No-one lives closer to the ground and it's unlikely anyone has spent more hours there over the past 40 years than the Tigers' dedicated team manager.

Ried arrives at 8am to start filling water bottles, arrange magnets and brace himself for "spot fires" which include, but are not limited to, the players who turn up without their jumper and trigger the knock-on effect of needing to amend every team sheet.

Two months shy of his 64^th birthday, Ried still lives and breathes the club but today, the closest he will get to the action is a glance at the scoreboard from his kitchen window. Seven days of COVID isolation have kicked in and Ried will be missing his first game for years.

"It will be difficult because I can't be there," Ried said.

"I'm anal about being organised and I like to know where everything is.

"If it's a home game, I'll go to the club on Friday night and they have their team meeting in the gymnasium so I will set the chairs up in a certain order.

"I'll get the whiteboard and everything organised so that when the coaches walk in, they can go straight into the meeting and everything's everything's set up.

"I'll have all my paperwork in envelopes, all the best and fairest cards and everything will be in its right place on my desk.

"I like to be organised, I don't like being hassled and pushed around on a Saturday when I've got other things to do.

"Preparation is super-important for me.

"There can be a red herring that comes out of the woodwork and you need that extra time otherwise you're in trouble, chasing your tail all day."

You need to be up early to beat Ried to the Sportsground but canteen managers Bluey and Nola Day usually have him covered.

"We were on holidays this week but we came home early so we could be here today," Nola explained.

"This is very important to us.

"The players are like our sons and daughters, a lot of them even call me 'Mum.'

"You should ask our son about it because every time we get a new player, he drops further down the list."

Orders for today's game were placed by Tuesday and the pair have been starting their weekend making sandwiches and salad rolls for the last 20 years, not to mention Thursday night dinners.

"Nola does lasagne and I make pasta bake," Bluey said.

"But third grade love their chicken schnitzels.

"Over the last 10 or 12 years, the kids have been fantastic, very respectful.

"We had one, a few years ago, who didn't pull the line and he was gone by Thursday. That's how the club is."

Albury's run of 10 consecutive grand finals between 2009 and 2018, which brought them seven premierships, represented an era of dominance the likes of which we may not see again but things were not always rosy in the garden.

"Back in the late eighties, the club was in desperate need of people and money," scorer Tom Rollings tells me on his way to the timekeeper's box.

"We were just about broke when I got here."

Ried remembers it well.

"The club could easily have folded that one stage if it hadn't been for some fellas that went to bank guarantee," he said.

"They got a group of business guys together and virtually paid the club's debts otherwise the club was gone, it was history.

"That's a terrible feeling and the players get into a bit of a negative mindset, like 'are we going to get paid, are we not going to get paid?'

"But the players were terrific in a couple of those aspects, they put their hands up and said 'look, we know we're in trouble here, don't worry about paying us, we'll be right.'"

Enter Colin Joss, the man whose backing laid the foundation for Albury to emerge as a powerhouse.

A junior with St Pats after moving to the town in 1958, he switched his focus from football to business after being handed an ultimatum by his boss at the time who didn't like the sport.

The rest, as they say, is history.

"I started to get more involved here in the late nineties," Joss recalled.

"I always came to the games and then I got involved as a sponsor.

"The club was coming off three premierships but there was an exodus of players so the club went through a really bad time from 2000 to when Paul Spargo came back and coached again in 2009.

"Paul has got enormous respect here and the club loved him because his father was a previous coach.

"He was just an enigma, he was unbelievable, the whole family but particularly Paul, coaching Albury to a couple of grand finals and knowing how to lift the club out of the doldrums.

"Again, when he came back in 2009, he did the same. He had an amazing amount of support from all around Tigerland, that he was going to be the new coach, people couldn't have been happier and we were very excited about it.

"Because of his influence, we were able to recruit some very good players at that time: Chris Hyde, Joel Mackie, Andrew Carey and Shaun Daly. We recruited those four players and they were the nucleus of our side that was coming through under the coaching of Luke Carroll, who coached for three years and really got the young kids coming through.

"They were good times and it was good to be involved.

"We were able to help, me being a builder, doing things around the clubrooms, we tidied it up.

"As a company, we manage the ground for the club and that's why it's always looking so damn good."

From the iconic picket fence to an oval you could almost play lawn bowls on, the Joss factor is evident even before you start reeling off the players who have brought the Tigers so much success in recent times.

"I'd like to think the club is very well-respected now," Joss said.

"You can go and buy a team if you want to but the best way is to build a team and that's what we set about doing.

"I love this footy club. I've got some damn good friends here, on and off the field, and it's just about part of my DNA now.

"I'm enormously satisfied. Actually, I'm blown away by our success and no doubt I'll continue with that.

"It's a great club to be around and I think we've done it the right way.

"I never wanted to be a president or anything like that, I'm happy to back out of the limelight.

"I think the support I do for the club is suited to someone in that light rather than a blow-hard coming in, saying 'I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that.'"

