Richmond dignity on line against Cats
Stephen Rielly | April 04, 2009 | The Australian
AFTER digesting the utter debacle that was Richmond's season-opening performance against Carlton nine days ago, coach Terry Wallace turned up at his reserve team's final practice match last Saturday with a clear and simple message: "If you want to compete, we'll look at you."
It was, no doubt, galling for Wallace to be stripping back a summer's worth of tactical and physical preparation to such a basic requirement only days into the new season, and not a little disconcerting to be making such a prosaic appeal.
But if an 83-point mauling from a younger Carlton side that included four debutants was bad, Wallace knew it could get a lot uglier very quickly, with Geelong and the Western Bulldogs coming at them.
The Tigers will take with them to Skilled Stadium today, for instance, an appalling record against Geelong, which has won the last four matches between the teams by an average of 80 points, three of them by 10 goals or more and one, incredibly, by 26 goals.
Wallace's Richmond sides have won one of seven games against the Cats and lost the other six by an average of almost 11 goals.
So maybe it was appropriate, or at least understandable, for Wallace to try to put a floor beneath his side's performance today by asking for and rewarding meat-and-potatoes effort, to select Jake King for his scratching, clawing desperation and Tom Hislop for his aggression, and to speak yesterday not of victory but of restoring honour.
"The response is all about how you go about your football. It's not about what you say or what you do on the training track, although that's where it starts," Wallace said. "Clearly, our supporters want to see a competitive group and that's what the players have got to show. That's always the starting point.
"I haven't even bothered to look at the win-loss ratio of Geelong down there over the last couple of years and how much they've won their games by. I mean, that's out of our control all that sort of stuff. But what our supporters do expect is our players to have a red-hot dip and get out and represent the colours the way that they should be."
To a point, there was exaggerated glory and shame in Richmond's loss to Carlton. The Blues aren't yet so good that they can expect to regularly beat up on sides by 14 goals and the Tigers, although a middling outfit, aren't or shouldn't be a bottom-four proposition.
Wallace said yesterday that his hope of a top-eight finish for the first time in his tenure at Punt Rd, which began in 2005, remains. Of course, his survival at Richmond and as an AFL coach depends on it.
"Our whole aims and objectives haven't changed because of one round of footy. Certainly our mindset needs to change from the first round of footy and the way that we go about it needs to change, but our aims and ambitions haven't changed at all," he said.
Has the manner in which those ambitions are to be realised, though, altered? Reinstating King, a player who has forged a career out of a rough-hewn, maniacal intensity, and demoting the lightly framed but superior-skilled Jordan McMahon, suggests as much.
The promotion of Hislop and debutant Alex Rance, too.
"He is only a youngster playing his first game, but I think if anyone around our footy club spoke about 'Rancey' they would mention hard work, dedication and keeping his eye on the footy is a major part of how he plays," was the way Wallace described the 19-year-old West Australian yesterday.
The robust Dean Polo, who has been named as an emergency for today's game, could yet play, too.
There is a hint of change, also, in the more youthful complexion of today's side.
It did not reflect well upon Wallace's reconstruction of Richmond, now into its fifth season, that 14 of the 22 players who wore the yellow-and-black jumper against Carlton in round one were either at the club before he arrived or recruited, like McMahon at the end of 2007 and Ben Cousins at the end of 2008, as mature players from other clubs.
After five national drafts and four years out of finals, for which clubs are granted the choice selections in the recruiting game, there were just five Wallace-era draftees and three one-time rookies in the team.
Today's team, however, with the inclusion of Rance and other young, relatively recent arrivals like Hislop, Angus Graham and Robin Nahas bears a lot less resemblance to anything Tiger fans might have seen run around in the last season or two. Or saw even last week.
A coach turning to youth and asking for effort, in round 12 let alone round two, is a little like a statesman seeking refuge in patriotism. There is desperation at work, if not more.
But these are difficult days for Richmond already, so much so that to compete has become an ideal, something to aspire to, instead of a given.
Which is why the Tigers can afford to lose the points today but not their dignity.
Or as Wallace put it: "I think we go out tomorrow with something like 13 players under 50 games and they've got three or four in the same sort of category, but the biggest thing for me is matching them in the competitive areas of the game."
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25285990-5012432,00.html
