By Jake Niall
To lose three players, in their primes, during one post-season after a host of decorated veterans have retired, is unusual, but not unprecedented.
But to emerge with eight draft choices inside the top 25 - five of them created by the crisis of losing those key players – is unparalleled in the AFL’s modern model of a draft system.
2025 shapes as a tough year for the Tigers after the departure of several key players, but their draft hand should give fans optimism for the future.Credit: Getty Images
On the measure of immediate prospects, Richmond will once again be Struggletown, the name given to the former industrial, working class suburb that gave birth to the Tigers. They will do well to win more than half a dozen games next year or to make finals any earlier than 2027.
On the measure of longer-term prosperity, however, Richmond has absolutely cleaned up.
Their draft haul is comparable to the largesse that was handed to expansion clubs, Gold Coast and GWS, when they entered the competition, with the critical difference that they will be adding these talented draftees to an established, powerful club rather than a fledgling operation.
And while they have a list that has lost Trent Cotchin and most of their triple premiership core, they will be adding those teenagers – callow midfielders, key positions and flankers – to pretty reasonable remnants, such as Tom Lynch, Nick Vlastuin, Nathan Broad, Toby Nankervis, Dion Prestia, Jayden Short and Noah Balta, the latter having just signed a seven-year contract extension.
If Tim Taranto and Jacob Hopper didn’t sign up for a rebuild of this magnitude, they can now dream that, like Luke Breust, James Sicily and Jack Gunston at Hawthorn, they will see finals again once these youngsters have been together for three full seasons.
So, if Richmond fans lost heart during 2024 – watching the final stages of a crumbling dynasty, as Dusty Martin and Brendon Gale exited and then premiership heroes Daniel Rioli, Liam Baker and Shai Bolton headed home (Perth) or found new digs on the Gold Coast alongside Damien Hardwick – they should begin 2025 with revived spirits.
The path forward is clear. As the club’s head of list management Blair Hartley noted, they have various options for using those prized draft choices, which comprise picks 1, 6, 10, 11, 18, 20, 23 and 24.
Hartley said the Tigers “wouldn’t rule out anything” in terms of trading picks on the night of the draft, or spreading their bets by trading some of this hand into 2025.
Richmond’s general manager of football Blair Hartley will have a prominent role at the national draft.Credit: AFL Photos via Getty Images
“Patience is required, but we’re really excited by what’s to come,” he said, adding that this regeneration process at Richmond “will take time, but people understand that.”
As Hawthorn has shown, the Tigers will soon become attractive to free agents and mature players who fit their needs once their youngsters make the great leap forward in development.
In the space of 12 months, Hawthorn went from being derided as irrelevant to a team that attracted Josh Battle and Tom Barrass (who finally got to the Hawks at the buzzer).
Hartley, one of the AFL’s most well-regarded football operators, is not given to outward displays of emotion, and if he played poker his hand wouldn’t be easily discerned from his expression.
But at the conclusion of his media conference, Hartley did show the emotion that had been welling up, pressing against the dam in recent weeks as he and the Tigers dealt with the awful cancer that afflicted their popular recruiting manager Chris Toce.
Hartley ended by paying tribute to “the Toce family” – a reference to the tragic passing of their recruiting boss, who had died on the same day, October 16, that will be remembered as a rebirth of sorts for Richmond.
Toce, who had filled the same role at St Kilda and worked at Collingwood in recruiting, had been coming in to the office to assist Hartley in preparing for what will be the most consequential draft at Richmond since? Take your pick, so to speak, between the 2009 draft when Dustin Martin arrived, the 2007 draft that yielded Cotchin and Alex Rance or the 2006 version that netted Jack Riewoldt and Shane Edwards.
The man who helmed the draft in those seminal seasons, Francis Jackson, had increased his presence with the Tigers to assist Hartley in recent weeks, Toce having remained active in the assessing of talent, coding games right up until a matter of a few weeks ago.
He would, as the Tigers said, have a major mark on the draft of 2024. That draft class – whether it comprises eight or six or seven youngsters from around the country – will define the next phase of the storied Richmond Football Club.
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