Wallace safe for 2009 season, says Tiger boss
Andrea Petrie | March 30, 2009
TERRY Wallace will coach the Tigers throughout season 2009 despite the club's dismal 83-point round-one loss to Carlton, Richmond president Gary March said yesterday.
March, who described Thursday's performance as one of the most disappointing he had seen, denied that Wallace's job was on the line.
He said he had spoken to Wallace since the game and, as with everyone at the club, the coach was "incredibly disappointed".
But he added: "As far as I'm concerned, Terry Wallace is the coach for this year".
"It was a very, very, very poor performance but we've got to review our performance over 22 rounds," March told radio 3AW.
"We're not going to be reactionary to one poor performance. If you think back 12 months ago we had some really poor performances early in the year and we got our act together and we just missed out on the finals," he said.
"Missing out on the finals would be unacceptable to our whole club because we've set ourselves to play in the finals this year. But we're one game in."
He said all of Richmond's 22 players had performed below their best, including star recruit Ben Cousins, who received a grade-one hamstring strain in the last quarter.
He denied that the club had poorly managed its list, having made five changes last year and introducing 30 new players over the past four years.
"We've been fairly brutal in terms of turning over the list but the system doesn't allow you to make nine or 10 changes every year," March said. "Our list has still got holes in it and we're still addressing that."
March also revealed that the club had researched Cousins' injury problems throughout his career, including the big hamstring tear he received in his last game with West Coast in 2007.
The impact of substance abuse on a player's physical conditioning and the potential it might have for injuries had also been thoroughly researched, March said.
"They don't believe that that has any impact in terms of the muscles used in your legs in terms of fatiguing and causing extra problems," he said.
Cousins yesterday described the setback as a minor hiccup compared with what he had experienced while banned from the game for bringing it into disrepute and admitting he had a drug problem.
"I remember speaking to the AFL medicos about the possibility of my re-introduction to the game, and how I would handle setbacks along the way or injury or poor form, and my response to that was 'this is insignificant compared to some of the lows that I've experienced over the last 18 months'," he told Channel Seven's AFL Game Day.
"Footy's the easy bit. This hamstring is, although it's going to be hard to deal with in some respects, it's the easy bit (compared) to where I've come from."
Cousins said he felt tightness at the back of his left knee about five minutes before three-quarter-time, and knew straight away it was his popliteus muscle giving him grief, a problem he had effectively managed to play with in the past.
"It's just a niggling-type injury, it's a very small muscle that can be played with," he said.
"I wasn't overly concerned about it, it was just about getting, at three-quarter-time, a bit of massage a bit of heat through it and just to evaluate things with the medicos."
He said criticism of Richmond's medical staff for letting him go back on after he raised the problem was unwarranted. "Since I arrived at Richmond officially on January 5, I had a different regime to the rest of the group, but I couldn't speak more highly of the way that they have got me from the point that I was then to the point that I was in round one," he said.
"I think I couldn't have done anything more to be prepared. I am 30, I have had 18 months out of the game and I was going to cop some sort of injury at some point, you would think. Fairytales rarely happen when you go on to play 22 games and everything falls in your lap. So this is a minor hiccup but certainly something I wouldn't lay blame on the medicos."
Cousins said he was not about to give up despite the setback. "It'd be easy for me to sit here and drop my head and say the season's stuffed, my career's over and get all dramatic about it," he said.
"(But) it means nothing to the end result. We don't know what is going to happen. This could be a blessing in disguise for me and for Richmond. We've got that big game out of the way and in reality I am a small part of the Richmond Football Club or the Richmond playing group … now we as a group can just get on with footy.
"It was a huge reality check (and) in my mind, we were a lot better side than that."
Meanwhile, March said he expected a better performance in the club's clash with Geelong next Saturday at Skilled Stadium.
"I'm expecting us to go out and play the sort of football we played towards the end of last year," he said, reminding the football public that Richmond was the last club to defeat Hawthorn before it went on to win the 2008 premiership.
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