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2007 Blog: Player movements

January 28, 2007, 8:27 pm
By Chris Greenway

I thought I’d kick this off by looking at player movements during the off season. The changes made by the Tigers were not as extensive as some supporters would have liked. Two players retired. Greg Stafford played his 200th game and realised that the body could not take any more. Mark Chaffey was more surprising. The groin injury suffered late in 2005 may have been more costly than first believed. The nuggety defender announced his retirement prior to Round 22.

Delisted were Dean Limbach, a little unfortunate as he was on the list for 2 years without playing a senior game and was probably beaten out by similar players who were more versatile. Tommy Roach, sad to say goodbye to the son of a legend, but he’s still young and a good season in the VFL or one of the interstate leagues could see him be given a second chance at the big time. Jeremy Humm, the former West Coaster who came off the rookie list was always going to struggle with the step up in class. David Rodan, another one that I didn’t like, I saw the sense in it, he never really came back as well as the club would have liked with the knee injury. Fortunately Port Adelaide drafted him and I think that will probably work out better for both player and club than if he had stayed on Richmond’s list. The one player I had real issues with being given the bullet was Andy Kellaway. I didn’t quite understand the rationale. It would have had to have been a choice between he and Darren Gaspar. Gaspar got the nod because he was deemed to be the better defender, but there was no loyaler servant than Andy, his courage was exemplary and his skills were better than he was given credit for. Conversely Gaspar has never elevated his skills above average and regularly coughs up the ball. I don’t buy the he will train the next defender line either, he has never properly recovered from the 2003 knee reconstruction, has about a year left at top level and only played 8 games last season. I have to trust that the people in charge know what they are doing. That’s the ones who are no longer there, next time I’ll talk about the trades and the newcomers.

2007 Blog: Trading Places

January 30, 2007, 3:26 pm
By Chris Greenway

The season is coming, you can feel it. The past two days articles about the mighty Tigers have been in the paper. Unfortunately one was about Richo and back spasms, however it does not seem to have been serious and the second item was about how well Nathan Brown is traning, after last seasons abortive comeback that is wonderful news.

At the end of every season the clubs shop players around and try to top up on what they think they need. One of the items on Richmond’s shopping list was a ready made key position player, preferably one with experience in the back half of the ground. The Fremantle Dockers had one such player: Dean Polak.

Polak ws a highly regarded junior and went top 5 in his draft year, this was a strong draft and as recently as a couple of years ago Fremantle had Polak listed as an untouchable. Unfortunately Dean never really seemd to deliver on his potential. Despite that the Dockers weren’t going to give him away. They were interested in Collingwood forward Chris Tarrant, but needed a top 10 draft pick to make the deal happen. Richmond happened to be holding draft pick 8.

The upshot of the deal was that the Tigers gave the Dockers pick 8 and received Polak and pick 13 in return (thus retaining a first round draft pick). If the Polak deal works out the way the Richmond officials hope then Polak will hold down centre half back and add another dimentions to the back line, freeing up Joel Bowden and alloing him to continue his attacking play from deep in defencce.

Next time I’ll look at the draftees.

1. The article about Richo’s back spasms almost sent me into a panic! I have a love/hate relationship with Richo — love him when he’s hot/hate him when he doesn’t play to our expectations — but I don’t want to see him on the sidelines nursing an injury!

Here’s to good health, Richo!

Comment by Becky — January 30, 2007 @ 6:16 pm

2. Richo is rather like the little girl with the little curl, when he’s good he’s very very good, but when he’s bad he’s horrid! I don’t ever actually hate him, though. A lot of people tend to point to Richo’s failings; bad body language, tantrums, the missed shots at goal, and they forget that he’s far from alone in this regard. There are many players in the league like this, every club has at least one wild child, but the media like to focus on Richo, because he is so damned good. He’s missed 3 seasons through injury and still holds a load of records. He’s never wanted to play anywhere else. I can name at least 2 games he won himself last season. The first Brisbane match (he could also put in a strong claim on the 2nd match), the 2nd Essendon game, and you can throw the 1st Carlton one in there as well. People won’t recognise the side when the big fella hangs the boots up and I am not at all sure, unlike many of his critics, that it will be a good thing for the Tigers.

Comment by tigerland — February 3, 2007 @ 9:02 pm