ANITA Frawley has just endured the worst football could throw at her - but it was nothing compared with watching her three-year-old daughter battle for her life earlier this year.
Mrs Frawley, wife of the Richmond Tigers' coach Danny Frawley, told a Ballarat audience yesterday of the agony of watching their daughter suffer from primary peritonitis.
She said the ordeal was far worse than the pressure placed on her family by Richmond supporters in the last month.
The couple's daughter Keeley spent five weeks in hospital, battling the life-threatening illness that is a direct infection of the membrane lining the abdomen cavity.
Mrs Frawley said the heartbreaking experience helped put recent events into perspective.
"You draw on experiences like that to get you through," she said.
"We all go through terrible, terrible sad times and it makes you deal with other pressures in your life."
Mrs Frawley did concede to the audience at the Dowling Forest Ladies' Day luncheon that the trauma of spitting, abuse, threats and fears over her husband's job security was the low point of her football life.
"It's been a horror week," she said.
"I understand supporters are fanatical, but that sort of behaviour is totally unnacceptable."
She was unable to take 11-year-old daughter Chelsea to Friday's game at the Telstra Dome against the Crows for fear she would hear violent abuse directed at Danny Frawley.
"And it wasn't just the older ones.
"There were 13-year-old boys hanging over the fence, and the language that was coming out of their mouths ... I was mortified as a mother," she said.
Despite this, Mrs Frawley is confident of a turnaround in supporter attitude.
"Danny's had flowers sent to him, I've had letters saying `please bring your children back to the football,' which I'm going to do this week.
"It's just a small, small minority that make it so bad for everybody else," she said.
When Mrs Frawley accepted an invitation to speak at the luncheon, she had no idea of the dramas that would unfold since the weekend.
She dismissed the irony, and said "if you're having bad run of luck, these things just happen."
Mrs Frawley also discussed her plans for life after football, and said she would like to return to Ballarat and train horses with her father Barry James.
"I always had an ambition to train with him.
"Dad would have me in the horse box shovelling whatever's in there," she laughed.