Riewoldt emerges from the shadows MARTIN BLAKE
June 4, 2010 JACK Riewoldt's improvement is measurable, demonstrable, palpable.
He has kicked 29 goals in 10 games for Richmond this season, almost as many as the 32 he slotted for the whole of last season, and enough to put him in the top five in the Coleman Medal race. And that in a team with a lone victory to its name, and at just 21 years of age.
He has taken more contested marks (22) than any of the top 10 players on the goalkicking list. Not content with one-way traffic, he is No. 1 in the AFL for tackles inside the forward 50-metre zone, a number that grows in relevance every year.
Not for the first time a St Kilda-Richmond game at the Docklands tonight will be about the Riewoldt Factor. The difference this time is that it is Richmond's Jack who is in the spotlight as his more famous cousin, St Kilda's Nick, recovers from surgery. Back in Tasmania as a boy, the younger Jack converted from soccer to Australian football as he aped the deeds of his burgeoning cousin, already his role model. What a story it is that that he is catching him centimetre by centimetre.
Jack Riewoldt might well be the most improved player in the competition. He kicked four goals in the soup at AAMI Stadium in Richmond's first win last weekend. The week before, he terrorised Tayte Pears in kicking six against Essendon, ripping down pack marks in that old-fashioned, 1970s kind of way. No longer can he be tagged The Other Riewoldt.
The numbers tell only part of the story. Riewoldt has had to work on deficiencies to round off his game in his fourth season and, fortunately for Richmond, he has proved a willing learner.
First and foremost is his conversion. Riewoldt has kicked 29.19 this season, converting at 60 per cent against a poorly 54 per cent last year. The improvement did not happen by chance.
He had the yips and knew that he needed to fix it. Richmond's forward coach Danny Daly says Riewoldt has 100 to 150 set shots at Punt Road every week, mainly on Thursdays, often with an iPod blasting away in his ears.
That is not mere chance, either. ''He's got music and crowd noise and all sorts of things going on in his ears when he's kicking for goal,'' said Daly, who extracted the idea from the American NFL, whose punters deliberately reproduce game-day sounds. ''That's helped him.''
Richmond knew it was an issue for Riewoldt and had assistant coach Brendon Lade, himself a brilliantly straight kick for goal through a 12-year career with Port Adelaide, get involved. The club psychologist, Kim Stephens, also was asked to help.
They came up with a formula that was about simplicity, for Riewoldt's kicking fundamentals are sound. Like so many players, his poor conversion had got into his head. ''We've been working on his thought process, not so much his action,'' said Daly. ''He was thinking too much: 'How many steps have I got to take, how do I drop the ball, how have I got to do this?' Rather than 'all that will take care of itself, keep in mind what the result's going to be, and focus on one thing, relax a bit'.''
Riewoldt had shown good signs as a key forward in his first three seasons, but the knock was on his defensive game. His response is instructive. He has doubled his tackle rate to 4.4 a game this season. ''It's an area he needed to improve in,'' said Daly. ''We spoke to him about that. The reality for forwards is if they get their defensive acts up, they get rewarded the other way, because you force the turnover and the ball comes back inside 50 and you get an opportunity to score.''
He has also grown from the 85-kilogram stripling who crossed Bass Strait as a No. 13 draft pick in 2007. At 195 centimetres he is two centimetres taller than he arrived (and fractionally ahead of his cousin) and the spindly boy is now a 93-kilogram man.
Moreover when Matthew Richardson and Nathan Brown retired at the end of last season, there was a changing of the guard. It was Riewoldt who has stepped forward into the breach, both symbolically and in a realistic sense. ''It's not something we spoke to him about,'' said Daly. ''We didn't put the responsibility on him. He took it on himself. He's a natural-born leader, I think. It's helped his footy.''
Daly came from North Melbourne, his football home of the previous six years, with a perception that Riewoldt was selfish. He has found the opposite to be true. At Punt Road, they love his instinctive ways, evident when he soccered a goal around the corner last weekend, somehow looping the ball over an opponent.
Richmond acknowledges that Riewoldt is carrying a huge weight as the main key forward in a 16th-placed team and with such tender years. ''To be honest, when we got [David] Astbury and [Ben] Griffiths through the draft, we were probably thinking those two would take the two key positions and Jack would be the really good third tall for us,'' said Daly. ''But the way we've seen Jack evolve, and for me coming to know him a bit better, it's probably going to be him and Benny Griffiths there and we've been able to slot Dave Astbury back, which is a bonus for us.''
Talk about changing perceptions.
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/riewoldt-emerges-from-the-shadows-20100603-x70a.html
