Deledio seeks position of excellence
Emma Quayle | March 16, 2008 | The Age
BRETT Deledio has no plans to depart the Richmond midfield on anything near a full-time basis. He wants to be an onballer, and he wants to be a good one. "I want to be a better one," he said last week. "I want to be one of the best ones."
But Deledio, who will alternate between the centre square and the forward line this season, wants to do that the very best he can too. He has been thinking a lot about how James Hird did those things, and how Brad Johnson can still fill the same role.
He can't see why he can't do it too. "Those are the two players I'm sort of modelling my game on, and they're both such good players wherever they play," he said.
"I don't know why you have to be just one thing. I want to be good wherever I play."
His coach has the same idea. Richmond used the last part of last season to expand Deledio's role, and it raised questions. Is it wasteful to have a No. 1 draft pick with turbo speed sitting in the forward line? Waiting for the ball to come to him? And, in playing him there, were the Tigers saying he did not and never would have the endurance to run as an all-day midfielder?
The first point Terry Wallace makes is that good players are good players, no matter where they play. "There's been some pretty good forwards over time. Matthew Pavlich is an important player; Nick Riewoldt is a fairly important player," he said.
"Brett's obviously a different sort of player to them, but if you impact games then you impact games. "Everyone's been wanting him to be the next Chris Judd. That's their expectation. But if he ends up the next James Hird or the next Brad Johnson, I'll be pretty happy."
Wallace has not abandoned the thought of Deledio the onballer. He thinks his endurance has improved and that it will keep improving. He also thinks that, at 20, he will develop the mental strength to handle and beat the taggers who got into his head last year and, says Deledio, "made me think more about what they were doing, not me".
As Wallace points out, some players are blessed with better endurance than others. And as he also points out, it is not like Deledio can't run at all. "With all due respect, when Nathan Brown came into the competition, Browny was hopeless," he said.
"Brett came in as a mid-range player straight from day one, and he's improved from mid-range. He's in between mid-range now and elite, so he's two thirds of the way up. It's not a strength, but it's not a weakness."
That, for Wallace, raised a more important question. Where some believe spare time, or even most of your time, is spent most usefully on the things you don't do as well as others, he thinks it should be the other way around. Deledio is quick, can mark, and kicks goals.
In the final month of last season he kicked 12 goals and led the team in forward 50 entries and finished fifth in the best and fairest. In his third season, wondered Wallace, what was wrong with that? "A lot of it's to do with expectation. But you draft a player because they have strengths, so why play them towards their weaknesses — I prefer to call them his non-strength areas — instead of their absolute gun key strengths?" Wallace said.
"You should work on your strengths 90% of the time to make sure they stay your weapons. They're what got you into the game. You don't ignore your weaknesses, you spend 10% on your weaknesses and 90% on the rest.
"People come into footy clubs and are so obsessed with trying to fix up the things they do wrong, they actually let their strengths drop down. They don't improve, and that was where we sat with Brett. Let's play him in a way that is going to let him play well."
Deledio is happy with that, but there are things he wants to do better. As a midfielder, he wants to keep building up his endurance, and to twist things around so that his taggers wonder more about what he'll do next. As a forward, defensive pressure is what he wants to apply.
"I want to become an established player in as many ways I can. It should be a good challenge," he said.
http://www.realfooty.com.au/news/news/deledio-seeks-position-of-excellence/2008/03/15/1205472163747.html
