Wallace's masterplan for Richmond
By Melissa Ryan
The Age
February 8, 2005
Ask Terry Wallace what would make him a satisfied coach at the end of 2005, the first year of the ambitious five-year plan to reinvent Richmond as an AFL force, and there is more than one answer.
To win back the respect the club has lost. To once more be competitive on the football field. To nurture promising young greats for the future, and help shell-shocked veterans and senior players rediscover the flair that Wallace so loves in his brand of football.
To that end, Wallace has swept through Punt Road with the force of a whirlwind. He has mucked out “cupboards that were a foot deep in possum poo” to rejuvenate the facilities of a “footy club (that) had lost a bit of respect for itself”. He has turned 12 players over on the list and overhauled the football department, and now, as the club switches from training mode to game mode as the Wizard Cup and the season approaches, he is preparing for the on-field revolution.
Matthew Richardson will be freed from the shackles of full-forward and allowed to roam further abroad in the forward line. Young forward Jay Schulz is being groomed as a centre half-back. Nathan Brown, reunited with his former coach, has been challenged to prove himself as an All-Australian midfielder, while dependable defender Mark Chaffey is set to be reborn as a tagger.
“Nathan Brown, I see him rotating as he has done in the past ... He will certainly play forward because he’s an All- Australian quality forward. I think he would love to prove that he’s an All-Australian midfielder but I don’t think he’s necessarily 100 per cent proven that, so I’d like to give him a challenge to be able to prove both,” he said.
Wallace also ponders the question of where to make use of the quality of best-andfairest winner Joel Bowden, after his excellent year in defence but wanting him further up the field, and anticipates the returns of Darren Gaspar and Mark Coughlan, the young midfielder looking to be more “dangerous” up forward, to the form that pre-dated their injuries.
These are just some of the changes in what will be a vastly different Richmond team aiming to drag itself out of football’s cellar. Troy Simmonds and Trent Knobel bolster the ruck and the tall forward stocks, ex-Hawthorn defender Mark Graham will reboot his career — although in an intra-club match last week, he spent time in the forward line — and then there has been the excitement generated by the drafting of Brett Deledio and Richard Tambling.
Already, Wallace has exposed the No. 1 and No. 4 draft picks to the treatment he expects them to receive from opponents this year, having them tagged in a scratch match against another pair of up-and-comers in Thomas Roach and Andrew Raines.
“Both probably struggled a little bit to reach their absolute heights in that particular game but both of them came back on the track the following Monday and just absolutely shone, so it wasn’t something that was too overwhelming for them,” Wallace said. “That’s a great sign.”
Of the game plan, Wallace has decreed much. Gone will be the hesitation, the stop/start football, and the infuriating pattern of chipping the ball incessantly and sideways. Rather, as he builds a side that he wants to find at least 16 goals a game, Wallace has re-educated what was a “timid” ensemble about confidence in football and implemented a quick, charging style that demands running hard through the lines.
“I like to play attacking footy. I like to think that when people go through the turnstiles, we are in sports entertainment and they can watch a really entertaining game of football,” Wallace said.
“Whether we achieve that straightaway or it takes a bit of time, I don’t know. But that’s certainly the pathway we’re trying to head down. That doesn’t mean that we won’t try and put in a good defensive structure, but that’s certainly what we’re trying to do.”
With the club’s Wizard Cup opener against Collingwood only nine days away — today, the Tigers will hold an intraclub match of “probables” versus “possibles” as the players challenge each other for a place in that side — Wallace believes the club, which lost 14 consecutive games to cement itself on the bottom last year, has made headway in the five months since he took over at the helm.
But the coming games, whether Wizard Cup, practice matches or the opening rounds of the season, will demonstrate just how quickly the players have adapted to his revolutionary regime, with its demands on strength, power and explosiveness. Much of the physical conditioning over summer has been to transform the players in those areas because “when I first walked into the place, they all looked like tennis players or sailors. They’ve got the skinniest legs of all time and they hadn’t done the power work in their legs.”
Their initial inability to handle the workload was shocking to him, but they have recovered from the knocks and taken to his strategy, and “absorbed it like a sponge”.
“Having seen their ability to run and carry the ball when I arrived, and seeing what they’re doing at the moment, they’ve made some significant ground. That’s not just giving us a scratch on the back as coaches, some of that’s just confidence, that you’re allowed to get it and carry it and run,” Wallace said.
“When you’re up to losing your 11th or 12th game in a row, it’s a pretty scary place to be out on the footy field, so what we’ve just been trying to do is break the shackles and allow them to do that. What they’ve got to do is not let the scoreboard affect them in breaking those shackles once we start playing footy matches.
“They’ve improved massively physically and game-style wise from when I first took over, but it’s like teaching the guy how to kick and then all of a sudden, he gets under pressure and goes back into his old habits. Until we start playing, you don’t know whether those old habits will reappear again,” he said.
Richmond fans have hungered for success in an emotive, ferocious manner for the past 25 years. Asking Wallace now where he figures a premiership should appear in his five-year reign, and he discusses the need instead for a “continuous incline” of improvement.
“I think premierships will look after themselves when you get your house in order, and there’s a long way to go to get that house in order,” Wallace said.
“We’re more about being competitive in every game we play. We’re all about trying to earn some respect from the footy community in general, which I have no doubt the place has lost, having sat where I’ve sat for the last few years, and having people in commentary boxes and in super boxes putting up signs to me saying ‘Whatever you do, don’t coach this rabble’.
“We’ve lost that respect from the outside community and we’ve got a lot of work to do to pick that up.”
… AND THE NEW APPROACH TO TRAINING AND TACTICS* Emphasis has been on strength and power work to build explosiveness into the players’ game, rather than concentrating on endurancestyle training.
* Number of skill sessions has been radically increased this pre-season.
* Game plan to switch from stop-and-start format to an attacking, run-and-carry style.
* Build a forward line capable of consistently delivering 16 goals a game.
* Expect the number of leftfooters in the back line to be reduced to open up options and make the rebound less predictable.
http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2005/02/08/1107625211473.html
