Wallace ready to face AFL critics
August 7, 2007 - 6:09PM
The Age
Richmond coach Terry Wallace accepts he will be under the spotlight for the rest of the AFL season and that his bottom-placed team has hit a new low in recent weeks.
With the coaches of Essendon, Carlton, Melbourne and Fremantle all having been sacked, or agreed to leave their positions, Wallace conceded it was inevitable media speculation would turn to whether he should be next.
While the Tigers hierarchy have repeatedly stated the coach will be in place for the remaining two years of his five-year term, Wallace expected the pressure from outside the club would only increase.
"That's the nature of the way the beast goes, it just goes from one attack to the next," Wallace said.
"As soon as they were starting to get chipped away, the coaches, I knew the spotlight would come on me.
"And it's going to be very strong for the rest of this year and even stronger leading into the start of next year.
"I know and understand that that's my spot in the sun at the moment and I'm quite a big boy, I'm quite capable of looking after myself."
Richmond officials were last week forced to stamp out a reported attempt by Kangaroos director Ron Joseph to have Wallace ousted and replaced by outgoing Essendon coach and former Richmond premiership player Kevin Sheedy.
Wallace said stability was the only way out of the gloom.
"It's always pleasing when you have stability, I think the better clubs in this competition have had stability over a long period of time," he said.
"You look at West Coast Eagles, I think they've had two or three CEOs in their time, only three coaches over a long period of time.
"Everyone's said how strong Essendon's been as a club over the past few decades, they've had real stability within their group.
"You can go further, you can go to Geelong, Geelong are setting the standards at the moment, but what is the one thing that they've done over this eight or nine-year period? They were hard enough and sharp enough in themselves to stick fat and know that they had a direction and stay with their direction."
Wallace conceded the Tigers lacked the respect of the rest of the competition and that their season had tailed off badly in recent weeks.
"We have a responsibility to do something about that drop-off in the last four weeks," he said.
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