Tigers not quite endangered
By Jake Niall
realfooty.theage.com.au
September 30, 2004
The Tigers keep losing things. They've lost, in no particular order, the last 14 games of the season, a couple of million bucks and a highly talented 24-year-old, 200 centimetre ruckman-forward. Terry Wallace has dropped a neutron bomb in the football department - only Greg Miller, a few support staff and the furniture are still standing - while the club is preparing, in the self-eating Tiger tradition, for an end-of-year election that promises to be as vicious as the simultaneous Howard-Latham or Bush-Kerry bunfights.
Yet, as the surviving players, officials and traumatised fans take refuge in the fall-out shelter, there are signs of life at Tigerland.
Richmond's ongoing political instability aside, there are strong parallels between Punt Road now and Geelong five years ago, when Mark Thompson stepped into a minefield.
Thompson inherited a team that was light-on for top-end talent, with an ageing core. The club owed the bank more than $6 million - about $4 million worse than the black hole in Richmond's budget - and, to complete the miserable portrait, a 24-year-old Leigh Colbert, its captain and vanguard of the next generation, had walked out, believing the club was mired in mediocrity.
In one sense, Richmond's situation is worse, because the Cats, at least, had been a regular finalist and grand finalist in the decade previous. Their supporters, therefore, had a higher pain threshold.
What has been encouraging about the Tigers is that Wallace and Miller have a plan that involves no further short-cuts. They have committed the club to getting the best possible young talent, reducing player payments and building from the ground up with the aim of winning a premiership, in preference to the usual Polyfilla, quick-fix culture that has kept Richmond down for two decades.
Unlike most coaches, Wallace has the luxury of time. His five-year contract removes the pressure to produce an immediate and rapid rise up the ladder.
Losing Brad Ottens is no disaster provided the club receives the first-round draft picks it seeks. If Ottens was to remain, his prime years would have been spent at a club in rebuilding mode; instead, Richmond will pick up a couple of younger, cheaper players. Hopefully, at least one of them will be an A-grader.
The Barry Hall deal between St Kilda and Sydney can be the role model for Richmond/Ottens. In return for Hall, who wanted out, the Saints picked up an exquisitely skilled teenager called Nick Dal Santo, plus Heath Black; had they kept the draft choice they expended on Black, they might have drafted James Kelly (Geelong), too.
Given a new dawn in a different environment, Hall has gone on to fulfil his enormous potential. Ottens, if he knuckles down, can do the same.
The financial constraints that have forced Richmond to take a stand with Ottens, who was asked to reduce his pay packet by more than a third, might ultimately work in the club's favour, because they have compelled it to pursue draft picks and young players.
The weakening of Richmond's big-man department might consign the Tigers to the ladder's lower reaches again next year, but that shouldn't concern Wallace. Another struggling year, in any case, would bring more early picks and ensure the list, much strengthened by picks one and four and whatever Ottens brings in 2004, is significantly better in years four and five of the Plough's contract.
The only problem for Wallace is the unfortunate fact that the financial restrictions make it difficult for the club to land a decent uncontracted player via the pre-season draft, that might expedite the Richmond renaissance, as St Kilda did through Fraser Gehrig and Aaron Hamill in 2000.
The other uncertain factor is the fans - after two finals series in 22 years, will calls for patience be heeded? Like all oppressed peoples, the Tiger faithful can bear only so much.
http://realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2004/09/29/1096401648185.html
