TIGER RARE Journey to AFL finals starts tonight for determined Richmond
HEAT GURU STEPS DOWN PUTTING A LID ON HEAD KNOCKS STAR POWER FOR TOP ACADEMY
AFL RICHMOND’S flight to a finals return starts tonight, as the Tigers vow to snap the early-season funk that has haunted their recent history.
Speaking ahead of the seasonopening clash with Carlton at the MCG, coach Damien Hardwick said he hoped a plan of getting more game-time into his players during the
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preseason would hopefully lead to a more even contribution in the first month of 2017.
While the Tigers have won the past two Round 1 contests against the Blues, they have failed to capitalise on that, losing the next six matches in a row last season, and dropping four of the next five games in 2015.
It’s a habit of having to claw their way back in to seasons at the halfway point that Hardwick is eager to end.
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“We probably, over the course of the last four or five years, have had indifferent starts and we did go back and look at some figures and we felt our best start to the season may have been 2013,” Hardwick said.
“It was four practice matches and the majority of our list played twoand-a-half or three games. We tried to get more minutes into our guys this year hoping it then transfers into the regular season”.
Richmond will have four debutants: the traded-in Josh Caddy (Geelong), Dion Prestia (Gold Coast) and Toby Nankervis (Sydney) along with 182cm rookie forward Dan Butler, 19.
Carlton named top draft pick Sam Petrevski-Seton despite the WA midfield product missing the JLT Series with a quad strain.
Blues coach Brendon Bolton said yesterday his young team won’t be measured by wins alone this season.
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“We are not going to be defined by just wins and losses but that doesn’t mean that we are going to absolve ourselves from the responsibility of trying to win games,” Bolton said.
“We are going to go out there and try and win every game we possibly can. But there are some other things that we will be measuring our club’s growth on.”