Game articles from RealFooty

[Rosy]

Tiger win no surprise to Frawley
By Linda Pearce
April 07 2003





Richmond coach Danny Frawley believes his team has recovered the preparatory ground lost through its early Wizard Cup exit, claiming the Tigers were always going to play better against the Western Bulldogs yesterday than in the opening round nine days earlier.

An uncomfortable week had followed the 28-point loss to Collingwood, and consecutive losses to start the season would have magnified the scrutiny on the fourth-year coach. Frawley acknowledged the pressure after yesterday's 22-point win over the Bulldogs at Telstra Dome.

"There seemed to be a lot of negative talk about our game last week and that's fine, and you always want to win," Frawley said. "Don't get me wrong, we're there to win games of football, so we've just got to make sure we can bottle that intensity and enthusiasm that we had out there today.

"We were always going to play a lot better than we did last week. If you look at all the sides who played well in the Wizard Cup and went through, most of them had really good wins last week. You can train and train, but the positive thing from last week was to get a game under a number of players who haven't played under that game-day intensity."

Frawley blamed a poor second quarter, and 14-point half-time deficit, on poor decision-making, but praised several individual performances, including Andrew Kellaway in defence on Daniel Bandy, and four-goal surprise Leon Cameron, who came perilously close to being axed at the end of last season.

"Today was about the club, the win today was about the club and the players' belief factor," Frawley said.

Both teams are now 1-1, and Western Bulldogs coach Peter Rohde, while disappointed by a limp last quarter, said he would resist the temptation to make substantial changes to his injury-weakened personnel.

 

[Rosy]

Victory keeps Tiger horde at bay - for now
By Jake Niall
April 07 2003


It wasn't so much that Richmond had to win yesterday as it could not afford to lose. Even after just two rounds, there was a sense of impending crisis if the Tigers had lost.

Greg Miller, the new football department chief, had picked up the ugly vibes last week after the Collingwood game and sought to soothe the savage beast that is the Richmond supporter base with an appeal for patience. Miller understood how the Richmond domino effect operates. Consecutive defeats make an understandably frustrated army angry. The media, always on the look-out for an uprising at Tigerland, begin to talk up the crisis. The fans flood the talk-back lines, demanding at the least, that Joel Bowden be sacked. Before you know it, the board is nervous and the coach is sitting on a bunsen burner.

That's been the recent tradition at Richmond, anyway. And, sure enough, Frawley was on the back foot last Wednesday night when he and assistant coach Darren Crocker spoke to the aptly-named women's coterie "Hafey's Ambush", some of whom put the coaches through a mild interrogation.

Miller, who repeated the message yesterday, is trying to act as a circuit breaker and to get the supporters to direct their passion in a positive rather than destructive manner. He has also hinted that the club must be realistic about where it stands and made the mandatory appeal for members to jump on.

But Miller's machinations were no substitute for a win. Victory is the only foolproof way to keep the natives from getting restless at Punt Road. Yesterday, to the palpable relief of Frawley and the football department, the players came through after half-time.

Frawley was acknowledging that there was more than just four points at stake yesterday when he said, "the win today was about the club".

"So there was a bit of pressure on our whole team today. They realise that a win like that, regardless of the scoreline, the way we went about it, is what the Richmond members really want to see and they take a lot of heart out of that. I just hope that it's a positive response during the week with the phones and membership numbers."

Crocker observed that the win would reassure everyone. "It's good to have a win because it then reinforces that everything you're doing is right, from the coaching panel right through to the fitness. If you're losing, you start to question a few of the things you're doing. But get a win and it gives you the belief and confidence that all the things you've put in place right throughout the summer - it's actually working."

What the victory might have demonstrated was that, provided it suffers no further injuries to tall players, the Tigers can better cover the catastrophic loss of Brad Ottens for half a season than the Dogs can the absence of Chris Grant for an entire season.

Richmond has other talls - Matthew Richardson, Darren Gaspar, Greg Stafford, Ray Hall - but, without Grant, the Bulldogs do not have one key-position player (Darcy is a ruckman) capable of grabbing hold of a game.

They have runners galore and plenty of speed and flair, but, Darcy aside, there is no one over 190 centimetres in the elite bracket. Daniel Bandy is handy. Matthew Croft, who is yet to return, is competent, but neither will cause the opposition to fret. And the tall kids aren't ready.

Nathan Brown, the go-to forward, is 182 centimetres. That places the pressure on the Dogs to be super-precise with their disposal. The long-bomb is suicidal when your key forward is not tall.

The other challenge for Peter Rohde is to train some of his speedsters to play in the same postcode as their opponents. While Rohde has preached that the Bulldog midfielders had to become more accountable and learn to tackle, the acres of space afforded Richmond's runners - especially Greg Tivendale - was remarkable.

Frawley must have wondered why his players were so loosely marked. As coach of the Richmond Football Club, he tends to get marked pretty hard.

