Growing painsBy Jason Phelan
Sun 10 Jul, 2011FIRST-YEAR Richmond player Jake Batchelor has experienced some extreme highs and lows in his short AFL career and he's confident the Tigers aren't far away from climbing out of their most recent trough.
Richmond suffered its fifth loss in six games when it succumbed to Essendon by 39 points on Saturday night, but Batchelor maintains the run of outs are growing pains rather than backward steps.
"We all want to learn and we're on this journey together," he said.
"We have our setbacks obviously, but we'll be a better team for it. We know we'll be right. We've got faith in our game plan."
The Tigers conceded the last 10 goals of the match at the MCG, which Batchelor said was easy to see happening, but harder to stop.
"You can sense it, but I just think it comes down to maturity to be able to stop that run and then go again," he said.
"It's all a mindset. We know that we can do it, but we just need to get that self-belief that we can do it week in, week out.
"I thought we were right in the game for two-and-a-half quarters, but they got a run on and we dropped off with our intensity a bit, which is uncharacteristic. We need to be able to run out a full four quarters week in, week out.
"When we played with composure earlier in the game we got the results we wanted, but we went away from that and it cost us dearly."
That lack of composure manifested itself on the scoreboard, of course, but was also easy to pinpoint of the stats sheet where Richmond was out-tackled 89-59.
"We were up by two tackles at quarter-time and we lost that by 30 by the end of the game," Batchelor said.
"They lifted their intensity and we didn't match them.
"That's a bit of inconsistency, but I think the main thing was we just lacked a bit of composure."
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