The Tigers have arrived at their sliding doors moment – The Roar

Not to steal from Damian Barrett, but I feel that the decisions that Richmond makes in the near future is going to be looked back on as a sliding doors moment for the club.

I have my concerns.

Obviously, a lot will depend on how well the Tigers do at the next few drafts, but they have traded virtually all their premium picks for the foreseeable future. As a result, more will rest on internal development and professional scouting.

There are two templates for Richmond to go by, taken from the Tigers’ two closest analogues since 2010: Hawthorn and Geelong.

Both sides tried to do the hardest thing in a sport that is built around trying to create equalisation through mechanisms like a salary cap and a draft – compete and rebuild all at once.

This is a high wire act for multiple reasons. Obviously, you do not generally get premium picks. But it goes beyond that, your upper-mid tier players become more expensive because of the success tax that other teams are willing to pay, and your stars start to get older and they can be hard to replace.

All of this is exacerbated by doing what all of these clubs did or have done at one point or another: trade the picks they do have for already established AFL talent.

Let’s start with what Geelong did.

In the 10 years after the 2011 premiership, Geelong missed the finals once, in 2015, and made the top four for eight of those seasons. For that decade they kept the same coach but continued to cycle players in and out around the margins while retaining a core group of good players who were still playing well enough to make an appearance in the 2022 flag: namely Tom Hawkins, Joel Selwood, Mitch Duncan and Cam Guthrie.

In 2011 the Cats were the oldest and most experienced list in the AFL. In 2022 they were again the oldest and most experienced list in the AFL. In 2014, when Geelong finished fourth, they were the 10th most experienced and 13th oldest list in the AFL. That is as young and inexperienced as they got over the journey.

In short, they never totally blew it up.

Geelong’s core players were in premium positions, which is obviously a boon, but they were able to find and bring in other star level talent at positions where they appeared bereft of talent. Smaller ticket items like Tom Stewart, for instance, joined the Cats in 2017, and has proven himself to be a gun defender. He is a good example of a low-cost move at a premium position. But these are rare.

Over the decade, where Geelong have excelled is making low risk-high reward moves in non-premium positions, while taking big swings at star players. They don’t take many, but when they do, they connect.

They’re running at a Danny Ocean robbing the Bellagio hit rate in terms of bold, borderline irresponsible decisions paying off.

In the decade in question, Geelong have taken two gargantuan swings: Jeremy Cameron and Patrick Dangerfield. To acquire them, they parted with six picks in the top two rounds, while also paying significant money to both players.

Importantly, these players are superstar level players in critical positions: Cameron is of course a key forward, and Dangerfield has moulded himself into a midfield/forward hybrid type of player that defines winning and losing in the modern game.

More often than not, however, they have made moves like the one for Isaac Smith. Smith was a gun at Hawthorn, but he plays on the wing. The list of positions that impact winning and losing is rather long before you get to the wings. Geelong knew this and acquired Smith for a bargain basement price, asked him to play a role that he has spent his career playing, and gave him only a two-year contract.

Smith was the Norm Smith Medallist in 2022.

Hawthorn took a different approach. In 2015, their last premiership year, they were the third oldest and most experienced team in the AFL. They essentially stayed around those marks until 2021, when they started to drop off the point where now, in 2023, they are the youngest and least experienced side by almost a full year and nearly 10 games respectively.

From 2016 through 2021, each of Luke Hodge, Sam Mitchell and Jordan Lewis were pushed out of the club, while other key cogs like Josh Gibson, Cyril Rioli and Brian Lake retired from the game for various reasons as well.

The issue is how they replaced these players. They brought in specialists, often at significant expense in terms of draft capital or salary cap space, to replace what had essentially been the beating heart of the club. Their bigger ticket additions from other clubs over that period, who lasted until 2021, are as follows: Tom Mitchell, Jarman Impey, Jaeger O’Meara, Chad Wingard, Jonathon Patton and Tom Scully.

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Only Wingard and Impey remain on Hawthorn’s books. They are paying O’Meara and Mitchell to play against them, while Scully and Patton retired.

