whole thing felt exhausting for me.’
The environment at the Club had also shifted. The focus was firmly on the performance of the team and Randall found the well-being of individuals suffered. ‘The way in which we were going about playing and training was not inspiring or helpful or caring, which was what I was craving.’
The team won two games that season and there was a feeling that they had lost whatever it was that glued them together in the previous season. Randall’s experience was exacerbated by her mental state.
‘I’m away from my family, I’m making absolutely no money and we’re not even a nice team to be around and we’re not succeeding at football. I thought: I could do this at home. I could do this in Melbourne. I’m not saying I wanted to go back to Melbourne, but if it carried on this way, I was thinking I am just going to do the same thing down there but at least be 20 minutes up the road from Mum and Dad.’
When Randall describes the reality of playing in the AFLW, I start to wonder when gratitude becomes irrelevant and the level of sacrifice required to play the game you love, for the reward of creating a legacy, becomes too much to sustain. When she started with Melbourne, Randall was paid $6,000 and thought it was the best thing to ever happen to her. Then she relocated to Sydney.
There were times when she worked 48-50 hours a week in her other job, trained 30 hours at nights and felt like she could barely stay afloat. She thought things could definitely be better. When you’re subsisting on tins of tuna you slid into your bag at the club, you might start to question why you’re still turning up. Then things started to compound. The university degree she began in Melbourne had to be deferred indefinitely. Career progression? Any job she took had to be able to employ her casually for six months at a time and tolerate her calling up at 5am before a 6am start to say, ‘I haven’t slept at all tonight and I can’t come in because I’ve got training.’
Certainly, there were, and are, immediate rewards: new boots, money in your bank account, access to the club – but it’s the underlying issues that irk Randall because they’re going to start to be a problem as the competition goes on.
‘If you’ve been there from the first year, you’re starting to see the cumulative effects of horrendous salaries. The effects on people’s mental well-being and general well-being. It’s starting to accumulate.’
She knows not all the players have her broad view.
‘A lot of the focus is on immediate things: how much am I going to make this year, how much am I being paid each month. OK, cool, that’s an improvement. But it’s like hang on. It’s hard to look forward.’
She also acknowledges that players don’t want to disrupt what they have. They’ve been waiting for so long to get a competition at this level, they don’t dare complain, for fear of losing it. They maintain positivity and gratitude.
‘I think there is unfortunately a real sense of gratitude, being grateful for opportunities that we haven’t had in the past. There is a fear that, abstractly, it’s not going to be there, that it will go away again. That it will return to no professional sport. No AFLW. No team.’
Randall is not one to smooth over her own complexities. She won’t maintain a veneer of positivity. She’s far too honest for that. She is also unafraid to challenge when she perceives an injustice or unfairness. On the field she is a defender. I’ve seen her described as ‘dour’ – a ‘lock-down’ defender whose only mission is to spoil the game of the opposition forward. She clamps down on you and talks.
Her demeanour on the field is not matched by that off the field. She can be flamboyant and vocal. Randall on the training track is something to behold. She screeches, she dances, she affects a shrill, extravagant voice to encourage her teammates. This year she rocked a mullet, the cutting of which she auctioned off. She took a portable deck to Brisbane so she could mix music in her room after the team meeting in the evening. Before games she usually carries around a tennis racket and takes Alyce Parker out onto the field for a quick hit.
Her dourness starts to kick in about an hour before a match begins. She wears headphones around the rooms and retreats into herself, slowly building her momentum. She looks straight ahead. As the team walk out through the tunnel, she explodes. There’s a photo of the team heading out for the final match of the 2020 season which shows her clapping her hands, snarling. I wasn’t there when the photo was taken but I could hear her roar when I saw it.
As far as Randall can see, she won’t have a career until she quits football, because you need to work full time, or at least close to it, to achieve career progression. Women with kids have the same dilemma. Before the start of the 2020 season several players were forced to choose between continuing to play footy and fully committing to their careers outside the game. Bianca Jakobsson of Melbourne decided to skip this season to focus on police academy training and of course, Amanda Farrugia ended her football because balance was becoming difficult. Randall doesn’t blame her.
All of the players I asked about Farrugia’s retirement, announced just before pre-season training began, understood why she made the decision. They are keenly aware of the tightrope they tread. As Randall said, ‘Unfortunately, we don’t have a competition that can support our players properly. And you know what, if you’ve got to choose your career, or your family or your partner or just your well-being, that’s fine. I don’t think one player in the entire AFLW would begrudge a player for giving up because it’s just too hard. Because it is.’
Randall is looking forward to the competition review, it’s a chance to get these things into the open and address the complexities of the competition and their lives within it.
Want a copy of Never Surrender? Send me an email at hello@georginahibberd.info and I’ll send one to you. I’ve seen secondhand copies for $45! I’ll give it to you for $10, which pretty much covers the postage. Alternatively, buy a Kindle version on Amazon. If you’re really keen, send me an email and I’ll point you to a PDF of the book.
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