No dwelling on past glories: How Adem Yze hopes to revive RichmondMichael Gleeson
The Age
February 2, 2024Adem Yze approaches being the new senior coach of Richmond not as taking over a team that has just won three flags, but rather a team that has not won a final in three years.
Both things are true, but for Yze the greater danger is in dwelling on the glorious recent past, not the less glorious recent seasons.
In a wide-ranging interview on the eve of the new season, Yze told this masthead:
* Noah Balta will play as a power forward to exploit his speed and explosiveness. He will also play as second ruck as former Demons assistant Yze recognises Luke Jackson-like traits in his follow-up work as a ruckman.
* Richmond’s game style would only be tweaked, but the heavy early focus would be on reasserting team defence.
* Dustin Martin will spend more time on the ball than forward and trained over summer exclusively as a midfielder.
* Shai Bolton, in contrast, will only be sparingly used as a midfielder. Bolton will adopt a Cyril Rioli-type balance, only attending one centre bounce a quarter on average and spending most of his time forward. Yze believes Bolton could be an All-Australian small forward.
* Full-forward Tom Lynch will join full training in the next fortnight and, while he remains a chance to play the opening round, he will not be pushed to play round one. Young key defender Josh Gibcus, who missed all of last season, was tracking to be fit for the first game.
* Yze said Brett Ratten had been a strong mentor for him and he still regularly spoke with Alastair Clarkson and Simon Goodwin but would also this year seek out former Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley, who was part of Richmond’s coaching selection process, for advice.
Part of Yze’s pitch to Richmond when he applied for the job was a frank assessment of where the team stood and problems it confronted.
“It wasn’t to say ‘this is what I see the footy club [as]’, it was more around the risk of [not] leaving things in the past,” he said. “With success, and I saw it at the Hawks, you can just get drawn back to ‘this is what worked for us’. But four years later if you’re still talking about ‘this is what won us flags’, then we’re not moving forward. We’re living in the past and that’s unhealthy, I think.
“The game keeps changing. This is the fourth year now [since the 2020 premiership] and we haven’t won a final as a footy club. We win the grand final in 2020, [and now] we’re in 2024 and we haven’t won a final.
“If we’re still thinking about 2020, that’s the risk. So that was the whole argument. In the end, Collingwood are the best team in the comp. What are they doing that we’re not doing?
“You talk about culture and list and things like that, the key pillars around your footy club in talent and a strong culture – I think we’ve got that and we’re evolving our list, the transition is happening.
“The culture of this footy club – massive tick, and it has been from afar looking in for a long time. This is a good, strong club.
“My head’s not that I am taking over from Damien Hardwick’s three premierships. I’m taking over a team that hasn’t won a final in three years. How can we get back to that? That’s my philosophy. And that’s where the board were really clear on that, and the management.
“‘So we know where we’re at – your job is to get us back up there.’
“I want our fans feeling like we can win it every year. We’re a big footy club, we’re exciting, and I want our players to feel like that. If we’ve got everyone available, I think we can be really competitive.”
THE GAME PLANWhat Yze does with changing the game plan of a team that had been very successful will not be an overhaul, so much as an adjustment.
“There are only subtle changes. I spoke to the players about it – I don’t want them feeling like they were no good, but there’s subtle little parts of their game that I thought we could fix,” Yze said.
“They’ve always, as a club, had an offensive brand – fast, high handball, gain territory, and they were always quite scary to coach against. But I noticed different things on their defence and around stoppage (in recent years). So the way that we set up around stoppage is going to be different.
“They’ve had a stoppage mode that they’ve always gone with, but we’ve got different personnel right now. We’ve got two inside bulls (Jacob Hopper and Tim Taranto) that have come to the club that I think we can generate some more stoppage wins [from].
“Richmond were historically never a great clearance team, but they could rebound and were a great ball-movement team. So I think we can get a balance of both, based on our personnel. It’s more of a mindset around what a clearance looks like, and what our stoppage structure looks like.
“Then I think we lost our way a little bit on our team defence. Richmond were so hard to get through, and I think we’ve lost that a little bit.
“It can happen, people are chasing you, trying to break you down, and then your head can naturally go to ‘how can we evolve our offence? The answer is offensive, they are slowing us down, how do we get speed?’ And then you just take your eye off the ball on defence.
“I’ve come from two footy clubs that were always really stable in defence and really organised, and really hard to play against, in Melbourne and Hawthorn. So that’s this subtle shift again.”
To coach the shift, Yze’s first weeks were spent working with his coaches, drilling them on the change. Once the players have arrived, much of the tactical coaching has been done by the line coaches, with Yze only stepping in occasionally.
Many first-year coaches want to establish their voice so it is tied with their message before delegating to others, but Yze took the other approach of immediate empowerment of his assistants.