Beyond that, ini 2021, a season where Hawthorn finished 14th and their four-time premiership coach in Alastair Clarkson left the club with the angriest smile since Heath Ledger’s Joker, their only key holdovers from the glory years were Luke Breust, Ben McEvoy, Shaun Burgoyne, Jack Gunston and Liam Shiels.

The other legends from that era were dumped quickly and unceremoniously, often heading to new clubs where they remained assets, like Smith.

Let’s count up the players who were either holdovers from a bygone era, or players brought in to top up an existing dominant list.

Of the Geelong players that I mentioned there are two generational midfielders, one of whom was the beating heart of the club, two generational key forwards, and two midfielders who have never commanded gargantuan salaries but have been excellent servants of the club.

Hawthorn made moves for two inside mids, two wingmen and onesmall forward. They held over a ruckman, a utility, a small forward, a midfielder, and a mid-sized forward. Put simply, they prioritised the wrong spots.

They didn’t add any damaging out of stoppage forward-half players, though they may have expected Wingard or O’Meara to be that player. But that did not work out.

Wingard never developed the tank to be able to be a consistent midfield presence and O’Meara is a pure mid, and by the end of his time at Hawthorn was more of a bullocking type. Neither player had ever played the role that Hawthorn appeared to have wanted them to play.

There is only one key forward mentioned, but his three biggest career goal tallies are in the three-peat years and even then his career high in goals for a season is 58. Gunston is an excellent but dependent player who can’t make something out of nothing like Jeremy Cameron can.

Hawthorn, of course, did also bring in an alleged gun key forward in Jon Patton. Unfortunately, it turned out that Patton went to the Tiger Woods school of sexual propriety. We can call Patton a mulligan and exclude him because at least the thought behind devoting real resources to a key forward is sound, even if they didn’t do enough research on Patton’s background.

So, what lessons can the Tigers take from this? There are two big lessons as far as I can tell.

Number one is to target premium positions. They have already dipped into the well with Tom Lynch and that has been an absolute success, but they may need to do it again given it looks as if this will be Jack Riewoldt’s last year. Whoever the next grumpy key forward that hits the market is, Richmond should target aggressively while also looking to replenish their key back stocks where possible.

However, their ability to do that may be mitigated by the fact that they have also not abided by that rule in their aggressive pursuit of Tim Taranto and Jacob Hopper. Both Taranto and Hopper are good players, certainly better and more impactful than Mitchell and O’Meara, but the process behind both of those sets of moves is similarly unsound.

Taranto is showing an ability to kick goals as a midfielder, which is positive, but on the whole their allocation of resources to Hopper and Taranto can and likely will heavily restrain them when the next gun forward gets upset.

When you are adding AFL level talent, especially when they are established players, don’t sign them to do a totally different role to the one that they have already done in the first place. It is hard for a player to change his game entirely, especially on top of all the other changes that they will go through at a new club.

Zac Williams at Carlton is a good example of this. The Blues saw a very good half back flanker at GWS and said ‘let’s pay him elite midfielder money’. It is astonishing to me that nobody asked if he had ever played midfield before handing him a reported $800,000 a year.

Add premium talent where you can, add marginal talent all the time and make sure there is proof of concept when the big swings are taken.

Lesson number two is to not carve the beating heart out of the club prematurely. Hawthorn got rid of three critical leaders in Mitchell, Hodge and Lewis in the space of what felt like two minutes. These moves left them bereft of leadership, especially when all three of those players went on to play relatively well for other clubs. Richmond have been conscious of doing this in keeping Trent Cotchin and Riewoldt around, and the decision to take the captaincy off Cotchin before he retired was inspired.

However, neither of those players would be picked up by another club next year and they should be advised to retire. There are still key leaders at the club like Dylan Grimes, Toby Nankervis, Nick Vlastuin and Lynch who can step into the breach left by Cotchin and Riewoldt while still offering far more on the field than either of Cotchin and Riewoldt can.

I would urge the Tigers to take their lessons from history, for those who don’t know it are doomed to repeat it.