My baby takes the morning train

The verdict is in, public transport is good for the environment and full forwards.

Riewoldt is second only to Franklin in 'when he's on, he's on' factor and after a week like that, something along those lines was always on the cards.

I've never understood the animosity directed at Jack and Buddy. They are the guys who make footy good, they drag people through the gate, they make people watch neutral games and fill newspaper columns. The AFL doesn't get a billion dollars for their TV deal because of midfielders, they get a billion dollars because of Buddy and Jack.

I suspect there is something seriously wrong out west but you can only beat who you play, and given that we haven't been doing that, yesterday was nice. We've been beaten up on enough in my lifetime, so I'm chuffed for us to fill our boots when and where we can.

As savaging as it was, it doesn't change much for 2014 other than putting us in a bit of form heading into Dreamtime.

For a second week in a row we took on a team financially propped up by the AFL and it went much more to plan. You can say good things about all who played yesterday, during even the glory days of last year I'm not sure we could have said that too many weeks.

After a week where everyone, including yours truly, were savage on Hardwick he made a few changes to structure that got us moving. Morris forward was genius, despite some of the finest junk time padding Shaw could only find it 13 times and turned it over on five of those. He free'd up the forward 50, it wasn't too often that Riewoldt, Vickery and Griffiths were in the same area and our ball movement was much better for it. He made a change during the game, something he hasn't always been great at, when he shifted McDonough out of the back pocket and into the midfield after he lost a few contests early. And he brought Thomas in, who's tough as teak and wouldn't have let Melbourne have their way with us in the middle last week.

Hampson is one of those players who legally has to be proceeded as 'often maligned' whenever mentioned in the press but yesterday he was outstanding. Not just beating Mumford, but smashing him, and hinting that he doesn't care too much for being subbed at half time.

Yesterday has to be taken with a pinch of salt given the opposition but how good was it watching Foley trust his speed? Two or three times he looked at his closest opponent, knew he had him covered, arched the back and went.

It looks as if we've found some groove which will keep the media off the doorstep for a little bit but yesterday means squat unless they turn up against Essendon and North during the next fortnight.

Lids racing to 200 as the youngest Richmond player is very impressive considering the number of finals a few people before him have racked up. He's as durable as they come, has only missed eight games across ten years and let's hope that the next 150 are peppered with a few more finals.

The Giants ground is a ripping place to watch footy if you are ever thinking about making an interstate trip.

Votes

5: Jack Riewoldt

4: Dustin Martin

3: Shaun Hampson

2: Brett Deledio

1: Steven Morris

Plenty unlucky for the first time in a while: Thomas, Rance, Cotchin, Chaplin and Houli amongst others.

Leaderboards

The Benny

16: Jack Riewoldt

14: David Astbury

13: Trent Cotchin and Shaun Hampson

12: Dustin Martin

10: Daniel Jackson

9: Ricky Petterd

8: Reece Conca

7: Brandon Ellis

6: Steven Morris

4: Matt Thomas, Sam Lloyd, Brett Deledio and Shaun Grigg

3: Ty Vickery and Shane Edwards

2: Nick Vlastuin

1: Ben Griffiths, Orren Stephenson and Ben Lennon

Blair Hartley Appreciation Award

13: Shaun Hampson

9: Ricky Petterd

4: Matt Thomas and Shaun Grigg

Anthony Banik Best First Year Player

4: Sam Lloyd

1: Ben Lennon

Joel Bowden’s Golden Left Boot

4: Shaun Grigg

Greg Tivendale Rookie Medal

4: Matt Thomas

1: Orren Stephenson

Championship belt

Incumbent	Winner	Streak	Wins
NA	Cotchin	1	1
Cotchin	Astbury	1	1
Astbury	Riewoldt	1	1
Riewoldt	Astbury	1	2
Astbury	Petterd	1	1
Petterd	Ellis	1	1
Ellis	Conca	1	1
Conca	Martin	1	1
Martin	Riewoldt	1	2

The guys over at TTBB are doing some really cool things on their site and I reckon the Virtual Duffle Coat is my favourite.

Chasing Jack

In an ideal world, Jack wouldn’t have said what he did in such a public forum. In that same ideal world, Hardwick would have halted the press conference after this zinger.

