Cotchin a 'decade player': Brown, Wallace
richmondfc.com.au
By Mic Cullen
4:14 PM Tue 10 June, 2008
THERE'S no doubt about it – the Tigers have snared themselves a beauty.
Trent Cotchin has only played four games since being taken with pick two in last year's NAB AFL Draft, but already he's being discussed in glowing terms, and must have missed this week's NAB Rising Star nomination by a whisker after his stellar first half against the Crows.
Both his coach and one of the game's best players are already singing his praises, despite the youngster missing the entire pre-season due to injury.
"He's fantastic, isn't he, Trent?" veteran Nathan Brown said on Tuesday. "He just does everything right – he comes in and he eats better than most, he trains harder than most, he's got his head screwed on.
"He just makes the right decisions with the ball just about every time he's got it, and that's pretty rare in football these days.
"We draft a lot of athletes and players who develop into good players, but to have a ready-made footballer come in and make the right decisions pretty much 95 per cent of the time he gets the ball is fantastic.
"He's someone you can build a midfield around for the next decade."
Coach Terry Wallace is in total agreement.
"He's going to be a decade player, and I don't use that statement loosely," Wallace said of the 18-year-old. "You have players who come in and out of the side and play for a bit of time, and you have blokes who are decade players, who are going to enjoy long, terrific careers.
"For a young player, the way he actually brings other players into the game – he holds, he draws with footy, and he creates overlap, and blokes run a long way to get near him, because they know that they're likely to get hold of the footy, and that's a bloke who's played the game for three or four matches."
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