Despite suffering their 10th loss against St Kilda on Friday night, the Tigers surprised many with a determined effort against last year’s grand finalists.
Falling as much as 42 points behind early in the second quarter, Richmond held its nerve to claw back within 12 points late in the third term, largely on the back of a six-goal effort by Jack Riewoldt.
“I reckon that is a new thing we’re developing with this young Richmond side, we’re really starting to get a lot more belief in ourselves and that we’re never out of games,” Collins said.
“I think maybe in the past we would’ve dropped away and let St Kilda run away and win by 60 points but now we seem to be able to fight our way back into games which is good.
“We are starting to get a high respect for the jumper we play in and it’s a real honour to pull on this jumper so if blokes don’t respect it they obviously won’t be playing for too long.”
With Richmond’s developing list the second youngest in the league, Collins added the youthful group was mining their veterans’ wealth of experience every chance they could.
Collins singled out captain Chris Newman and Ben Cousins as well-respected teachers around the club but reserved special praise for retiring big man Troy Simmonds.
“Simmo’s an exceptional, exceptional bloke and he’s helped a lot of the younger players. He’s helped me a lot and is just a really good person to have at the footy club,” he said.
After Friday night’s loss, the Tigers now occupy the bottom rung of the ladder with just one win from the opening 11 rounds of the season. Collins said the club was under no illusions as to what stage it was at in its development.
“We’re pretty jovial still, there’s a lot of blokes that are five or six games into their AFL careers here so we’re all about learning,” he said.
“We know that results are results and are everything but we’re realistic at the same time, we’re building our list and there’s no point getting all doom and gloom about it.
“We’re always confident we can get over the line but we will take a few things we need to work on out of the previous game and take them into the next game and hopefully the results will start to look after themselves.”
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