But given that we were supposed to play finals, are now 2-6 and just lost to Melbourne – it’s pretty obvious that Richmond doesn’t exist in an ideal world. Jack did say what he did in a public forum and rather than kill the story with that line, and it was a very good line, Hardwick strung everything out an extra five hours by making an empty threat that he was never going to follow through on.

Disclaimer: Jack is my favourite current Richmond player by a considerable margin. I think he’s our best player and, in 2014 to date, I think he’s been mismanaged by the game plan to the extent that I’d hardly blame him if he wanted out at the end of the year.

He made the classic CJ Cregg mistake of screwing up by telling the truth. Anyone who has watched us closely knows that we’ve tried to replicate borrow from Hawthorn’s game plan and at some time during the last six months everything has gone haywire. But that doesn’t mean that your full forward should air that dirty laundry during an interview.

As I mentioned above, the gaffer could have killed the issue this morning but he didn’t. And in a slow footy news week, it dragged into this evening and onto Melbourne’s public transport network.

What chance does Riewoldt have if his own competition’s media team are willing and able to follow him camera in hand on his way home? If you haven’t seen it, I’m not linking to it on here because that’s pretty much exactly what they want. Would be interesting to hear what the AFLPA thinks about it  but considering they didn't seem to care about anything other than free agency I'm not holding my breath.

I don’t who the comms person (they aren’t journos) was that thought it was a good idea (it was probably Matt Thompson) but Christ on a bike, you’d hope that a media team that represents the league would have even a sceric of professionalism rather than lowering themselves to A Current Affair tactics.

If the footy media wants players to say things, they probably should chase one of the few who does to the train station. Pretty hard to sum it up any better than this.

I get that we under achieving at the moment, we talked a big game before the year and we are absolutely fair game at the moment, but surely there is a line somewhere? And if we can't trust the AFL themselves to keep behind the line, what hope do we have from the Murdoch crew?

Wounded, but not tigerish.

We didn’t let Tommy Hafey down today.

We’ve let him down nearly every single year since 1983. We let him down when we launched the player war with Collingwood. We let him down when we put KB in charge. We let him down when we sacked Northey. We let him down when we let Maxfield go. We let him down when we hired Gieschen on the back of soft late season wins. We let him down by not putting resources into recruitment when the draft became the most important thing in the game. We let him down when Frawley was the only candidate willing to coach us. We let him down when we traded ourselves out of the 2001 draft. We let him down when we gave Wallace five years. We let him down when Ottens left. We let him down when we drafted Oakley-Nichol on the back of his interview. We let him down when we went 0-2 against Gold Coast. We let him down in the elimination final last year. We let him down whenever someone gives one of our teenagers a cheap shot and we don’t fly the flag.

We let him down when Richmond wasn’t something to be proud of anymore, when Richmond became comfortable with being an easy beat, when Richmond players stopped standing up to be counted when things got tough.

Richmond let Tommy Hafey down long before today.

After we lose a legend of the club like Hafey, it rams home that we stopped producing legends in the early 80’s. My generation won’t be able to speak about legends of the clubs when we were young. Knights, Campbell and Richardson were great players but were never able to frank legendary status because of their surroundings. Who from this 22 will be a legend? Perhaps Cotchin or Jack but it’s likely they’ll stay because they are loyal, when really they should get out this summer before Richmond swallows up their careers as well. Dusty knows it; he put the feelers out last year. Next time someone other than Essendon will show interest, he’ll be out the door and I won’t blame him for a moment.

I watch a clip like this, with names like Barrett, Bartlett, Balme, Sheedy and Hart winning premierships. What memories do I have? When Turner went the knuckle against Essendon in 95 and when we beat Carlton in 2001 because Kouta did his knee? It’s pathetic.

I don’t really know what Hafey did at Richmond, I only know of what Hafey did at Richmond. So to blame a team including blokes as young as McDonough, Vlastuin and Lennon for letting down Tommy Hafey is farcical, Richmond stopped respecting Tommy Hafey long before any of those three walked through the door.

The easy thing right now is to blame Hardwick rather than the players. But after six years, they’re his players executing his game plan. After six years and one final, maybe the easiest thing is the only thing we’ve got left to blame. 9.20 is awful kicking and it’s unfair to blame that on Hardwick but it just shouldn’t come down to goal kicking against Melbourne. All power to them, it’s ace what they’ve done under Roos – but we should be able to kick all day long on our opposite and beat them, we may as well have done that today anyway.

