Tigers' season no false dawn despite finals fade-out Michael Gleeson
The Age
September 9, 2014 The season was a success, the finals a failure, Damien Hardwick soberly, bitterly, opined.
He was reflecting on the Tigers dispiriting elimination final loss ... last year. He said it again on Sunday night after the match against a side a wearing prison bar jumper that Richmond fans coincidentally had to watch in horror through their own finger prison.
It was a humiliating final that had horrible deja vu about it. After a season that ended in such giddy belief and optimism, it was a rudely flattening way to end so abruptly.
It begged the question of whether Richmond had tread water. In one regard even this is an advance for Richmond for it reinforced the idea that this time finals were no false dawn – the side had the capacity to reach finals and stay there. But have they gone ahead or just held their ground?
The Tigers won fewer games than last year and even putting the intoxicating last nine-game ride into the finals into perspective, there remains a sense that they have advanced on last year. They have found bona fide players who were not there last year, but they have also as tellingly made judgments on others.
No team remains the same year on year, for change is demanded, but the query for Richmond is how close this group is to being able to win finals, not just play in them.
Richmond found a player, potentially even an A grader, in rookie Anthony Miles. Brandon Ellis has turned potential into performance and Nick Vlastuin improved. Ben Griffiths has shown he has the ability to seriously make it and David Astbury has quietly accumulated games. If there were queries over Dylan Grimes after injury plagued years, they have been answered.
This season, and more pointedly the final, has done nothing to answer the query of whether the players at the bottom end of the Tiger list are capable of advancing them.
Will Shaun Grigg, Jake Batchelor, Steven Morris, Ricky Petterd, Troy Chaplin, Nathan Foley and Bachar Houli be players to help Richmond into the top four? The answer is no. Not all of them. Some will stay, some will be rightly squeezed out by new talent.
Ty Vickery might be the most vexing issue for Richmond. A high draft pick, he has taken time without ever completely convincing that he has arrived. His failure to be picked when it mattered at the end of the year after his suspension only reinforced that idea of a player at the crossroads. He should be retained if for no other reason than his trade currency is low.
Unfortunately the Shaun Hampson experiment has not worked. Liam McBean is a long range project. He was close to a debut this year but is still as thin as a ... (ahem) bean.
Richmond recently re-signed Kamdyn McIntosh, a player they rate but who has been troubled by injury. He has been given a one-year extension, which says that after two years without a debut next year he will be given chances and he ought to take them. Matt McDonough is in a bracket like McIntosh of being in the next generation of players who are expected to displace the bottom six.
The coach has spoken warmly of Matty Dea in the past but he managed only seven games this year. Matt Thomas is tough and gritty and many things a coach likes but his pace and kicking are not things coaches like. Todd Elton, Matt Arnott and Brett O'Hanlon look unlikely to be the players to be in a top-four Richmond side.
The little-known list asset the Tigers do have, and this is the most tantalising one they have for the years to come, is a war chest. Richmond is understood to have significant space under the salary cap – in the realm of seven figures – for next year, which is room they began making years ago to be able to position for free agency.
The right free agent or player to trade for has not (yet) presented this year after early inquiries of Nat Fyfe went nowhere once he decided to stay in Perth. Which means the Tigers still have the scope to be robust in trade week should they wish to and the right player were to emerge.
More likely they will go to the draft this year, front-end more contracts and play the long game for next year. With enough bait on a hook, fishing for large fish is easier and next year Richmond will have plenty of bait.
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/tigers-season-no-false-dawn-despite-finals-fadeout-20140908-10e3jf.html
