Frustrated Richmond coach Adem Yze expected his players to have a “bad taste in our mouth” following yet another thumping loss on Friday night at the MCG.
Melbourne became the latest side to fill their boots against the last-placed Tigers, winning by nine goals to ensure winless Richmond’s average losing margin this year is 51 points.
Adding salt to the wound for Yze was the fact that the Tigers were actually very competitive for the first three quarters and found themselves trailing by only 11 points midway through the third term before capitulating and coughing up seven consecutive goals in what was a “deflating” showing.
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“We’re disappointed. We don’t want to expect to not play a four-quarter performance,” he said.
“We’ll take the positives out of the first three, but we’re a winning footy club, we’re not a losing footy club.
“We’re not going to be happy with a competitive performance and our Tiger Army expect more.
“There just were things in the last quarter that just weren’t good enough.
“The last quarter was just a blowout … to lose the last quarter by 20 contested possessions; inside 50s – we have eight for the quarter to 15.”
Adding to Yze’s frustrations was his team on the wrong end of multiple umpiring decisions and non-decisions.
“We try and tackle and you’d love to get rewarded for tackling,” he said.
“I felt like we didn’t get rewarded for a few of them and then we got punished for others, so you’re going to get the rough end of the stick in certain games, but you just want to get rewarded for pressure.
“We’re a pressure team, we expect our players to put pressure on the opposition.”
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The result continued Richmond’s worst start to a season in 16 years and they’re now riding a 12-game losing streak, which is their longest since 2010 (13).
The Tigers have also lost 47 of their past 54 matches, but Yze remained confident that things could turn around quickly for them.
“We get ‘Lynchy’ (Tom Lynch) back in for one game and I felt like our scores per entry were almost as good as theirs,” Yze said.
“We’ll get some troops back next week. Tim Taranto’s our best midfielder that didn’t play this week, so that’ll help us sustain it for longer.
“We’ve got so many young players like Sam Cumming and Sam Grlj and Tommy Burton getting his first game, Patty Retschko’s playing his second game.
“We’ll be better for it. These young guys are getting exposure earlier than what they probably should.
“So when we start getting some troops back, we feel like that will start to even out.”
But Toby Nankervis (hamstring), Rhyan Mansell (foot) and Maurice Rioli (hamstring) remain unavailable for the foreseeable future as Richmond’s official injury list still contains 10 players all up.