On Saturday night at Optus Stadium, Richmond played who they were meant to be in 2025.
They played a West Coast side full of fresh faces still finding their feet at AFL level, whose tackling pressure was nonexistent, disposal rarely short of disastrous and game plan all but nonexistent beyond trying (and usually failing) to hit the next target.
A team, in short, with one win for the season and looking unlikely to add another.
The most remarkable thing about Saturday night isn’t that the Eagles are quite comfortably the AFL’s worst team once again – it’s the yawning chasm between them and the most red-hot pre-season wooden spoon favourite we have seen in many a year.
From the moment Richmond’s scorched-earth approach in last year’s trade period was confirmed with the departures of Liam Baker, Shai Bolton, Daniel Rioli and Jack Graham, 2025 was meant to be a write-off, a chance to see what a gargantuan haul of first-round draft picks could become if given time, patience and development.
Yet to watch the Tigers tear up Optus Stadium and hand the Eagles the kind of walloping that would be par for the course for a finals contender to hand them is to see not just an exciting future, but something to be proud of right here, right now.
Brady Hough is tackled by Maurice Rioli. (Photo by Daniel Carson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
No one has a prayer of arguing for Adem Yze as the coach of the year, but to not just squeeze every ounce of talent out of this team, but to organise them in such a way as to emphatically prove themselves to be significantly better than the very bottom of the pile, is an almighty accomplishment for a man whom many feared was the sacrificial lamb who’d pay the price for his club’s youth-first approach.
In just his eighth game for the season in between lengthy stints in the VFL – a seemingly damning assessment of his future at the Tigers given the inexperience of players regularly getting games this year – Maurice Rioli played this seemingly meaningless match like it meant everything and then some to him.
Two of his clips will go round the footy world this week, be highlighted in the mid-week review internally, and probably always hold a soft spot in the hearts of the yellow and black army: both his remarkable run-down tackle on Brady Hough in the first quarter to turn a likely Eagles goal into a Tigers major going the other way, and his smother of Harry Edwards midway through the second and quicksilver pounce on the loose ball to gift Toby Nankervis a walk-in six points, were individual moments of desperation any Rioli would have been proud of.
If there’s a defining image of Richmond’s night in Perth, it’s of Hough streaming towards goal, in mid-bounce, unaware that there’s a yellow and black blur stretching like Superman behind him, about to run him down.
Two years ago to the week, at the very same venue, Rioli was widely condemned for petulantly refusing to answer a phone message from then-Tigers caretaker coach Andrew McQualter after being subbed out. Safe to say he caused McQualter many more headaches tonight as an opposition player who played as impactful a 13-disposal, goalless game as you could hope for.
Don’t let it be lost, either, that it came at a time when the Tigers trailed by eight points, had been largely dominated by the Eagles up until then, and seemed short of a gallop against a motivated opponent.
Sometimes it takes an individual act to spur a team into action – even Yze noted after the match that that tackle was what sparked Richmond’s surge to life. From then on, it was one-way traffic.
Rioli is the embodiment of all the Tigers did right at Optus Stadium, and indeed all they’ve done beautifully in a season where they’re already four wins and two ladder positions ahead of where I thought they’d be at the start of the year.
It starts, as it so often needs to for teams near the footy of the ladder, with the senior heads – some of them from the premiership years, others thrust into positions of leadership before their time by the status of the list.
More than anyone else at Richmond, Tim Taranto and Jacob Hopper had a right to feel jilted when, midway through 2023, Damien Hardwick, the man who lured them to Punt Road as a supposed final piece to a premiership jigsaw puzzle as inside midfield bulls, walked out the door having given all he could to the club.
Throughout this most challenging of seasons, as far from a premiership as it’s realistically possible to be, both can more than hold their heads high as having not just set the perfect example for the younger blood taking their first steps in an unforgiving world, but as legitimate A-grade candidates who would be getting a lot more praise for their performance had it been for a side in finals contention.
Once derided for his poor foot skills and inability to hit the scoreboard, it wasn’t just Taranto’s three goals and 30 disposals that caught the eye: it was his nine score involvements too, his ability to win the footy in dangerous positions and ruthlessly expose an Eagles midfield that lacked any semblance of the Tigers’ cohesion.
The worst thing he did on a night where he will likely receive three Brownlow Medal votes is to attack the footy with sufficient zeal to inadvertently concuss Seth Campbell, who likewise went for the ball with a desperation seldom matched by any Eagle not named Harley Reid.
