Wallace offers players a say in Tiger plans
By Emma Quayle, Ballarat
The Age
February 7, 2006
RICHMOND'S on- and off-field philosophies will become more player-driven during coach Terry Wallace's second season in charge.
Having directed most of what happened at Punt Road last year, Wallace will have his five-player leadership group present their ambitions and plans for the new season to the match committee and players tomorrow.
With Wallace conscious of the gulf between his older players and teenagers, the leadership group - Kane Johnson, Nathan Brown, Matthew Richardson, Joel Bowden and newly reappointed defender Darren Gaspar - also will select a group of younger leaders, who will be announced before the players complete their community camp in Ballarat on Thursday morning.
"We just thought there was some balancing to be done with our group. We've got a lot of good, solid senior aged players and we're very young at the other end," Wallace said.
"When you're 18 or 19 years old, it's a long way to look up to someone who is 28 or 29, so we thought we probably needed a group in between just to be able to help those young guys aspire to what they need to do to play AFL footy.
"Last year, we were pretty much coach-driven, in terms of setting up our aims and ambitions and those sorts of things, and that's fine first year up. But good clubs are player-driven, the players are the ones out there doing it, and our players have got to now put their own disciplines in place."
Wallace returned to Melbourne after yesterday afternoon's training session for the funeral of his father, who died at the weekend, but will return tomorrow to oversee the Tigers' first full-scale practice match.
After the game, Wallace will split his list into teams of "probable" and "possible" inclusions for Richmond's first-round NAB Cup match against Hawthorn, and pit those sides against each other next week.
Pre-season draftee Matt White and rookie Cam Howat loom as two early contenders for the two "development positions" Wallace will keep open for each NAB Cup match.
Nathan Brown will wait until next month to play his first match after last year's broken leg. Mark Chaffey (adductor), Greg Tivendale (groin) and Trent Knobel, who has a slight hamstring strain, also will sit out tomorrow's game.
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