Richmond's football department is set for a major shake-up at the end of the season, regardless of coach Damien Hardwick's future.
It has emerged that the club remained uncommitted to Hardwick's panel of assistants at the time it re-signed him at the start of the football year, with virtually every coach coming out of contract in 2016.
That includes Port Adelaide's premiership coach Mark Williams, now in his fourth season at Tigerland, Hardwick's former Port teammate and right-hand man of six-seasons, Brendon Lade, defensive coach Ben Rutten and the other Mark Williams, an assistant coach who played for Carlton and the Bulldogs and who joined the Tigers at the end of 2011.
Nor did the football club re-sign Hardwick's long-time list manager and recruiting boss Blair Hartley or commit beyond this season to recruiting manager Francis Jackson. Most of the Tigers' under-fire recruiting department work on general employment contracts.
Richmond chief executive Brendon Gale said of the decision not to recontract Hardwick's assistants: "We invested a lot of time and effort into the senior coach. We think it's probably appropriate that collective performances are evaluated.
"It will be looked at absolutely. At the moment we need to get the team playing better. Then there will come a point where we evaluate our recruiting, our coaching, our high performance and conditioning.
"We'll be evaluating all of that.
"There's a time for acting and a time for thinking and there's a lot of thinking going on at the moment, on-going conversations. We're trying to understand why we're not playing well but the season's not gone. We're not conceding. We're still in it."
With the coaches' messages lost in translation, tough questions being asked and home truths delivered behind the scenes as Richmond's on-field crisis deepens, Fairfax Media understands that significant internal frustration surrounds the club's decision not to act upon some of Hardwick's key lieutenants before now.
Although Hardwick remains under pressure, the club looks at this stage determined to back the coach it recontracted until the end of 2018, at least until the end of next season while it continues to search for improvement elsewhere.
Said Gale: "The players are not executing the game plan. For some reason, it's not being executed."
The Richmond football department, in the AFL's financial bottom four before Hardwick took over at the end of 2009, now sits comfortably in the top half of the 18 clubs where spending is concerned with the club investing significantly in recruiting and coaching and development resources.
Football boss Daniel Richardson said on Tuesday the Tigers were "paying a price" for seeking mature-age players at the start of Hardwick's tenure. "I think the club made a decision then that we couldn't take eight years to rebuild," Richardson told SEN.
Gale told Fairfax Media that the decision more than six years ago "was not about selling or not selling. We didn't think of it as a compromise at the time. It's a balance. We wanted to build a football team as aggressively and as quickly as possible. And we couldn't rely simply on the draft for reasons that are well known.
"There's no one reason and there's no one person to blame for the predicament we find ourselves now. People like to find one reason or one person. It's certainly happened more quickly than we expected.
"The fact is we lost three finals and that was a bitter, bitter pill to swallow and we formed the view we needed to get more games into our young players. We felt and we still do that given the age profile of our list we could continue to improve.
"We're obviously disappointed and I completely understand why our fans are disappointed and frustrated. Our performances are unacceptable and we're hellbent on finding the answers."
http://m.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/afl-2016-richmond-set-for-a-major-shakeup-20160502-gokcsb.html
