Richmond coach Adem Yze has revealed the way he wants the Tigers to play in the 2025 season.

Just a week out from Richmond’s opening round clash with Carlton at the MCG, Yze entered the studio of the Club’s Talking Tigers podcast and, among a broad range of topics he covered off in an insightful interview, he expressed his expectations of the team’s playing style.

“All the good teams play a front-half game. I think we’ve got a pretty potent midfield and, hopefully, we can have some dominance around stoppage. That gives you first opportunity to play front-half footy,” Yze said.

“We want to be really stable in defence. I’m going to preach to our players, irrelevant of who’s in the team, we play a team defence, and you’re one cog in that system.

“So, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be hard to play against on defence . . . really stable on defence, have a really potent offense and then we just need to change gears on offense.

“I think it’s been in our DNA at our footy club around playing fast. But when we did win premierships, the rules were a little bit different. You could play a spare behind the ball and just create counter-attack footy. But now with the 6-6-6, it’s hard to do that.

“We’ll have that part of our DNA that will come out in games, but at times we need to slow the game down and just possess the ball. So, we’re just trying to find a balance of both.”

Yze also defined what success looks like for the Tigers in 2025.

“Obviously when you’re going through an AFL season, there’s a win-loss column. So, that’s always going to be our focus, and we go into every game trying to win,” he said.

“We’re not going to put a ceiling on how many wins we’re going to try to come out of the season with. But for us this year, it’s going to be around growth.

“As a coach, you want to see growth in the way that you play, no matter what, whether you’ve won the premiership or not . . .

“We want to see growth all across our team . . . Whether it’s purely on offense, defence, stoppage, we want to see growth in all areas and all phases.

“And then we want to see growth with our players. They’re obviously going to get exposure because they’re young, and that takes time . . .

“We’ve got so many players that have played under 30 games that we’ve got to fast-track. Not only their exposure, but their development.

“So, the growth in each of our players needs to be individually, and then obviously as a team we want to see growth.

“We want to be competitive every week and be really hard to play against.”

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