Dylan Grimes: Richmond defender’s surprising statistics, Is Dylan Grimes the most underrated player in the AFL?Chris Cavanagh,
Herald Sun
February 12, 2018 RICHMOND defender Dylan Grimes is taking inspiration from a Sydney counterpart as he looks to ramp up the offensive side of his game this year.
Confident he has shaken an injury curse after playing every game in a career-best 2017, the 26-year-old is now setting his sights on contributing more to the Tigers’ rebound from halfback.
Grimes said he admired the way Sydney defender Dane Rampe went about his footy and was hoping to add elements to his own game.
“He’s got a really good balance between offence and defence,” Grimes said of Rampe.
“I base my game around by defence and my contest work and as long as I’m sound in those two areas that’s when I try and go (off my man) a little bit more. That’s probably the biggest scope for my improvement I think, investing a bit more into my offensive game to be able to contribute a bit more to the running players like Bachar Houli, Nick Vlastuin, Jayden Short, Nathan Broad, those sort of players that really give us a lot of drive out of defence.”
In a dark past ravaged by hamstring and foot injuries, Grimes feared more than once that his body was simply not up to the rigours of AFL football after playing just 79 games across his first seven years.
But a full pre-season last year was the springboard for a season which gave him confidence not only in his body but also his ability at the top level.
Spending most of the season as a third tall defender alongside Alex Rance and David Astbury, Grimes recorded the sixth-best defensive rating of any general defender in the competition.
Often playing against smaller opponents, Champion Data statistics show he won 43 per cent of one-on-one contests he defended which also ranked as the sixth best percentage of the top-100 players to defend a contest.
“There were certainly stages of my career where I’d had double hamstring surgeries and struggled with a broken foot and stress fractures and that sort of thing that I really doubted my ability to perform and almost my ability in my body to stay as an AFL player,” Grimes said.
“It’s been a huge confidence lifter for me to finish a couple of pre-seasons in really good physical form and then be able to put that into the season and play every game last year was huge tick on my goals list and something I’ll be trying to do again this year for sure.”
In the space of six months, Grimes has become a premiership player and Richmond life member and this week inked a three-year contract extension ending in 2021 which effectively makes him a Tiger for life.
Like his teammates, he is hungry for more success though and believes Richmond is ready for the different dynamic this year of being the hunted rather than the hunter.
“It’s funny you say the word ‘hunt’,” Grimes said.
“The way that we play, we hunt the ball on offence and then we hunt the man on defence. If we’re doing those two things we don’t really worry about the results and what the crowd or the media or anything are saying about us and I think last year we got really good at focusing on what we can control and we’ll certainly be looking to do that as we go forward.
“We based our game last year off our defence and our pressure and we’re pretty keen to take that to another level this year.
“I think that’s probably what’s most exciting about our club at the moment, that although we had some success in the past the scope for improvement with a really young list is really exciting.”
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/afl/teams/richmond/richmond-defender-dylan-grimes-looks-to-sydneys-dane-rampe-in-a-bid-to-improve-offensive-game/news-story/7c27c86915b0d99c3554368021e858ac