Our game plan is nowhere, our best players carry too much burden and our youngest are asked to do too much and I’ve got a feeling that 2014 will get plenty worse before it gets any better. Anyone know what the draft is like this year?

Chaplin has moved from calming influence in 2013 to liability in 2014. Foley is running on fumes. Lloyd only kicks goals in junk time. Griffiths played 100% of game time for one effective possession. Vickery has gone backwards at an incredible rate. Morris is a back pocket plumber in a game that left that role behind a long time ago. All of these blokes were ordinary but Hardwick saw fit to pull Hampson, who wasn’t playing that badly, at half time.

We made some exceptionally ordinary players of theirs look like stars today. I can hack Tyson, Jones and Vince looking good because they’re all stars but Pederson, Watts and Gawn? Spare me. It’s just about boarding the joint up time when you let Pederson and Watts take 19 marks between them.

This is all compounded by the fact that we’ve lost Astbury, one of the players we can afford to lose the least. I don’t think that means we can afford to spare Chaplin some time in the VFL, bring in Petterd and Darrou if we need to. Petterd makes mistakes but at least we know he’ll always go 100%.

The shitty thing for Melbourne out of all of this is that we are the story when it should be them. They were great, they care and they’ve finally got a coach and footy department who can support the talent available to them. But we’ve lost the one club we had left to be smug about so I guess I’ll be reading a lot more for the rest of the year.

There were a few good things. Dusty played his best game at the club, not by numbers but by effort, he kept going all day in a losing effort. Lennon is going to be a star and I think it’s reasonable to ask why we haven’t seen him until now. Titch seems to have finally found his groove. And, goal kicking aside, Grigg keeps doing more than his fair share of heavy lifting, especially when the other team has the better of things.

By all reports we’ll have oodles of cap space for 2015 and at my count the potential delistings are up to a dozen. Whichever way we go, we need to add two or three plug and play midfielders. Players that can run all day and, importantly, will run just as hard back as they will forward.

We’ve spent two years building a list for contested footy, while the rest of the competition (Carlton doesn’t count) have been getting ready for run and gun footy. We need to find run, and we need to find it for round one 2015.

A better bloke than you, I and anyone involved currently at Richmond once said: “Nothing more tigerish than a tiger, a wounded tiger”, I only wish that were true because breaking point for a lot of people with this club isn’t far away.

To read about better times, because reading about them is the only fucking access I’ll have have to good times apparently, check out:

Rhett Bartlett’s Hafey piece in the New Daily

Caro’s piece on Hafey and Richmond in The Age

Also, make sure you read Demonblog's offering this week to remember what those first wins in a rebuild feel like. It might not be long until we are back in that territory.

Votes

5: Dustin Martin

4: Daniel Jackson

3: Shane Edwards

2: Shaun Grigg

1: Ben Lennon

Leaderboards

The Benny

14: David Astbury

13: Trent Cotchin

11: Jack Riewoldt

10: Shaun Hampson and Daniel Jackson

9: Ricky Petterd

8: Reece Conca and Dustin Martin

7: Brandon Ellis

5: Steven Morris

4: Matt Thomas, Sam Lloyd and Shaun Grigg

3: Ty Vickery and Shane Edwards

2: Brett Deledio and Nick Vlastuin

1: Ben Griffiths, Orren Stephenson and Ben Lennon

Blair Hartley Appreciation Award

10: Shaun Hampson

9: Ricky Petterd

4: Matt Thomas and Shaun Grigg

Anthony Banik Best First Year Player

4: Sam Lloyd

1: Ben Lennon

Joel Bowden’s Golden Left Boot

4: Shaun Grigg

Greg Tivendale Rookie Medal

4: Matt Thomas

1: Orren Stephenson

Championship belt

Incumbent	Winner	Streak	Wins
NA	Cotchin	1	1
Cotchin	Astbury	1	1
Astbury	Riewoldt	1	1
Riewoldt	Astbury	1	2
Astbury	Petterd	1	1
Petterd	Ellis	1	1
Ellis	Conca	1	1
Martin	Conca	1	1