Deconstructing Deledio Matthew Lloyd
The Age
July 21, 2013 Brett Deledio is the Richmond Football Club's best and most important player. So much so, that Fremantle's No.1 tagger Ryan Crowley wouldn't have even had to ask Ross Lyon who he wants him to put the clamps on at the MCG on Sunday.
Deledio would have gone to bed on Saturday night thinking of Crowley and awakened thinking about him. The Freo man is one of the most aggressive taggers the game has seen. He gets inside players heads before they have even run down the race. Deledio is a very good player but I don't class him as a great player due to his indifferent form when under severe heat from the opposition's best negating player.
Sunday is a huge test.
Richmond hasn't been in such a strong position for well over a decade and, North Melbourne aside, it has beaten all the teams below it - as a finals contender should. The knock on the Tigers is that they are yet to beat a side in the top six and face their bogey side here - Fremantle beat them twice last year because of the way Ross Lyon coaches his teams to play.
The Tigers then meet Sydney and Hawthorn and they need to take at least one scalp out of these three games to justify the improvement that everyone thinks they have made this season.
Make no mistake, Deledio is the barometer for Richmond - the best players usually are but his statistics bear a stark difference in the Tigers' 10 wins compared to their five losses.
When I close my eyes and picture Deledio at his dynamic best, I see him starting his run from the wing, taking three bounces and kicking a goal from 50 metres.
In the Richmond wins, he has had 18 scoring shots for a return of 9.9 and driven the ball inside 50 at an average of six times a game.
In Richmond's five losses, Deledio is yet to kick a goal and his inside-50 entries have been halved from six to three. Deledio's possession rate also drops from 26 to 20 and it is the ability of the better teams to stop his uncontested ball that has most hurt his effectiveness.
Crowley in round five, Taylor Hunt in round six, Heath Hocking in round nine and Taylor Hine in round 15, were all able to stop Deledio from influencing the game with his outside run and carry, which coincided with Tigers losses - and his MCG battle with Crowley will have a huge bearing on the outcome of the game.
I can already see it unfolding: Deledio will start at the back of the square at the first bounce, with coach Damien Hardwick looking to use his run and creativity to hurt the Dockers but knowing full well that Crowley will be running straight to him and going everywhere with him. I love watching the best players in our game prosper under severe heat as Joel Selwood, Chris Judd, Gary Ablett and Scott Pendlebury do, week in and week out, and I also saw Deledio carve up Kane Cornes of Port Adelaide in round seven, which forced Ken Hinkley to move Cornes off him by half-time.
Deledio was at his explosive best that day with dashing runs through the middle of AAMI Stadium combined with strong contested work on the inside, racking up 13 contested possessions and 18 uncontested possessions. It was the perfect game.
I was watching him closely against North Melbourne's Hine two weeks ago and, like most of his teammates, the Tiger had a day he would like to forget but I felt that he didn't throw anything at Hine to change the direction of his performance.
I was looking for him to get aggressive with Hine at stoppages or waiting for him to go on a gut-busting run to make the inexperienced Roo crumple in a heap but I felt that Deledio just accepted his lot.
Deledio went to the goal square late in that game but he has to do it earlier on Sunday and use his explosiveness on the lead and his marking ability to take Crowley out of his comfort zone.
I hope he has watched a tape of the first half between Sydney and Fremantle in round eight. Crowley went to Daniel Hannebery at the opening bounce and started bumping into him as Crowley does.
Hannebery dealt with that by taking Crowley on aggressive runs from the first bounce and was on the wing one minute, in the centre bounce the next and whenever he could, would charge forward to get Crowley having to defend on the last line of defence, which Crowley struggled with.
The end result was that Hannebery had kicked four goals before half-time, Crowley had stopped his niggling tactics and Lyon was looking for a new match-up for Hannebery.
Hardwick has to support Deledio by allowing him space inside forward 50 as he should be too strong for Crowley in the air. I cannot wait to see how that battle unfolds and if Deledio takes the points, it's a feather in his cap and will more than likely see Richmond win the game. Deledio must steel himself for the battle and fight fire with fire in his attack on the ball and by never letting Crowley intimidate him.
That battle will be a game within the game.
The last time Richmond and Fremantle met at the MCG was round eleven last year when Fremantle just suffocated the Tigers, laying over 100 tackles in the wet. Lyon was also able to manufacture countless one-on-one marking contests for Matthew Pavlich, who went on to kick six goals while the Richmond forwards were surrounded by a sea of purple every time they went inside 50.
Pavlich won't be there but a Lyon-led Fremantle will be and if there is any doubt about the Tigers being the real deal in 2013, things will be much clearer by 4.30 in the afternoon.
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