The 18 minutes in Croatia that changed the game for RichmondMichael Gleeson
The Age
February 13, 2026Richmond coach Adem Yze stood on the edge of Croatian soccer club Dinamo Zagreb’s pitch and looked at his watch. Twelve minutes. That’ll probably be enough, he thought to himself.
It wasn’t.
Three minutes later, he checked his watch again. They must be done now? No.
Two minutes more, and Yze was agitated. He looked around, wondering who had stuffed up and left these blokes stuck on the same drill? Who was running this? Had they wandered off?
A minute later a whistle blew and the drill finally ended. The players ran to the next drill before main training started.
Later, after the training session, Yze spoke with the coaches. What had happened with that first drill? It was 18 minutes long, was that a mistake?
“I thought someone had stuffed up because it went nearly 20 minutes. And I was watching a senior team after an international break, so they have just got back from playing for their country but even within that, the touch of the ball is everything,” Yze said.
“And there is no way known every time they touch it is perfect. It might go 30 centimetres from their foot instead of 10, but they are looking for this pure perfection. We are never going to get it, especially in our game with an oval ball.”
But it is the pursuit of that perfection, the understanding that the game is predicated on skill that must be honed and not at the cost of tactics and structured movement, that was the key message.
Consequently, after Yze’s trip to two clubs in Croatia, things have changed at Richmond this summer. The focus on skill drills has changed, and they are longer. Previously, the Tigers spent a lot of time looking at drone footage from overhead at training, analysing ball movement. Now they spend longer analysing ground-level video of skill execution under pressure.
“Drone footage doesn’t show the technique of footwork, skill execution, handball, ball drop under pressure, marking technique; when you are using your body instead of your hands. You only learn them with repetition, no matter who you are,” he said.
“I could picture the whiteboard after each game last year and attitude and effort had massive ticks because the boys tried hard, but execution was a question mark, especially against the really strong teams who put you under more pressure, and their execution was better than ours.
“Our list profile has changed so our mindset has to change as coaches. There’s one thing of having the detail of the way we play but within that detail of offence and defence there is skill execution and handball technique and marking technique and just becoming automatic with the ball, and that takes time.”
It altered Yze’s attitude to how they train and redoubled the focus on skills and emphasis on development.
Now with more money in the soft cap, they have added more development coaches – all fresh out of the game – in Luke Breust and Taylor Duryea. Jack Madgen is the VFL coach. Richmond have returned to pre-COVID staffing levels.
Defying expectationsThe deliberate draft-mining and list overhaul two drafts ago left Richmond expected to go winless in 2025. Consequently, externally at least, it was a free hit given the low expectations.
They won five games, far exceeding those expectations even though they finished the year with a percentage of 60. It was figure that spoke to the inconsistency of a young team.
Those five wins theoretically set the bar higher for them for this year, but as he was last year about others’ expectations, Yze is sanguine about any change in pressure.
“If you asked ‘Fages’ [Lions premiership coach Chris Fagan] … he would expect to get better. Top of the ladder or bottom, you want to get better year-on-year as a team and individually,” he said.
“Scott Pendlebury is in the game and going to play until he is 40 years old because he is working on his craft every day and trying to get better. He is not there because he is just highly talented, there is a reason why he is still in the game.
“I need to fast track how quickly we bounce back and how quickly we can get back up and compete against the best players and provide that environment.
“We can’t shy away from average performances, that is why our percentage was not good enough – because we weren’t good enough for long enough against the good teams. We need to be in those games for longer.”
Smillie’s evolutionMention Josh Smillie and Yze smiles.
For a period last year the player and the club began to wonder if it was all in Smillie’s head. He had a hamstring problem and then a quad issue that denied him the chance of an AFL debut. The quad problems then lingered into the pre-season.
It was a tease. He could run at full pace and do all sessions but would then pull back complaining of quad pain when he kicked. No one could explain why, so began to figure it as phantom pain.
Eventually, they found there was something there and surgery could fix it.
“I am so excited we found the solution because there was something underlying it. It was almost to the point where even our staff were thinking it was a mental battle but then to find, no, there is an underlying issue with the tendon – that gave him some clarity.
”So it was like, ‘This isn’t a bad thing’. An operation sounds like a worst-case scenario and we have got nothing else we can do so we try surgery. It’s not. It was the way your body was healing – that part wasn’t healing. So the awareness [of pain] you have been having you have had. It’s not in your head.
