Nah not Caro 2007 but Caro 1988 
. Some newspaper article titles don't change in two decades 
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RICHMOND: IS THERE ANY HOPE?
Herald
THU 02 JUN 1988, Page 26
By
WILSON C LOVETT M
The talk around town is that Richmond is hopeless - a team without hope.
The Tigers have one champion player, a couple on the edge of retirement, a handful of inconsistent contributers and a stack of new chums.
Has there ever been a time when a raw coach had so little to work with? And there's worse. Not since football became a money sport has a club been forced to start a new season without being allowed to buy one new player.
How on earth can this story be a positive one? And yet somehow the club has almost managed to convince us that the future for Richmond is bright. And it has certainly convinced us that it is going the right way about it.
Neville Crowe says that Richmond will make a profit this year and, at worst, threaten the five next year.
Certainly there were several several senior officials we spoke to at Richmond who conceded that the decision may have been taken too late to fight its way out of obscurity with honest, old-fashioned values.
Can anyone truly beat the dollar?
But Barry Rowlings sounds so chirpy when he answers his telephone on Monday mornings that people ask him why. All at the club agree it is quite conceivable that the first three placegetters in the Tigers' 1988 best and fairest award will be first year players.
Michael Green says that Richmond players and administrators have started to care for and trust each other.
Even if the club could spare $20,000 on a psychologist it is unlikely he could work any harder on the anxieties, strengths and insecurities of the Richmond players than Kevin Bartlett has.
Crowe, Rowlings, Green and Bartlett have all known better times at Richmond.
Only Crowe, the president, has not played in a premiership team. The VFL tribunal ended his 1967 four weeks early and in 1980 he was at the club as a specialist coach.
He is a physically imposing yet somehow self-conscious man and it is almost in a shy way that he vows never to rest until he sees one of those silver things back in the cupboard. He honestly believes 1990 is not out of the question.
If Richmond can become a successful club again through the methods it is now applying then the result would mark a triumph never even attempted before in professional Australian Rules football.
CAN THE Tigers ignite a football revolution?
The cynics say that the situation has been forced upon them by several years of mismanagement and a $1.7 million debt. Michael Green agrees the club had little alternative.
St Kilda's famous debt in 1983 saw a scheme of arrangement devised in which former players, coaches, administrators and other creditors lost out badly.
Yet the following year Phil Cronan and Phil Narkle bobbed up at Moorabbin.
It was not long after his inevitable appointment that Bartlett suddenly found himself a popular man.
The agents and managers knew that like any Richmond coach or official, Bartlett would be a sucker for the latest reject. What they had not banked on was Bartlett's and Richmond's near fanatical stand to do exactly the opposite.
Bartlett says he was offered at least 20 players from other clubs before the start of the 1988 season.
Apart from David Honybun, who came via Carlton gratis and on a salary to match, every offer was rejected, with the full support of the coach.
Crowe believes that second-chance players no longer have a place at Tigerland - of all places.
He adds that the reject strategy will disappear from all clubs once the new player drafting rules start to level the clubs' recruiting efforts.
The president, like the coach, is disappointed in several of the club's few experienced players.
He regrets that first year players have been forced to form the backbone of the club this season and laments Richmond's lack of depth, which has forced Bartlett to play experienced players who deserve to be relegated.
"Some guys just mightn't be prepared to climb the mountain again," said Crowe. "This might sound unkind but there are several experienced players who perhaps could have been more help."
It sounds tough but you really wonder what Mark Lee, Michael Roach and Jim Jess have to offer in the future.
Roach goes to extraordinary lengths to get himself fit but has had a wretched run with injuries; Jess had to be propped up to play another season and Lee appears to have lost all semblence of form. 1987 West Australian recruit Peter Wilson is another whose confidence appears to have deserted him.
But, perhaps apart from Wilson, these are names Richmond fans won't be seeing in a couple of years.
Which is why Bartlett hopes to play 20 first-year players - already he has introduced 10 - which would surely be some sort of record, by the end of the season.
Crowe is very encouraged by Bartlett. "He had other offers to coach several clubs but he chose Richmond," he said.
"There has been a long line of successful coaches who played under Tom Hafey - Kevin Sheedy, John Northey, Tony Jewell, Mick Malthouse. I see he's got all the successful attributes of those men and perhaps a lot more.
"He has set rules and standards that the players have readily accepted and he makes no exceptions. He wants professionals who judge themselves upon performance and not dollars."
And Bartlett is encouraged too.
"I hope that in four or five years people can say they saw Tony Free, Justin Pickering or Trent Nicholls in his first game and relate it to the first time they saw Sheedy, Bourke and Clay," said the coach.
