Robbo’s pre-season likes and dislikesMark Robinson,
Herald Sun
4 March 2019As we count down to the first bounce on season 2019, Herald Sun chief football writer Mark Robinson puts every club under the microscope.
See his concerns and likes about your club.
RICHMOND
WHAT I LIKESimilar to Melbourne, they crumbled on the second most important weekend of the year, and suspect the Tigers will learn plenty about themselves because of it. They’ll be contenders again, barring a load of injuries.
The positive is Tom Lynch — he and Jack Riewoldt loom as a formidable front two if the chemistry is right. You know what the Tigers will do. They will defend forward, move the ball forward by hand and run hard, and Dustin Martin will play midfield forward.
Don’t know it will happen too many times, because Damien Hardwick likes Martin one-out deep, but Martin, Riewoldt and Lynch in the same 50m will be frightening for opposition defences.
WHAT I DON’T LIKEMucked up preliminary final weekend, but the issues probably started six weeks out.
They knew they would finish top two and the mindset of knowing that could have played against them, as predicted by Denis Pagan. In hindsight, they seemed to play within themselves and lacked the absolute death football they played every week from Round 17 the previous season. The club will learn from that, if, in fact, it was the case.
But they weren’t the same team against Hawthorn either, before being shellacked by Collingwood. The Tigers have the game plan, the experience and now Lynch, so it could be theirs to lose if the mindset is astray. One question: Will teams try to match up Alex Rance with a mid-sized player, a la Jordan De Goey in the preliminary final? You’d expect so.
VERDICTTop two
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