Why Adem Yze is Out of Ideas at Richmond

I had my in-laws from the UK staying with me and we played that game where you can invite three people, only alive, to your house for a dinner party.  

I said that I’d have Bill Simmons, Peter Mandelson (I just want to know what was going on), and Dustin Martin.  

What I wanted to say, but couldn’t because of my audience, was that I would have a Black Bag style dinner with Adem Yze, Blake Caracella and Chris Newman.  

I’d give them whatever drug that Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett gave to their guests and do an investigation centring around one question: what the fuck are you doing to my club? 

I have never seen a coach roll into a footy club and more perfectly embody the “we haven’t tried anything and we’re all out of ideas” problem than Yze and this staff.  

I gave his boring, dreary, timid footy a pass in his first year because the cupboard was so bare.  

He didn’t inherit much of a list and I can understand the impulse toward damage limitation when you’re a first-time coach with probably the worst list in the league.  

But last year, after a major injection of youth and enthusiasm, it was the same.  

Adding Sam Lalor, Taj Hotton, and the rest to that Richmond team was like adding Al Pacino in Heat to Pride and Prejudice but then making him do line reads in an English accent after checking him into rehab.  

You’re taking away the whole fun of it. 

Yze’s Tigers tended toward damage control at every possible opportunity last year, with or without ball in hand.  

When Richmond got the ball in their back line, they kicked it up the line.  

That’s what they did.  

The kick up the line is Yze’s version of Tarantino doing close ups of women’s feet. It’s a trademark.  

It’s how you know you’re witnessing someone entering his wheelhouse. 

They were not interested in your newfangled use of the corridor or even the concept of a running bounce!  

The Tigers were dead last in possession time, dead last in expected threat per kick, but first in metres gained per kick. 

That is a team that has no interest in taking any risks. 

They were also, therefore, toward the bottom in virtually every transition stat. They just weren’t good at it. When their trusted kickers like Sam Banks tried to get something going, he looked for some risk to take and there was never an option available to him so he went back to old reliable and bombed it up the line.  

And then, when by some miracle Richmond did have the ball in their front half it never stayed there. They were 16^th in time in forward half and  last in inside 50 differential.  

Richmond was also the only team in the AFL with fewer than 8 tackles inside 50, finishing with 7.7.  

The next worst – Essendon while playing with a larger injury toll than Trump reckons NATO troops had during the Afghanistan war – had a full tackle more per game inside 50.  

And don’t tell me that this is a personnel issue. It isn’t. The Tigers have some banshees as pressure forwards like Seth Campbell, Rhyan Mansell, Hotton and Steely Greene they just didn’t use them as pressure players.  

They just didn’t deploy enough resources to keep the ball deep. The lack of numbers inside 50 when the ball is there is also part of the reason why Richmond was last in forward 50 ground ball gets despite that good group of small forwards.  

When Richmond did get the ball forward, their impulse wasn’t toward scoring it’s toward stopping the other team from scoring. The way that Richmond structured with and without ball in hand said to me that Adem Yze’s view is that defence is the best and only form of defence.  

This is a coach who came from Melbourne where he was the gameplan guru. I do not understand how that works, given Melbourne’s biggest problem every year of the Goodwin era was their gameplan even when they won the premiership. Very few good teams in living memory have ever relied more heavily on just having good players than those Melbourne teams. 

Even with an exciting crop of young talent, Yze is has taken the Melbourne problems to Punt Road. The footy is reliant on pinpoint kicking and, failing that, contested dominance.  

Richmond has the horses to do neither.  

He’s trying to get the kid that played Jackie Jr to do stuff that only Daniel Day-Lewis can do.  

I know Richmond won five games last year and that’s terrific. He’s clearly effective at coaching effort. That’s great. And even if the Tigers played swashbuckling, aggressive footy, it likely wouldn’t make any difference in terms of win/loss record. 

But that isn’t the point of this period of development.  

The point is trying to set your team up for how to play when it is more mature and when the whips really start cracking.  

Yze has failed to do it. 

In his two years and his deep obsession with damage limitation, Yze has had the Tigers playing regressive footy which simply doesn’t work in the modern game. He needs to fix this issue if he wants to be a sustainable long-term coach for a young and exciting list that has prioritised high-damage players like Lalor and Hotton. 

I don’t trust that he will, and what will almost definitely be a bad year on the win/loss ledger regardless of how they play, will also be yet another deeply boring and depressing year for Tiger fans.