Emma Quayle
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In 2010 Liam Picken won the Western Bulldogs’ most courageous player award, an honour that sits well considering his journey and challenges so far. Emma Quayle reports.
Liam Picken was in India on a charity trip when he heard that the Australian selectors wanted him in their international rules side. He had no idea why they had chosen him, and never asked, but he travelled home for 30 hours, trained once, slept and then spent another day flying to Ireland.
“I didn’t even know what time it was when we got there,” he said. “It took me a week to get going again, but that was all right.” On the last day of the trip, as his teammates shuffled luggage from one bag to another on the airport floor, Picken simply checked in everything he had and stepped through the mess with just one thing in hand — his passport. “I was a bit sick of airports by then,” he smiled. But that was all right too. “It felt like a much shorter trip, that time. It wasn’t too bad.”
There is a warm, honest simplicity about Picken. He’s the footballer who can’t stop concentrating, who can be trusted every week, who doesn’t react when an opposition player tries to stop him doing his job, who thinks about nothing but the football when he’s chasing it. He doesn’t get fazed or unsettled, and it’s what the Western Bulldogs love most about their rough-and-tumble onballer.
He’s so quiet and humble. We’ll be going through our positives and negatives after games and there are always more positives with Liam, but he’ll just sit there and nod,” said Daniel Cross. “You don’t get much reaction and he doesn’t really acknowledge the praise, because I think he just expects that of himself. The only frustrating thing is that he probably doesn’t ask for enough help, at times. We’re always telling him: let us know when we can help out. But I think he just likes to do things on his own, to take care of things.”
He’s like that when he gets home, too. Organised and proactive is how Picken’s partner, Annie, describes the 24-year-old. “If there’s a job that needs to be done, Liam just does it,” she said. “He’s not one of those people that thinks things will just happen. He’s so calm. Nothing gets to him very much at all.” His nature has been tested in the last little while, though. Last August, Liam and Annie were asleep late one Friday night when the phone rang.
They had a lot on their minds already — three days earlier they’d found out Annie was pregnant — and on the line at 2am was a policeman, with some shocking, shattering news. Annie’s younger brother, Thomas, had been killed in a car accident near their old home town, Hamilton. He was only 18.
Instantly everything changed. That night, Picken somehow played against Geelong. For a long time they kept the pregnancy to themselves, sensing that the people around them weren’t quite ready to know. Annie was worried the baby wouldn’t survive her stress, and needed Liam to tell her that everything would be all right. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say, about any of it, and sometimes still feels uncertain. But he did the best he could.
“It was a tragedy. It was so shocking for Annie and her family. She was shattered, for months and months, and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing,” he said. “That’s hard, because then you think: ‘What’s the right thing?’ Even now I don’t really like to bring it up because when it comes up I feel like I’m making her think about it again. There was just a lot of stress, all at once. It was such a tragic, sudden thing. For me though . . . it wasn’t about me. At the time it was just about getting through it, I think. I just tried to do what Annie wanted, to look after her and do the best thing for her.”
This time, he didn’t need to worry. Liam might not say much, said Annie, but he chooses the right words. She just needed him to be there and he was. He helped carry her brother’s coffin and he woke up and sat with her when she couldn’t sleep at night.
“Sometimes he’d be up with me all night because I was so upset. Then he’d get up and go to training or play footy, and I don’t even know if he told anyone,” she said. “He always said exactly the right thing to me and he’s so intuitive. He always knows when I’m about to start crying and it’s not so much what he says, it’s the way he picks up on it and will just reach down and hold my hand. I keep waiting for him to go to sleep so that I can have my little time to cry, but he wakes up every time.”
She already knew he would be like that, though. Annie lost much of her vision after an accident a few years ago, and not everyone she’s met since has wanted to stick around after hearing the words “legally blind”. She can get around, but familiar places are the best places. She goes to the football to support Liam, but she can’t see any of the game. The noise and atmosphere tell her what’s going on, as do the other players’ partners.
