If a week is a long time in football then four years has been an eternity for Richmond football director Greg Miller.

It's hard to believe now - in the wake of one of the game's most experienced and best-known administrators being axed by the Tigers on the weekend - that just four years ago Miller effectively decided the outcome of a Richmond board election.

And now those very same people that he helped keep in power at Punt Road have turned around and sacked him.

At the end of 2004 the push for change at Richmond was overwhelming.

After all the club had just finished last on the AFL ladder and had suffered a $2.2 million financial loss in that year alone, bringing the very future of the club into question.

President Clinton Casey was under siege as was the rest of his board which also contained the man that would eventually succeed him and then dump Miller in Gary March.

And when Casey and the then Richmond board faced a challenge from a well-credentialed rival board ticket - led by former Richmond board members Charles Macek and Brendan Schwab - it appeared certain the Tigers would have new leadership.

But then Miller intervened.

The man who built his formidable reputation at North Melbourne by having recruited the great Wayne Carey was widely seen at that time as the 'messiah' of a club that was going nowhere and had been going nowhere since its last grand final appearance in 1982.

Miller had already secured the highly-respected Terry Wallace as the club's new coach for the upcoming 2005 season - a move greeted with joy by the Tiger hordes after the dismal 2004 season under Danny Frawley - and was setting about re-building an ageing Richmond playing list.

So when Miller announced that in addition to his responsibilities as the club's football director he would also seek a board position as part of the Casey ticket, the current board had pulled off a major coup and re-election was sealed in a cakewalk despite the club's difficult predicament at that time.

But that would prove the peak of Miller's power at Punt Road as his responsibilities and influence began to wade in recent times, particularly in the wake of last year's slide back down to the bottom of the ladder after two years of progress in 2005 and 2006.

First he lost responsibility for the club's recruiting, which went to former player Francis