“I’ve got two coaches that have coached senior footy before (Ben Rutten and David Teague) so if I don’t utilise their voices, I’m kidding myself,” he said.
Initially, Yze plans to coach from the stands until he gets a feel for what the coaches are seeing and the mechanics of the group, before he considers a move to coach from the bench.
FORWARD BALTAThe biggest structural change will be flipping Balta forward. With the club wanting to bring on young key defenders Gibcus, who missed all of last year, Tylar Young and Ben Miller, they have scope to move Balta forward.
“He’ll play like a power forward, then I think he could be a really good second ruck,” Yze said.
“His follow-up work around contests is really similar to Luke Jackson. He’s like a cat around a 20-metre bubble.
“He’s powerful. He wants to pressure. I can see an opportunity for him to take his game to another level, and I think it just suits what his make-up is. He is a power athlete. Get out there, run hard, go and have a spell, whereas you can’t do that as defender. You get stuck out there a little bit.
“His game time will be a bit lower so he can go out and do all the powerful things.”
When full-forward Lynch plays – and he is tracking to a return in the early rounds, if not round one, after missing eight months last year – Balta will play higher.
“Noah can get up the ground and, with his speed, get in behind (the defence). I see some huge upside in him. And he’ll miss a goal from the top of the goal square, which will be frustrating, but that’s OK, we live with that, because of what he can do. I’m excited by what I’m seeing so far.”
DUSTY AND SHAIVeteran star Martin will still play a lot in the forward line but will spend a bit more time on-ball this year. He has trained all summer with the midfield, not the forwards.
“He’ll do a bit more midfield time this year than what he did last year, but knowing that there’s always going to be opportunity forward,” Yze said.
“I just like the fact that he trains as a midfielder. He knows what to do forward, he will go down and just win one-on-ones or whatever, but just the ability to go and play five minutes of midfield time, it’s hard doing that if you just train as a forward. You end up playing midfield as a forward, you won’t run the right patterns.”
Bolton is also training with the midfield for the same reason of understanding midfield structure, lanes, hit targets and patterns, but he will be used more sparingly on the ball.
“I just feel like we’ve got the ability to have one of the best small forwards in the comp, and we’ve got a lot of midfielders,” Yze explained.
“For an opposition coach, when you’re looking at Bolton in a forward line, it’s like ‘how can we stop him?’ Look at Kozzy Pickett, Charlie Cameron, Bobby Hill on grand final day – they are hard to find, those players, and we’ve got one that could be an All-Australian small forward. Why try get him up the ground when we’ve got guys that can do that?
“I think we’ve got an A-grade forward. I was at Hawthorn with Cyril. Cyril would do one centre bounce a quarter, so he’d get some midfield exposure to start the quarter when he’s got energy, but then just go and be the best small forward you can be.
“Shai will be exactly the same. We want him in the game. So go do a centre bounce, go play for four minutes, but then just go and play forward. I don’t want him feeling like he’s a midfielder or to feel like he has to go and get 30 possessions to have an impact on our game.
“The way he will have impact is if he kicks 50 goals for the season. That is high-level impact. And that’s what he can do. He’s done it before.”
THE RETURNSLynch played just four games last year. Gibcus didn’t play any.
Having good players fit and on the field will make as much difference to Richmond this year as tweaks to game plan and new coaching voices.
Gibcus joined match simulation on Wednesday and is set to be ready for round one. Lynch might be, but is less certain of being so. He has done a lot of running, which is positive given the ankle/foot problems he had, but is yet to join full training.
“He is close, but he needs to do a block of footy training to be ready for round one. We can’t just expect him to come and dominate with only doing a small pre-season,” Yze said.
“He doesn’t hold back, he’s a machine, he crashes packs. So the minute he plays, he’s got to be ready for that and to back that up, so we’re going to give him his best chance to do that.”
Dion Prestia picked up a minor hamstring injury at training on Wednesday that will sideline him for the club’s match simulation against Melbourne on February 18, but he is expected to be available for round one.
HANDLING THE HEATSome changes at Richmond have been subtle, some more overt. Others involve a camel.
There is a large camel sitting on the dugout at Punt Road Oval. There is another one, a full-sized camel, standing in the media theatrette.
This was not Yze’s idea, but he loved the suggestion when conditioning coach Luke Meehan came to him with it. Meehan has had the players do a lot of work in heat training this summer. There is a heat room at Richmond that the players have used, and the theme has been pushing through the heat. What animal copes with heat and pushes through? A camel.
“I love that Lukey Meehan wanted to do it. It creates a bit of fun,” Yze said.
“Shane McCurry (the club’s head of leadership development) went down to get it from some bloke in Gippsland. I’d love to have had a camera to get him driving up the road with this camel on the roof or in a trailer, like something from The Hangover.”
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