Joss may have been the headline act but the likes of Ried have also driven the standards relentlessly.

"One day I saw a young player coming out of the shower and he was wiping his feet with his jumper," Ried said.

"I told him 'that's disrespecting the jumper, that jumper is sacrosanct.'

"I talk to the under-18s every pre-season, I give them a spiel to educate them about the history of the club.

"It's been here for almost 150 years and we want to continue that tradition and the past players who have bled for the jumper. Some of these kids have played their junior footy elsewhere and suddenly they're coming into a senior club where the history and tradition is held in the highest regard."

But whatever the culture internally, barbs aimed at Albury at the peak of their powers would sometimes find a target.

"It used to piss me off totally," Ried said.

"We had a couple of clubs in the Ovens and Murray - and I won't mention who they were - who actually came to us and asked us 'how does your system work?' so we invited them to come to our board meetings.

"But other clubs got super jealous and it used to get me down really badly. I used to get quite upset about what people were saying and it got to a point where I wouldn't even like to wear my club shirt or my jumper down the street just in case someone looked at me strange.

"You'd read something on social media, or in the paper and if my wife hadn't stopped me, I'd have written to the editor, many times, to say 'get your facts straight.'"

Tony Wood, who I find opening up the can bar below the coaches boxes, also played a key role in the club's evolution.

"Dave Kefford asked me to take on the role as secretary-manager and I said I would, on one condition," Wood said.

"I wanted to do some changes which, most probably, the club wouldn't like.

"I wanted to use the club as a function centre.

"The year before I took over, they had three functions for the year outside of football but the year I left, they had 70."

BEHIND THE SCENES - IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM:

It's been a big week for Albury co-coaches Anthony Miles and Luke Daly after the Tigers went down to Wangaratta by 54 points in the season opener - their first defeat since September 2019.

"Generally, I don't like to analyse the game much on a Saturday night but the first week was one of those where I couldn't stop thinking about it," Daly said.

"You stay awake, thinking about it, but I generally like to leave it to Sunday. There's other things on a Saturday night, with the kids and the family that take more priority for me.

"You can't do anything once the final siren goes, whether you've won or lost, so dwelling on it on a Saturday night probably doesn't change anything.

"Playing down in Wang on Saturday night, my two boys came up to me straight away, even as we were walking off the ground, and what they come up with, what they say, it does lighten the mood pretty quickly.

"It's a great distraction to have."

Miles and Shaun Daly are among the most vocal inside the rooms pre-match but it's Luke Daly who has the final word before the door opens and the players burst into the arena.

"The last two minutes before you run out is a good time to have a deep think about what you want to get out of it personally and how you feel you're going to influence the game," Daly said.

"It needs to be pretty simple, what you're trying to deliver to the players. If you start to give them too many messages, sometimes it can be a downward spiral. We have a meeting on Thursday night and then we have a pre-game on Saturday so they're all pretty similar messages in what you deliver and that last one's just bringing up what we've been through and some of those key messages of what we want to get across.

"I'm getting towards the latter part of my career, so I don't know how many more times I'm going to do it.

"The hairs still stand up on the back of your neck, particularly playing at Albury and being able to run out onto the Sportsground.

"That feeling never leaves you."

Brendan Brown, whose company was among the sponsors to help the rebuild of the 1990s, is now in his 14th year on the club's board and first as president.

"The Joss family's support of the club is phenomenal," Brown said.

"Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people think that's wholly and solely financial support but, categorically, it's not. In fact, it's probably quite the opposite.

"Paul, Colin and Lorraine have been wonderful supporters, not just through the playing lists but the facilities and maintenance of our wonderful facility, which attracts people to the club.

"I'm very honoured to be in this role at a club of this magnitude.

"It's a huge responsibility but I receive a great deal of support from the two vice-presidents, Aaron and Dominic, and the rest of the board.

"This year, we're represented by two ladies from the netball fraternity and that's the first time, which is great to see."

The Tigers' A-grade coach Skye Hillier agrees that things are moving in the right direction.

"We're pushing very hard this year to unite the football and netball," Hillier said.

"It was something I noticed coming in, that the netball club was very separate from the football club and there was also a high turnover of players each year so we looked at some things internally that we could change and try to create that culture everyone wants to stay around.

"I meet with the football coaches quite a bit to make sure we're planning everything as a footy and netball club and really trying to push that family feel.

"That unity is huge. So many of the footballers and netballers have families so we've got to cater for that.

"Whether it's upstairs dinner after a game, people don't want to hang around when you've got a family if there's no food, it's those little things that if a club's never done it before, they don't understand how it can help to create that culture.

"Even Thursday night dinners, we've now had a couple with everyone around and it's nice to walk around and know the footballers by name and likewise for netball, even to get a few footballers over to watch the netball is huge.

"Things like that change the club, big time."

Nine months since their last home game, the Tigers have chalked up six wins from seven matches across football and netball.

The rooms are filled with smiling figures in yellow and black, whooping and back-slapping, and you can bet Ross Ried is joining in with the team song from his house on the hill.

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