“You could see his whole demeanour shift. It was like, ‘I knew there was something wrong and now we can fix it’.”
That is not the only reason for the smile. Smillie arrived at the club pick seven in the draft and built like Patrick Cripps. Now he’s not – he’s bigger.
“He grew three centimetres last year, now he is like 197 centimetres. Paddy Cripps’ size (in fact he’s taller than Cripps by two centimetres from the Carlton captain’s listed height). We are thinking should he be playing centre half-forward?
“It’s pretty cool. To have him coming in, he is almost into full training now. He is such an important person for our next 10 years.”
Smillie speaks to the Tigers’ still changing complexion. He will come into the midfield this year. Sam Lalor will play more games than the 11 he managed in 2025. And the Tigers picked up more midfielders in Sam Cumming and Sam Grlj with two draft picks in the top 10 last year.
Then there is Taj Hotton. He arrived at the club with a knee injury, but managed to play the last seven games last year as a half-forward. This summer he has been training with the midfield and is agitating to get up on the ball. He will get a chance.
“He’ll be similar to Shai Bolton with some centre bounce access, you see ‘Kozzy’ Pickett doing it, Cyril [Rioli] and Luke Breust used to do it at the Hawks,” Yze said.
“Getting him some access to centre bounces where you don’t have someone scragging you and stopping you kicking goals every minute, gives us a different look through the midfield.
“Now he is physically capable so hopefully we get some access to that at AFL level.”
He fits at the moment in a forward line that orbits around Tom Lynch, who played last year like he was searching for his place and wondering how to fit with these new teammates. He also played like a cranky old man at times, getting reported for whacking Jordon Butts and being banned for five weeks.
“He knew he stuffed up. The leadership he has shown our young forwards since then has been fantastic. If you look at our lines, our forward line is our youngest line and he is the godfather overseeing it all. He is carrying a lot of weight with that,” Yze said.
“He knows he let his teammates down, but he didn’t let them down after that, he became a coach for that crew.”
Tigers ‘went hard enough’ on BaltaIf Lynch let the Tigers down, it was nothing on what Noah Balta did. Balta pleaded guilty last year to assaulting a man outside a pub, for which he was fined, given a curfew and an alcohol ban by the court. The club suspended him for four matches, and two pre-season games. In the context of suspensions for what occurs on the field, and given the severity with which the court considered his action, Richmond’s ban was light.
Still, the court imposed curfew meant he missed more games than he was suspended for and his season ended up gurgling away to just 13 underwhelming games.
“When he made that mistake it threw his whole season out of whack. And fair enough, you cop your right whack and he knows that,” Yze said.
“We think we went hard enough on him and that was not just my decision but a club decision. We went as hard as what we think we needed to.
“Based on the curfew and things it threw everything out of whack. He couldn’t get into any rhythm.
“We almost punished him by throwing him around after that. Because you are in and out your form might fluctuate because you are back one week and forward the next but you kind of have to do it because our forward line needs some support, so bad luck.
“Whereas this year he has earned the right to cement a position. He is doing everything we have asked. I don’t want to punish him any more than what he got punished for last year. He dealt with enough, I want to look forward and expect him to get better.”
Stand: a change is comingThe hard thing with coaching a young group is that you can redouble your focus on skills, you can drill them in how you want them to play and you can instruct where you want them to be at any one time on the field to play the game. But the AFL can also change the rules by which they play.
For a young team, rule changes are an extra load. Yze has already spoken of his frustration at the level of access to players in the off-season and the rule changes are an additional reason for wanting more time over summer to educate players.
This year there are a bunch of rule changes. The most contentious, Yze said, would not be the last touch out of bounds, but the stricter stand rule.
Now if you are within five metres of a free kick or mark, you have to stand the mark (unless there is a teammate also there, in which case only one of you has to stay put).
“The main one for the first few prac games is manning the mark, whether you should man it or not,” he said.
“If you are in a contest and land, then someone in that vicinity has to stand still. Your natural reaction is to run away and let someone else come in.
“Some teams would come into the mark then back out, but you are not allowed to do that now.That became a habit ... now if you don’t want to man the mark you have to stop yourself and let them mark it and stay outside five.”
https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/the-18-minutes-in-croatia-that-changed-the-game-for-richmond-20260211-p5o1do.html
