Summary:
* Not in crisis. Far from it. We're united and aligned as a club but we have a footy team that isn't playing well.
* Trips (eg: World Cup) are about building business relationships and meeting up personally to further those relationships. That's business.
* Consumer support (members) have been affected by the onfield performance. Crowds have dropped off. But that's life.
* First step is finding an understanding of what has happened and why. Can't go into specifics but one thing he can say is we lost some players early in the year, no different to other clubs, and it exposed our list as still needing a lot of work. 15 wins last year and finishing near the top 4 flattered us. Gale said he said that 6 months ago. So we're trying to find out what has happened and not trying to jerk the issues.
* We were trying to build the business side of the club first. We needed to do that to participate. We didn't have that option but we do now. We'll obviously participate in the draft again.
* A number of things went wrong but he can't share those publicly. To be honest he didn't see this year coming. The previous 4 years we've had linearly progression on and off-field. We had got better year on year both on and off-field. He expected that to continue this year but clearly it hasn't.
* Mike said there's been criticism of Richmond taking too many recycled players. Gale disagreed and said recruiting the likes of Chaplin and Grigg you would say has been a success for us. Last few years we've changed our use of the rookie draft to recruit more ready-made top-ups but the recruiting of mature players has been overstated.
