Thank you, Richmond: how @Richmond_FC have made @AFL a more watchable competition in 2022, as clubs like @CollingwoodFC & @GoldCoastSUNS follow the Tigers template & go fast.
https://twitter.com/JakeNiallTHEAGE/status/1548421368089559040--------------------------------------------------------------
Live and die by the surge: The lasting impact of the Richmond revolutionBy Jake Niall
The Age
July 17, 2022At the peak of the pandemic, relations between Richmond and the AFL became strained.
Damien Hardwick wasn’t keen on some COVID-19 restrictions and made his dissent known. The league wasn’t rapt, either, when Sydney Stack and Callum Coleman-Jones escaped their hub and found trouble at a kebab shop in the seedy precinct of Surfers Paradise.
But if the game’s benchmark club and governing body had tense times in 2020, the AFL should be grateful that Richmond’s bold on-field approach has prevailed in 2022.
Much as fans of other clubs might have found Richmond’s outbreak of supremacy irritating or worse, everyone who cares about the shape of the game on the field should be thanking the Tigers for providing a template that has produced a better-looking, watchable spectacle.
Richmond’s season is precariously placed, having lost another nail-biter on Saturday - this time to lowly North Melbourne - underscoring their luckless season.
But where the Tigers have clearly won out overall is in the contest of ideas about how to play the game.
The Richmond of 2017 unleashed a new game style in which they moved the ball forwards, taking territory and applying immense defensive pressure at the contest. They did not chip sideways or backwards as they had in their awful, stunted 2016.
The alternative model was exemplified by the Eagles, who played keepings off, using width and a patient use of excellent kicking skills in their formidable peak of 2018.
By 2021, however, West Coast’s method for moving the ball had become redundant, as teams worked out how to defend the switches of play. The Eagles were the worst team in the competition for moving the footy from their defensive 50-metre arc to their attacking area - a ranking that remained for much of 2022.
This year, Collingwood and Gold Coast have adopted Richmond-like game styles, embracing imperfection and chancing their arm to move the footy forward. They’ve used the corridor, reducing superfluous disposals.
It is a lean and mean style that imbued the Pies and Suns with a confidence in each other and also a belief that they can storm home from behind; neither has sacrificed much in defensive capability, either.
Drilled by Hardwick’s former lieutenants Craig McRae and Justin Leppitsch, Collingwood are unrecognisable compared with the team that went backwards, in every sense, last year.
Across the competition (up to round 18), backward kicks are down by 10 per cent on 2021, as coaches come to terms with the fact that if you don’t move the ball quickly, you’ll be marooned in your defensive 50m area, unable to penetrate the cluster of the opposition’s forward press.
Geelong, too, have quickened up movement of the ball, cognisant of the need to take full toll of their foremost weapon - the combination of Tom Hawkins and Jeremy Cameron in attack.
The Cats scored 33 per cent from moving the ball from their backline last year. This time, after a readjustment, rebounds from the backline account for 39 per cent of their scoring.
This straight-at-goal method, instigated by Richmond of 2017-2020, is an act of faith in one’s players. The coach must accept, as McRae and Stuart Dew have, that there will be turnovers, mistakes and counter-attacks.
But it is a way that has won Collingwood, Gold Coast and even Geelong more games than had they remained mired in a conservative approach.
The AFL could say, with some justification, that two rule changes - the six-six-six formation at centre bounces and the stand rule that freezes the man on the mark - have helped teams attack, as scoring has lifted from about 80 points to 83 points per team per game.
But the predominant view of several senior and assistant coaches canvassed by The Age is that while those rules have helped, the shift in philosophy has been more important. “I just think that teams have got a different mindset,” explained one senior coach.
“Teams are trying to keep the ball in motion,” added an experienced assistant coach from a Victorian club. “Richmond really was the pioneer of forward handball and transition.”
That crowds have been down, compared with 2019 (the last pre-COVID season), seems largely due to the breaking of rituals, especially in Melbourne, and an ongoing reluctance of some fans to risk the coronavirus, or even flu, when you can watch games with a glass of Pinot on the couch.
The look of the actual game, however, has improved markedly since 2019. There are simply more games one can bear to watch.
Many of the numbers don’t show the shift from slow to fast play footy. Inside 50 entries and play-on percentages have not increased.
One number, though, does demonstrate a different game (besides fewer backward kicks).
In 2021, there were 102 runs of five or more goals without a reply, a number that was almost exactly the same every year since 2018 (not counting the reduced season of 2020).
This year, up to this round, we had already seen a staggering 127 run-ons of five goals or more. Momentum changes within games have never been so dramatic nor plentiful. Scoring from centre bounces is up from 10.4 points (per team per game in ’21) to 11.2.
Momentum, as the coaches know, is harder to halt when there’s a six-six-six rule, when you can’t “hit the boundary” or dive on the ball. Teams can still slow the play by chipping the ball around, but in today’s game, you’ll eventually have to kick down the line to a contest.
A small irony lies in that the progenitor of the faster game, Richmond, have become something of a victim of their own method.
This year, the Tigers have blown seemingly match-winning leads - against Carlton (round one), Sydney, Gold Coast (40 points) and Geelong, and they led against North Melbourne in the last quarter on Saturday. Their heavyweight bout with the Cats, in which they wiped of a six-goal deficit, only to surrender a 17-point lead in the final quarter, was probably the season’s best.
So, they’ve lived and died by the surge. But for what you’ve done to repair the great Australian football ugliness, thank you, Richmond.
https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/live-and-die-by-the-surge-the-lasting-impact-of-the-richmond-revolution-20220716-p5b22n.html
