Richmond to bill clash with Adelaide Crows as mini elimination final says Bachar HouliSam Landsberger
Herald-Sun
August 10, 2014 BACHAR Houli says Richmond’s greatest winning streak in 19 years was built on a lift in training standards and the Tigers will bill Saturday night’s clash against Adelaide as an elimination final.
The Tigers’ 18-point win against Essendon on Friday night was its sixth on the trot — their best run since starting the 1995 season 7-0.
Richmond is now within four points of the seventh-placed Bombers and if it can square the ledger at 10-10 against the Crows a September finish will almost certainly boil down to its Round 23 trip to face Sydney.
“I can believe (we’ve won six in a row) because training has been to a really high standard that we as a team have set, particularly the last 6-8 weeks,” Houli said.
“A lot of it is just attitude. For us we’re now focusing on Adelaide. We’ve got a 24-hour period where we can relax but once that’s over we’ll focus on Adelaide.”
The Tigers have saluted in three of their past four games against the Crows and Houli said his side was winning back the respect of the footy world.
“The (Crows game) will bring a finals atmosphere and I thought (Friday night) was a finals atmosphere as well,” he said.
“We were fighting to keep our season alive and also Essendon are as well, even though they’re in the eight they’re trying to get that extra game for security.
“For us next week is another elimination final and hopefully we can get the job done.”
Spearhead Jack Riewoldt yesterday said the Tigers were still a “sneaky sniff” to play in September.
“We trained our arses off over pre-season. But we let a few things slip, we let a few things individually slip but we’ve been able to rectify that over the last 2-3 months,” he said on Triple M.
“Trust me, I’m as frustrated as anyone. There were games we should have won at the start of the season that we let slip.”
Coach Damien Hardwick said the Tigers’ form had eclipsed the best they produced last year on the back of heightened consistency but lamented their inability to handle injuries to stars Brett Deledio, Alex Rance and Ivan Maric early in the season as thy slumped to 3-10.
“We knew what was going wrong, it just took a bit of a lag to fix it, which was a little bit disappointing,” he said.
“There always was going to be a bump in the road at some stage and it defines your organisation how you handle that bump.
“Hopefully ours was in the first part of this year and then we move forward.”
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