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‘Hopefully we can win one or two more flags together’

Dion Prestia lived with Josh Caddy when they were drafted by Gold Coast in 2010. The pair reunited and won a flag with Richmond in 2017 and are hungry for more success. Prestia has penned this column on his great mate ahead of his 150th game against St Kilda this weekend.

To win a premiership with Josh at Richmond in 2017 was amazing and definitely one of the best days of my life so far.

We first played together in the Under-13s in the Diamond Valley representative team and then of course we got drafted to Gold Coast and lived together while we were up there.

Josh is a confident bloke. He was pretty talkative in our first couple of days and weeks at the Gold Coast and out of all the young boys who got drafted there he was the one who would speak up in meetings.

The thing that Josh has always been is honest with everyone. He’s probably the most honest person I’ve ever met and he’s really loyal to his friends and who he’s close to which I really respect in people.

For me, he’s always been someone I’ve been able to catch up with whenever and have a chat about anything that’s happening in my life. We’ve known each other for a long time and we’ve always been really close.

I trust Josh with everything in my life and I can definitely go to him if I need some wise words.

He’s still in contact with guys that he played with and was close to at Geelong and when we weren’t in the same team or weren’t able to see each other as much in his four years at the Cats, when we did get to Richmond it’s like we’d seen each other every day and we just picked up from where we had left off.

You know what you’re going to get from Josh and that’s what I love about him.

Josh has matured a bit as he’s got older. He probably knows that he’s a bit of a hot head on the field but he just accepts that’s how he is and he’s playing his best footy when he’s playing on the edge.

Looking back at the 2016 trade period and if someone had said we’d both be premiership players by the end of that next year, I wouldn’t have believed them.

It’s just coincidence how things work out for you sometimes. ‘Cadds’ probably had no intention a month before that about leaving Geelong as he was still contracted to the club.

We managed to make some big changes at the Tigers in 2017 and we did a lot of things off field as a playing group and as a football department just to get everyone closer and Josh was a major part of that.

Hopefully we can win one or two more flags together by the time we finish up. That would be nice.

Good luck in your 150th!