Tigers face tough call on Tyrone Vickery Michael Gleeson
The Age
August 26, 2014 - 6:58PM Not for the first time in his career, Richmond has to ask what it does with Tyrone Vickery.
Confronting its final-before-the-finals against Sydney on Saturday night, Richmond has to decide whether to bring Vickery back in after a month of being sidelined due to his silly suspension.
The side has been winning without him, but in the games before he whacked Dean Cox in the nose, Vickery was playing well. The string of wins that began the Tigers' late-season surge to the brink of the finals coincided with Vickery coming back into the team after being dropped and he was playing well again, booting 10 goals in four games.
When he knocked himself out of the side by almost knocking Cox out, Vickery left the door open for Ben Griffiths to come back in as his replacement. Griffiths has since played as well as at any time in his brief AFL career. Griffiths doesn't really deserve to be squeezed out of the side. He is big, a booming kick, and is starting to better understand his presence and the role he needs to play in the team. He has only kicked five goals in those four games but the forward line has operated well and he has held up his end when asked to ruck.
It could be that it is not an either-or choice between the two key forwards and relief rucks, for there is a chance they could play both, but that would be a change of direction from the middle of the year. Richmond made a call on this mid-season when it stopped playing the pair of them together. It might have been coincidental that when Richmond was horrible at the start of the year Vickery and Griffiths were both playing … but then it might not be coincidence at all.
Richmond football manager Dan Richardson said four weeks out of the game was not likely to be an impediment to Vickery returning and so it was only a matter of choice in team selection.
"He has trained hard through the break and we think his fitness is fine but we have an important training session on Thursday to assess all of that," Richardson said. "Training form has a bit of a bearing on selection.
"We have not made a call yet, it will be up to match committee on Thursday afternoon. It is good position to be in to be having to make hard calls at selection at this time of the year."
Former captain Chris Newman was non-committal on Vickery when asked about it on Tuesday, confirming that Vickery had been mounting the most persuasive case he could for a recall, without actually stating whether he thought he should be recalled.
"He's been trying to do that (make up for his suspension) for the past four weeks. He's worked really hard," Newman said. "A lot of the sessions that he's had to do, he looks exhausted after it. He knows that he let us down, he admitted that. He's putting his hand up to definitely be selected. He's doing everything in his powers to be out there with us."
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/tigers-face-tough-call-on-tyrone-vickery-20140826-108quh.html
