Damien Hardwick got what he wanted.

Damien Hardwick got what he wanted.

GuyWhoLikesSport GuyWhoLikesSport

Old Greener Pastures Hardwick got what he wanted. Again.

Signing Hopper and Taranto before the 2023 season told us what he was looking for.

He found it on the Gold Coast.

He wanted to be able to deploy his game style but with an added emphasis on grunt around the ball.

Between 2017 and 2022, Richmond never ranked better than 12th in clearances.

In that stretch, 2017 was their year, between 2018 and 2022 (the glory years pre-Hopper and Taranto), as his vaunted system came into place, Richmond was bottom twice and never better than third last.

They just didn’t care about the clearance game.

But returns started to diminish and Hardwick figured that what he didn’t have was the difference, he figured that his system, predicated on pressure, metreage, time in the forward half, forward half turnover and a miserly defence, was still good.

The issue was that the game was changing to the point where you needed first use of the ball more regularly than he was able to do with his personnel.

That’s how he got to Tim and Jacob, both for hefty contracts and high picks.

Signing Hopper and Taranto was Hardwick’s Danny Ocean and Rusty in Ocean’s Eleven putting together a crew moment: “You think we need one more? You think we need one more”.

Except in this version of the movie, the Bellagio robbery was a massive failure.

What he didn’t account for at Richmond was other general slippages around the club as the other stars around whom the system was built started to age or retire.

So, he left.

I bet that Dimma asked this question before he took over the Gold Coast job: what if I could instil my system into what is already one of the best stoppage teams in the AFL?

Watching the first half of Richmond v Gold Coast, we saw the answer.

You can see all the old Richmond archetypes. Collins is the Astbury, Powell is the Houli, Fiorini the McIntosh, Rosas the Bolton, King the Lynch, and Lukoscious the Riewoldt (at least while he’s playing forward).

I’m probably not quite sold on 9-possession Humphrey being a Dustin Martin clone, but you can see the skeleton of Hardwick doing it again.

Even the way they played looked so familiar, they were beautifully set up behind the ball, designed to keep it locked into the forward half.

It looked as if Gold Coast had 25 players in the park as they were able to fashion an outnumber at every contest, both on the ground and in the air.

Physically, Gold Coast was also able to dominate.

They pushed the Richmond forwards around but then didn’t sacrifice any dynamism as they attacked the corridor and got the forward handpass game going, outgaining Richmond by 500m.

Even the turnover game got going with Gold Coast winning forward half turnovers by 10.

As Richmond worked their way back into the game in the third quarter, the Suns were able to steady the ship.

They ultimately held a surging Richmond to just 9 points in the final term largely through composed one-on-one defending.

But what was the difference between this Gold Coast team, and virtually all his great Richmond teams?

It was that element Hardwick was searching for when he signed Hopper and Taranto: dominance around the ball.

In the first half, Gold Coast looked like they were running centre-bounce drills.

They were totally dominant out of the middle, at half-time, Gold Coast were +9 in total clearances, but they might as well have been +900. They walked it out as they pleased.

They finished the game +10 in centre clearances alone.

Rowell alone had twenty clearances, 10 from centre bounces alone (quick aside: I’d rather Matt Rowell who gets too much hardball than Darcy Parrish who gets none. We will honestly criticise anyone for anything).

But it wasn’t just him, Witts and Anderson each had 8 while Miller and Flanders also dominated out of the midfield.

Dimma went to a party he knew his ex would be at with the girl who was everything the ex knew she wasn’t.

It was an ass-kicking of epic proportions out of the middle.

One that his Richmond sides never doled out, except in the 2020 finals and in hindsight, that was probably the catalyst for Hardwick’s hunt for ball hunters.

Hardwick knew his system still mostly held up, he just needed to add to it, he also knew that he couldn’t add to it by wearing yellow and black.

It would have taken too long to add the stoppage beasts he needed, and even if he could find them everything else would have slipped too far.