New year, same sorry Tiger tune ROHAN CONNOLLY
March 26, 2010 THERE couldn't have been a Richmond supporter who didn't feel a profound sense of deja vu after just 13 minutes of last night's MCG season opener.
All that was missing this time was the outrageously optimistic pre-season expectation of the Tiger faithful. That aside, the start of this game might have been a carbon copy of Carlton's round one walloping of Richmond last year, the Blues running amok, Jarrad Waite on fire, the goals mounting up at alarming speed.
There were five of them after barely 10 minutes, Waite booting the first and looking in great nick in his comeback from a knee reconstruction, debutants in the navy blue Lachie Henderson and Brock McLean both chiming in, Marc Murphy and Setanta O'hAilpin also joining the party.
By then, Richmond's tally was one lousy rushed behind. The Tigers weren't even butchering the ball. They simply couldn't get their hands on it, a whole team with just 18 possessions between them after more than 10 minutes of play. The looks on the faces of the Tiger army at the same stage last year had been of stunned disbelief. This was more like muted resignation.
The good news for Richmond was that this ended up being far less of a humiliation than last season's round one 83-point pummelling. If Damien Hardwick's mission as the Tigers' new coach is destined to be a long, difficult haul, he appears to at least already have instilled a little more resilience in the line-up.
The Tigers didn't drop their heads after going five goals down. They did, however, appear to at least give up on some zoning patterns and revert to good ol' one-on-one football, which had the immediate effect of preventing the Blues slicing through their defences like butter.
Indeed, the Tigers did a bit of buttering up themselves, toughing it out and managing to kick four of the next five goals. It was a pattern repeated in the second quarter when Carlton booted the first four, the last of that quartet coming after Richmond had squandered five scoring chances in succession. Again that could have been the cue for heads to drop. Again the Tigers responded with a bit of pluck, kicking the next three to pull the deficit back to 19 points at half-time.
You never had the sense that there was an upset in the making, but you could at least rest assured there wouldn't be any tearing up of Richmond membership tickets just yet.
Perhaps, in time, Richmond won't even consider last night's initial foray into season 2010 too bad a loss. Because its opponent played some seriously good football when it counted, even without its captain, heartbeat and barometer Chris Judd.
All that hand-wringing about just how Carlton would replace a 90-odd goal-a-year spearhead in Brendan Fevola seemed pretty wide of the mark early on, particularly during the seven-goal first term. Henderson and O'hAilpin both looked genuinely threatening key targets, the latter ending up with 3.2, and while still looking pretty rough around the edges at times, the Irishman's brief emergence for a time last season as a key forward appears to have been a learning process expedited over summer.
Eddie Betts was irrepressible with not only the capacity to pounce on the crumbs, but exert some fierce defensive pressure. And last night, he had plenty of support on that front from Chris Yarran, whose three goals and general liveliness said very loudly that here was a player ready to make a significant mark this season.
Eighteen goals for the evening wasn't necessarily a cricket score, yet the Blues converted what came their way efficiently enough to suggest they can hold their own with higher-scoring teams.
Andrew Carrazzo, acting skipper in the absence of Judd, won't play too many better games than he did, 40 disposals and no fewer than 25 handball receives testament to the amount of hard running he was prepared to do. Heath Scotland and Kade Simpson were busy, Ryan Houlihan similarly, but perhaps the biggest smiles in the Carlton coach's box might have been reserved for the efforts of McLean.
If it was grunt the Blues were looking for with this bloke, they got no end of it, the former Demon finishing with 26 hard-won disposals, five clearances and four tackles. Carlton finished up with 78. That's not the sort of figure you would necessarily have associated with the Blues in seasons past.
They should be smiling, too, about the health of their ruck stocks. A chronic weakness for Carlton looked anything but last night, Matthew Kreuzer and Robert Warnock a terrific tandem, not only with their dominance in the tap outs, but Warnock's prowess allowed the Blues to throw the dangerous Kreuzer forward for longer spells. Like the No. 1 draftee, Warnock, too showed his agility for a bloke of 206 centimetres, two tremendous smothers in the third term as good an example as any.
Not that Richmond couldn't enthuse about its new blood. Dustin Martin had a pretty solid debut in trying circumstances, winning some hard balls just when his team looked like it was headed for a right belting. The spectacularly coiffured Ben Nason got better the longer the game went, his third quarter, in particular, cause for optimism.
Mitch Farmer had his moments, too, but already you can sense the emergence of another in a long line of Richmond cult figures in the other Tiger debutant, Relton Roberts.
Only Tyrone Vickery had fewer touches for Richmond last night, but even Ben Cousins (remember him?) couldn't elicit the same sort of roar produced whenever Roberts got near it, one opening-term dash along the wing when things were at their bleakest leading to the sort of guttural bellow that said: ''We can't take any more of this.''
The trick now for both he and his team is to turn those little cameos and bursts of decent football into something of far more substance.
Richmond fans know that's going to take plenty of time and that it's going to be a long season. But while 56 points is a sizeable enough defeat, at least the Tigers, unlike a year ago, could go home last night without all semblance of hope already having been extinguished.
BEST -
Carlton: Betts, Carrazzo, Murphy, Kruezer, Waite, Yarran, McLean, Warnock.
Richmond: Deledio, Riewoldt, Jackson, Cousins, Connors.
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/new-year-same-sorry-tiger-tune-20100325-r00d.html
