Richmond's loss to North Melbourne on the weekend was a cripplingly tedious affair, leaving fans questioning whether any progress has been made. The Tigers weren't thrashed or disgraced, but the game was blighted by cynical coaching, uncontested marks, and a sense of futility. Several older players appeared to have checked out, forwards barely saw the ball, and most of the best young talent watched from the stands.
Injury Woes and Drip-Feed Setbacks
A team would normally be pilloried for such a performance, and a coach with nine wins from 60 games would typically be out the door. However, Richmond's struggles have been tempered by a relentless drip feed of injuries affecting hips, feet, knees, collarbones, throats, groins, brains, ligaments, and tendons. The nature and protean timelines of these injuries have only added to the frustration. Tom Lynch lost the use of his voice box and underwent speech therapy to rediscover his vocal projection. Josh Smillie was sent to Philadelphia to reprogram his body, and Sam Lalor is still nursing what is not entirely convincingly referred to as a partial Achilles tear.
Sam Lalor: The Most Sorely Missed
Lalor is the most sorely missed. To watch him read the ball off the ruckman's palm, tilt backwards when exiting a stoppage, and execute perfect shoves to buy seconds and space is to remember Dustin Martin at a similar age. He is a player to turn up for, to give hope, and for opposition coaches to worry about. During the sleepy shift at the MCG, he would have provided three or four moments where he looked like the most assured player on the ground. Now the 34-year-old Martin is playing for Port Douglas, and the 19-year-old Lalor remains unavailable.
The 2024 Draft Haul: High Risk, High Reward
Lalor was the dux of the 2024 draft class, considered one of the best collections of young talent the sport has seen. Fans at Punt Road paid $25 to watch the comic stylings of Ben Dixon and see the club draft eight new players, including six in the first round. It was a difficult draft to predict, with no clear standouts, abnormal hype, and considerable depth. In the Carlton room, senior staff—most of whom are no longer at the club—were ecstatic to snare Jagga Smith at pick three. Fremantle were just as rapt to get Murphy Reid at 17.
Richmond's haul was cause for great optimism, but there were risky picks. Lalor, whom most draft experts had as the top selection, had missed a lot of football with hip, quad, hamstring, and ankle injuries. He had never done a proper pre-season. Trent Cotchin presented him with his jumper, and the 34-year-old former captain looked like the draftee. Taj Hotton, perhaps the most talented of the lot, was coming off an ACL tear. Jonty Faull, who went higher than expected, had missed six months with stress fractures in his back. All eight selections were private schoolboys; most were tall and had played together in the same underage teams. Many are now pictured on crutches.
Waiting and Hoping: The Rebuild Reality
Richmond laid their bets and waited. In a rebuild, that's all you can do—teach, hope, and wait. Everyone knew the reality: it would be a slog, with thrashings and periods where nothing went right. They knew they would have to sit back and watch fierce rivals win premierships. They knew many draftees wouldn't work out and that the coach probably wouldn't see out the rebuild.
Eighteen months on from that super draft, we thought we'd be in a position to track progress. But it's the following year's draft that has given them what they need most: speed and durability. Seth Campbell, a key figure in almost all wins under Adem Yze, was taken at the lower reaches of a rookie draft where most selections were clubs redrafting delisted veterans.
Assessing Yze's Tenure
Some rebuilds are incremental, some ill-defined, and some are dead ends. Richmond's isn't any of those—it's incredibly frustrating and unusual. There have been memorable performances under Yze: the win over Sydney in the haze at the MCG in a year where the Swans were the best home-and-away team, and the almost comical win over Carlton in round one the following year. There have been honourable losses, such as last week against Brisbane in Hobart. But mostly there has been a kind of drift, a deferral, a constant asterisk that has made it impossible for them to develop a cohesive and sustainable style of play—and just as impossible for us to judge them.
According to Jonathan Horn, writing for Guardian Australia's From the Pocket newsletter, 'Some rebuilds are incremental. Some are ill-defined. Some are dead ends. Richmond's isn't any of those.'
