SUCCESSIVE heavy defeats have prompted Richmond coach Terry Wallace to go back to the drawing board in an effort to fix the Tigers’ ailing game plan.
Richmond was effectively out of the contest by half-time in Sunday’s cash with Collingwood, with the eventual 44-point defeat following last week’s 41-point loss to North Melbourne.
“We would clearly like to have done better in our last two games – we haven’t – but what we do is we go back to the drawing board and have a look at why that is,” Wallace said.
“It’s a long arduous season. We go over to the west next week to take on Fremantle over there, and the one thing that we need to do is get the game style working better than what it did.”
Wallace was straight to the point when asked his initial thoughts on what was troubling his side.
“Starts are killing us,” he said.
“We’ve played in three games now, and I think when you have a look at the three games, we were nearly five goals behind Carlton in round one, but managed to work our way out of that.
“Last week, (it was) 11 shots to four in the first quarter [against North Melbourne] and then this week (Collingwood has) had seven of the first eight scoring shots.
“We’re clearly going to be working on our first quarters, and we’ve got to be better than that early in games because they’re hurting us. When you play two top-four sides from last year in the last two weeks and you give them a start, they don’t let you back in.
“We were very, very even from half-time, but the game (was) gone.”
Wallace didn’t hide from the fact that his side over-used the ball by hand, finishing the match with the lop-sided total of 209 handballs to 182 kicks.
“We had too many midfielders with high handball [to kicks] stats with nowhere near enough kicks,” he said.
“That’s not the way we want to play, but we’ll go back and that’s the thing that we’ll work on the most. If we get as much possession of the footy as what we did today, you can’t be finishing on [182] kicks. If you’re not getting over 200 kicks in a game of footy you won’t win; that’s purely and simply it.
“Unless you’re kicking the footy and giving blokes good one-out opportunities and getting it in there quicker than what we did today, it will never work.”
The Richmond coach even conducted a little exercise with his players after the match to illustrate his point, citing Collingwood’s Alan Didak as an example of what to do when taking possession of the ball.
“(Didak) had 12 kicks in the last quarter, which was more than what 19 of our players did for the entire game. It’s a kicking game; we know that (and) we understand that, (but) we didn’t do it under pressure.
“Who gets the blame for that? We all do, and we’ve just got to go back and work on that aspect of the game and do it better next week.”
Further souring the day was news that Kayne Pettifer was reported for striking Nick Maxwell in the second quarter.
