Wallace weighs up wide-open eight
richmondfc.com.au
By Mic Cullen
Thu 31 July, 2008
AS HENRY Ford once said: "History is more or less bunk".
A couple of months ago, the 2008 AFL season was declared dead and buried in relation to the eight. That was it -- history showed that the teams qualifying for the finals were not going to change.
But the season has continued to throw up all sorts of twists and turns, and with five weeks left, the top three teams are pretty much the only sides that are safe.
As a result, Richmond in 10th is just half a game out of the eight.
Coach Terry Wallace isn't getting too excited at this point – especially given his side has uber-team Geelong to face on Saturday night – but is happy to be still in the mix.
"It flips and varies in a lot of mysterious ways, doesn't it?" he pondered. "What it's done is it's just set up the competition for a fantastic finish to the year.
"As we all do, you have a sneaky look to see who's playing who, and work out your permutations and combinations, and you can't work out anything, because nearly every week there's three games that impact the bottom part of the eight significantly.
"There can be movement, I reckon now, there can be movement anywhere from fourth downwards to those that are still involved.
"So that's opened it up a fair bit."
The closeness of the competition meant Wallace was unable to say how many more games his side needs to win to see September action, citing the old classic – 'eight-point games' – as a major reason.
"I don't know. I don't know the answers to that. To be honest, I think it would matter which wins, because if you're playing other sides in similar scenarios to yourself, if you win those type of games, well, that's one less that they can win.
"At the very least we would say that we would need three victories from this stage onwards, if we wanted to play finals footy.
"I think that's at the very least."
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