 

[Rosy]

Dogs meet tall order but pay price elsewhere
By Melissa Ryan
April 06 2003

RICHMOND 3.4 4.9 10.10 16.15 (111)
WESTERN BULLDOGS 1.2 7.5 10.7 13.11 (89)

GOALS: Richmond: L Cameron 4 G Stafford 2 D Rodan 2 G Tivendale 2 R Hilton K Pettifer M Richardson A Fiora R Hall M Coughlan. Western Bulldogs: N Brown 4 D Giansiracusa 2 S Garlick R Smith B Johnson M Hahn J McMahon R Hargraves M Alvey.

BEST: Richmond: G Tivendale R Hilton L Cameron M Richardson J Bowden K Johnson. Western Bulldogs: S West L Darcy R Hargrave M Robbins N Brown.

INJURIES: Richmond: T Zantuck (corked thigh). Western Bulldogs: S Kretiuk (ribs) R Murphy (calf) L Carcy (brow).

UMPIRES: M Vozzo C Rowston S Wenn.

CROWD: 28,847 at Telstra Dome.

Western Bulldogs coach Peter Rohde hardly needed prompting, after yesterday's 22-point loss to Richmond, to agree that if he had been told before the match that the tall Tiger trio of Matthew Richardson, Greg Stafford and Ray Hall would be kept to only four goals by the Bulldogs' pint-sized defence, then he would have been a man confident of victory.

But it was the manner in which the Bulldogs had been expected to overrun their opponents that Richmond utilised so strongly in a telling second-half performance, particularly in the crucial opening 15 minutes of the last quarter, with Richmond desperate to build on a three-point lead.

Hard running, swift sharing of the ball and lively medium-sized players - with Greg Tivendale, Kane Johnson and Leon Cameron leading the way - proved the winning combination.

"It's very true. If you told me before the game we were going to keep their three talls to that total, you'd be pretty confident. But Leon Cameron stood up for them and their medium-sized players probably hurt us a bit more than what ours could do to them," Rohde said.

Richmond's intensity picked up substantially in the second half. Mark Coughlan became direct and damaging, Rory Hilton worked strongly off half-back, David Rodan added ground-level grunt as he kicked two goals in the last term and dug out the hard ball, while Adam Houlihan made vital contributions in setting up goals.

Then there was the unchecked drive of Tivendale and Johnson. It all added up to victory when the game was in the balance, as Richmond piled on five unanswered goals in 17 minutes after Brad Johnson briefly regained the lead for the Bulldogs.

Out of the 16 goals Richmond pushed through, only a quarter were chalked up by the talls of Stafford, Hall and Richardson, and Richardson's solitary goal came from a free kick in the third term. Steve Kretiuk gave away 15 centimetres to Richardson but plied his niggling trade effectively. Richardson's value came in his willingness to cameo for others, dishing off two handballs to Cameron - one in the second term and one in the last - that provided Cameron with two of his four goals.

The match started conventionally enough, with Richardson camped in the goal square and either Stafford or Hall, marked by Brian Harris, alongside him in a bid to exploit the height advantage, with Bulldog veterans Chris Grant and Matthew Croft missing.

At the other end, Nathan Brown was given an open 50-metre arc in which to roam freely, his duel with Darren Gaspar a fascinating clash of differing styles: Gaspar solid and inhibiting, Brown slippery and seeking room to manoeuvre.

It took Brown time to work free of Gaspar, and he was not helped initially by poor delivery to him but he still scrabbled together four goals. While Gaspar was tied up with Brown, Andrew Kellaway mopped up with impunity and outplayed Daniel Bandy.

Tivendale had proved a considerable handful as the Tigers established an early lead, given far too much latitude, as was Kane Johnson in a strong second half, with little sign of the accountability Rohde wanted to instil in his team. The most obvious example came in the third quarter when Kayne Pettifer goaled after Bandy failed to man up.

The second quarter belonged to the Bulldogs, with six goals to Richmond's one, as the Tigers failed to hit their targets. None was more prominent than those of Joel Bowden as the clanger count soared off his boot, earning ironic cheers from Richmond supporters when he was deemed to have delivered a satisfactory kick.

Scott West was levels beyond the hapless Clinton King, and Luke Darcy worked his influence as the Bulldogs' momentum gathered. Robert Murphy eased the ball from half-back, usually with a Brad Johnson touch in the chain, allowing the younger Bulldog brigade to give the Bulldogs a 14-point lead at half-time. But when the game had to be won, the Bulldogs disappeared

 

[Koalalill]

By Jake Niall
April 07 2003
And, sure enough, Frawley was on the back foot last Wednesday night when he and assistant coach Darren Crocker spoke to the aptly-named women's coterie "Hafey's Ambush", some of whom put the coaches through a mild interrogation.

Hmmm..... Caro must have spies (and it wasn't me ) everywhere