Warwick Green
August 22, 2007
HE'S a Brownlow medallist, premiership player and All-Australian captain: there's not much Mark Ricciuto hasn't achieved in football. So do you reckon Richmond would have liked to have got its hands on him before he'd even played a game? Just a little bit. And for one glorious day in 1992, Tigers insiders dared to dream that the impressive teenager might be headed to Punt Road. It may well be the greatest trade that never happened. A couple of seasons earlier, Richmond had drafted South Australian ruckman/forward Brett Chalmers, but he refused to cross the border and was simply filling a spot on its list. The then Richmond general manager, Cameron Schwab, recalled that the fledgling Crows were showing considerable interest in trading for Chalmers. "It was one of probably 100 discussions that you have in trade week," Schwab said yesterday. "But we raised the name of a kid who showed a fair bit of promise — we thought that mightn't be a bad deal, a stocky teenage midfielder for a towering key-position player." The mature-bodied Ricciuto was an under-17 All-Australian and had some big wraps on him. "The Crows rang us back later and said, 'No thanks'," Schwab said.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/sport/the-crow-the-tigers-were-left-to-roo/2007/08/21/1187462265210.html
