RICHMOND WAS SO CONFIDENT IN DRAFTING JACK RIEWOLDT THEY DELIBERATELY TRADED THEIR TOP DRAFT PICKBy Nic Negrepontis
SEN
17 July 2021Former Richmond coach Terry Wallace has revealed how confident his team at the time was when they drafted Jack Riewoldt.
The now-300-gamer was selected with pick 13 in the 2006 National Draft, but the Tigers actually finished the year with pick eight.
Wallace has revealed they were locked into taking Riewoldt early, but knew other teams wouldn’t select him.
They therefore opted to trade down the draft order, working out a deal with Fremantle and Collingwood.
It was a big trade at the time, seeing Chris Tarrant move to the Dockers and Paul Medhurst to the Magpies, while the Tigers moved back from eight to 13 and picked up Graham Polak.
“We actually had pick eight that year. If we’d gone to the draft with pick eight, Jack would’ve been pick eight rather than being pick 13,” Wallace told AFL Nation.
“We had done our homework and knew that no one else was going to take him that high.
“Again, it was because he wasn’t seen as an athletic player. When he tested at the combine, the high-end testing wasn’t there. He didn’t have natural speed, but he was a natural footballer.
“We’d seen him play in senior games and every time he came up against an AFL player, he stepped up to a higher level and Jade Rawlings had given him an enormous praise for his footy acumen.
“What we said was, if no one else was going to pick him first up, why do we need to use pick eight?
“So we went to Fremantle and there was a three-way trade between Fremantle, Collingwood and ourselves for us to get Graham Polak into the club.
“What we did was we got Polak out of Fremantle and got their pick 13. We knew there was no danger of losing Jack at all. We thought we might as well get the extra player in.
“Graham was just starting to establish himself right until he got hit by a tram which probably didn’t help him too much along the journey.
“That was why we went to pick 13. We always knew we were going to be able to pick him up. We were always very confident in Jack at pick 13.”
Collingwood made the most of pick eight, drafting future All-Australian Ben Reid.
Polak played 38 games for the Tigers before being struck by a tram in 2008.
He ultimately retired in 2010, with the injuries suffered in the incident changing the trajectory of his career.
Wallace went on to explain that the 2006 draft was the first year Richmond had a full-time recruiter on staff.
https://www.sen.com.au/news/2021/07/17/richmond-was-so-confident-in-drafting-jack-riewoldt-they-deliberately-traded/