“They don’t fit the stereotypes at all,” she said. “They pretty much commentate the game and yell and scream, so I know what’s going on. After my brother died I was relatively new to the club, but the girls got my number and made sure that I was never sitting on my own, or anything like that. It’s been such a big support.”
Liam treated her differently from the first day they met. “I was a bit used to people . . . kind of not giving me a shot, but I told Liam straight away that I had bad eyesight and he didn’t care. You tell some people and they get all awkward — they start speaking to you like you’re slow or something — but Liam wasn’t worried at all. When we first started dating he’d sit there and read the whole menu out to me,” she said.
“He’s so patient, especially now with the baby. I can’t read, to start off with, so he has to help with measuring out the bottles and doing everything like that. He drives me around, he helps with my studying because that’s pretty hard, and he does so much around the house, a lot more than I wish he had to do. A lot more than a lot of guys would do.”
Liam also helps Annie know what Malachy Thomas, born four-and-a-bit weeks ago, looks like. She has a limited visual field and what she can see is fuzzy and in duplicate, so she can’t know for sure what his little face is like. “I know he has blond hair, but I can’t really see him. But I touch his face all the time, so it’s different,” she said. “And everyone tells me how much he looks like Liam, so I’m happy with that.”
Malachy is pronounced Mal-a-key, and is an Irish name. Annie discovered it, despite sending Picken off on his international rules trip with a book of baby names that she suspects was never opened. Few people knew by that stage, after all. The name is derived from Liam and means “messenger of God”, so it felt perfect for many reasons.
Liam and Annie will never forget what happened on that horrible night last August. But their little boy has given them something and someone new to think about, and to see Annie smiling more often has made Picken feel happier, too. “It was one of those things where, as time went on, I think it helped her, to know he was coming along,” he said. “It’s really hard to know. For her family, I hope it’s helped them, given them something positive to think about, so that it’s not negative all the time. It’s brought us closer, for sure. And you can see how happy Annie is, she loves him so much.”
The same applies for him. “It’s given all of us a new direction to go in,” said Annie. “I’m pretty glad he turned out to be a boy. He’s not replacing my brother in any way, but it’s definitely been a positive for everyone. I don’t think you ever can get over losing someone like that and it’s hard to keep going, but Malachy’s helped a lot. It’s been hard but this is the happiest I’ve ever been and Liam’s helped a lot with that. He’s just a good person to be around. His calmness rubs off on you.”
Today, Picken will play his 48th game for the Bulldogs. It’s safe to say he’ll have a big job to concentrate on. He still isn’t entirely sure why, after he was overlooked by Collingwood and the Bulldogs after training with them several years ago, he got his chance after a third try. “Williamstown put up $20,000 of my salary,” he said, “and I think that’s the only way I got on. But it’s probably worked out pretty well. It was a long time ago that I trained with Collingwood and I wasn’t ready to play AFL then. They might have ended up getting rid of me pretty quickly, and most players only get one chance, so that might have been it for me.”
He loved being part of the Australian team — once he had shaken his jet lag — but still isn’t sure why he was invited along in the first place. “I said yes straight away, but I was surprised. I know other guys must have been unavailable, but I jumped at the chance,” he said. “I’m nowhere near as talented as most of the guys who played, but I felt like I could play my role. I just tried to do everything that I was asked to do.”
He’ll do the same today, then go home to see Malachy, who is already a lot like his dad. He’s organised — arriving a few weeks early, he avoided clashing with the Bulldogs’ trip to play Fremantle last week — and he likes to get on with things. He was ready, after a difficult delivery, to go home after two days and he already likes a good sleep. There’s not much fuss about him, and Picken is in love. “Everyone mentions all the bad things, like how much work it is and how you never get much sleep, but he’s been good,” he said. “Your whole life changes, but that’s all right. I’m glad he’s come along.”