Jack Ross, the unluckiest footballer of the last decade – he who missed out on both an AFL and VFL premiership in 2019 after being held out of the latter on standby for the former and then not picked in favour of Marlion Pickett – again was forced to sacrifice for the greater good, given the job to mind Harley Reid in the third quarter after the Eagles young gun threatened to rip the match apart before half time.
That it worked is a testament to both Ross and Yze – a hard tag can destabilise a midfield group, opening up spaces where previously none existed with one player focussed on stopping another.
But the success was eye-catching: Reid has just four disposals in the game-destroying third quarter, the Tigers piled on eight goals to one, and they turned for home with the four points safely in their keeping.
Ross is 24 years old, a senior citizen in this most youthful of teams. He’s unlikely to ever be a star of the competition, and is the sort of player I fear will eventually become a Nathan Jones-style hard luck story if and when the Tigers rise into contention again, squeezed out by a crop of young guns he helped to cultivate.
All the more reason, though, to celebrate his achievements in the here and now. Nights like his, where he ran himself ragged from one end of the ground to another, laid nine tackles and performed an admirable defensive job when his team needed him to, are the bedrock on which great teams take their tentative first steps.
Down back, Nick Vlastuin and Nathan Broad hold the fort with aplomb: the former in particular marshalls the troops and ensures a sound system behind the ball all while his intercept game has arguably never been better than this season.
No matter the quality of the opposition, to concede a mere eight goals from 48 inside 50s – the Eagles and Tigers actually tied for entries on Saturday night – is a brilliant result for the entire Richmond backline.
Enough about individuals, though: the true measure of Richmond isn’t about any one man, but about how much greater they combine than the sum of their parts.
The Tigers have at many stages this year needed to play dirty: last week against Essendon, in the worst match in a generation, there was no room for flashy stuff and less ability to pull it off, so they resorted to tackling fiercely, pushing the ball forward by hook or by crook and eventually overcoming the Bombers through little more than sheer will.
The loose-checking Eagles, though, presented an opportunity to spread their wings and take the game on: and when they did that repeatedly in Perth, it was devastating just how quick their play was.
Defensively, any Eagles mistake, or a single act of dilly-dallying, was swamped – just look at Rioli’s chasedown for the standard bearer on that count.
But going the other way, when it was their turn to attack, the Tigers weren’t just fast, didn’t just comfortably outstrip their Eagles counterparts, but nearly moved faster than Fox Footy’s cameras could track them.
Just look how fast the pan is to match Campbell’s breathtaking sprint from the centre circle to 40 metres out, kicking the goal that ensured the Tigers had an ascendancy they never relinquished.
The boldness here is just as dazzling as the run itself: with two Eagles converging on him, another player might have looked to find a target after the first bounce, or worse yet, blazed aimlessly after panicking under perceived pressure.
Campbell, though, never considers anything other than the goals, and as damning as it is for the Eagles that Reuben Ginbey was the first player to come up and try to pressure his kick, with a score of teammates too worried about their own opponents to help out, to take advantage of it is something special.
Equally brilliant to watch was their willingness to take the hard option, especially as their confidence grew the longer the third quarter went.
Tyler Sonsie is a player permanently on edge at Tigerland: he has 35 games to his name across four seasons, with no more than seven AFL games in succession.
He’s one for whom any glaring mistake could be career-ending; so it took serious guts to, hemmed in on the boundary line midway through the third quarter, decide not to boot the ball long up the line on his left boot, but rather jink, turn inboard, and try and hit Taranto 40 metres away in the corridor with blue and gold jumpers everywhere.
The kick was perfect – but again, what follows is symbolic of the Tigers’ approach. Taranto has barely marked before he dishes to that man Campbell again, once more leaving Eagles in his dust with pure speed.
He has nothing to kick to further afield, so instead, looks laterally, where not one, not two, but three teammates are also on the burst, their Eagles opponents having been left well in arrears.
They all keep running, too, keep presenting even as Hopper gathers, runs towards goal and takes a bounce. It means when an Eagle at last comes across to impact, Hopper can dish over the top to Rhyan Mansell, unmanned, to snap through the goal.
How could you not be proud to be a Richmond supporter watching that?
So sure, it was ‘only’ West Coast. Never mind that the Eagles were justifiable favourites going in, never mind that a miserable team on a hiding to nothing with an embattled coach powerless to do anything about it was exactly who THEY were supposed to be, not just who they were playing.
Who knows what the future may hold. False dawns are just as common in sport as sunrises themselves.
But these Tigers don’t seem all that concerned with what is to come. They appear perfectly happy with trying to be the very best they can be right here, right now.
They are what every bad team should aspire to be like.
