It wouldn't be Grand Final week without a fitness doubt over a star player.

This year it is Hawthorn's Jack Gunston, who will need to satisfy his club he is over the ankle strain he suffered in the qualifying final loss to West Coast more than a fortnight ago.

In the third of a five-part series, ASHLEY BROWNE revisits some of the great Grand Final week fitness tests.

ALAN Richardson had every reason to curse his luck when he broke his collarbone in the 1990 second semi-final.

Collingwood handily defeated Essendon at the MCG that day. The Magpies were good things to repeat the dose 13 days later in the Grand Final, a win that would end the 32-year curse of the Colliwobbles.

X-rays the following day confirmed the worst, but Richardson went ahead and ordered a brace and went to work on building up his strength so he could at least attempt to prove his fitness to play.

"There was reasonable movement if I took a painkiller," he told the AFL Record this year.

By the following Tuesday he was able to train and by the end of training on the Thursday night at Victoria Park, he was ready for a fitness test.

But it would be no ordinary fitness test. Waiting for him at the end of training would be the brooding figure of Leigh Matthews, a hard man when he played, but utterly ruthless when carrying a whistle around his neck.

The first part of the test was overhead marking under pressure. No problems there.

Then came a drill where he was thrown a ball and had to get past a tackle from Matthews. The roles were then reversed, with Matthews taking the ball and Richardson laying the tackle.

"It was going well," Richardson recalled. "It was a fairly structured exercise where I would come in from a predetermined angle and was able to prepare and potentially get the shoulder to where I wanted it to be."

But Matthews was cunning. He told the AFL Record he was amazed Richardson made it as far as he did but that if Richardson was to break down, "it had to be at training". So at the last moment on that Thursday night, he charged at Richardson from a different angle.

"He ran right over the top of me," Richardson said. "I had taken significant painkillers but I knew I had shifted it again."

And with that, Richardson was out of the Grand Final team. The Pies were prepared to roll the dice with Darren Millane and his broken thumb because of what he meant to the side, but not with Richardson when they had a capable replacement in Shane Kerrison, at 100 per cent fitness, ready to go.

Richardson recognised that Matthews was left with little choice. He couldn’t roll the dice. "In a Grand Final when you’re planning for it to be tight and tough and everyone being there as long as they can, when you have an alternative as good as Shane waiting there, the decision was easy."

Richardson couldn't move his arm the following day, barely 24 hours before the match, confirming once and for all his unavailability.

"It was pretty clear things weren’t right. I just didn’t have enough faith I could get through, and as much as I wanted to play, it would have been pretty selfish to take that risk and not be able to be a strong contributor for the whole game," he said.

Now coach of St Kilda, Richardson said he lived with the disappointment of missing out on a premiership, particularly one that has become one of the most feted in modern times.
"That was the year I started to play consistent senior footy and I naively believed, because we had a pretty young list with guys like Gavin Brown, Damien Monkhorst, Mick McGuane, Gavin Crosisca who had come through under 19s, that I'd get another chance.

"But I was very pleased for my teammates," he said.