Players to blame, says former TigerJesse Hogan
July 18, 2011RETIRED Richmond forward Nathan Brown says his former club's failure to beat the league's bottom two teams this season is the fault of the players, not the administrators who shifted those home matches interstate.
As Richmond chief executive Brendon Gale staunchly defended the deals to sell two home matches — one to Darwin, one to Cairns — Brown labelled the loss on Saturday to Gold Coast in north Queensland "deplorable".
"The players let the club down," Gale told The Sunday Footy Show. "The club sells the game because the club makes $1 million to get even, to spend more money on the football department like Collingwood and Hawthorn do, and try to get some more people in recruiting and some more people to the club, like a ruckman."
Brown quarantined the Tigers' coach, Damien Hardwick, from blame after Saturday's loss to the Suns and the round-10 loss to Port Adelaide.
"People are starting to talk about his coaching. It's not his coaching, [it's] the players," Brown said.
Former Collingwood coach Tony Shaw similarly believed it was a "total cop-out" for anybody to suggest the Richmond board and management were liable for the losses that have all but extinguished the club's hopes of reach the finals.
"This is a player-based issue, not coach or administration," he said.
Shaw urged the club to be "brutal" when reviewing its list at the end of the season and cut at least eight players.
Gale yesterday conceded shifting the matches from Victoria, where they would have produced a negligible financial return, could effectively have cost it "four or eight points" but gave the theory short shrift in defending the decision.
"To simply focus on the selling of the game as the basis of that result is an excuse, a cop-out, and we won't accept it as a footy club," Gale told 3AW.
"We'll get to the finals when we get there on merit. Yeah, we may have picked up four or eight points [by playing at home], who knows? It's probably a bit of an insult to the opposition we played.
"We've taken too many short-term decisions as a footy club. We're [now] about taking a long-term view of building financial strength and competitiveness . . . it takes longer than five minutes."
Gale said truly competing with the league's best clubs required a significant increase in its football-department spending.
He believes the multimillion-dollar gap between it and elite clubs such as Collingwood "has a bearing on your performances as a football club — and it's happening now".
He urged members to consider the club's view that decisions such as selling matches, to help eradicate debt, would ultimately benefit the club.
"The passion of our members has sustained us through some lean times in recent years. I felt the wrath of that [on Saturday], I was heckled and confronted at times. That goes with the territory," he said.
"I can understand the disappointment and frustration of a lot of our supporters but we are simply not going to accept short-term fixes.
"It's happened too often in the past. Unfortunately there's going to be a bit more pain but I'm confident we're on the right trajectory."
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/players-to-blame-says-former-tiger-20110717-1hka7.html#ixzz1SNm3yDpd
