Wallace plays down expectations
1:43:22 PM Fri 3 March, 2006
Jason Phelan
Sportal for afl.com.au
Plenty of younger players will get the chance to strut their stuff in Saturday's NAB Challenge match against the Bulldogs, but Terry Wallace is keen to hose down supporters' expectations of his new breed of Tiger cubs.
Eleven players with 10 games or less to their name will take the field in Shepparton, and while Wallace understands the excitement surrounding the club's recent recruits, he has urged fans to be patient as they learn their craft.
"All you're looking for is improvement - I think sometimes we put too much expectation on players, too early," Wallace said from Punt Road on Friday.
"I regularly hear about Richard Tambling and has he lived up to expectation. Well he's 12 months into the system and he's only a young boy trying to find his way in Melbourne, let alone the footy world, and I just think sometimes our expectation on those young boys is too much.
"All I'm looking for is that they just continue the graph and that the graph is still heading in the right direction - I see that most of ours are."
The last player to be added to the current senior list, Calder speedster Matthew White, is the most advanced of the latest draft class and gets another chance to impress this weekend.
"White played last week, he'll play again tomorrow and he'll start tomorrow, so he'll get another opportunity," he said.
"A couple of the other boys have had minor hiccups along the way. Jarrad Oakley-Nicholls is back out on the track today, but has missed a bit of footy."
The Shepparton trip isn't all about the youngsters, however, with several older hands getting their first run of the year.
"We've probably got six or seven players who didn't play in the first round of the NAB Cup who are senior players for the club that are having their first hitout," he said.
Wallace said he was looking forward to evaluating the progress of Nathan Brown, Mark Coughlin, Trent Knobel, Greg Tivendale, Travis Gaspar and Andrew Kellaway.
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