Richmond’s tallest ever player<\/a> to play a senior game.<\/p>\nThe 25-year-old has been promising at VFL level, namely nabbing 10 clearances, 23 disposals and 19 hitouts against St Kilda last weekend.<\/p>\n
Balta returns to the side after passing hamstring testing that saw him miss last week’s clash against Port Adelaide.<\/p>\n
SCROLL DOWN FOR THE FULL RICHMOND ROUND 5 TEAM<\/p>\n
While Balta has been a key pillar in defence to start the season, coach Adem Yze discussed the positional versatility the premiership star provides during his press conference on Thursday.<\/p>\n
“We did (move Balta forward) a little bit last year and we thought that did disrupt his season a little bit,” Yze said.<\/p>\n
“Those thoughts will be discussed…whether we do throw (Balta) around. We have done that a bit with Campbell Gray to try and settle Noah in our back end. We will look at those things.”<\/p>\n
The pair replace Samson Ryan (suspension) and Kane McAuliffe (omitted).<\/p>\n
The backline will be made up of Nick Vlastuin, Ben Miller, Balta, Nathan Broad, Jayden Short and Sam Grlj.<\/p>\n
Sam Banks, Dion Prestia and Tyler Sonsie make up the centreline. Hayes-Brown takes the spot in the ruck, alongside followers Tim Taranto and Sam Lalor.<\/p>\n
Seth Campbell, Jack Ross, Steely Green, Jonty Faull, Liam Fawcett and Mykelti Lefau make up the forward line.<\/p>\n
The final interchange is made up of Tom Brown, Luke Trainor, Maurice Rioli, Gray and Jacob Hopper.<\/p>\n
The emergencies are McAuliffe, Patrick Retschko and Zane Peucker.<\/p>\n
Richmond takes on GWS this Sunday from 3.15pm (AEST), 2.45pm local time, in the Barossa Valley as part of the AFL\u2019s Gather Round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A pair of Richmond big men join the side for Gather Round. Two changes have been finalised ahead…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":598151,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[64,63,85,83],"class_list":{"0":"post-598150","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-text"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/598151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}