Here is Richmond coach Damien Hardwick’s assessment of the challenges facing the Tigers in their Round 12 clash with Geelong at the MCG on Friday night.

Gary Ablett’s influence upon return from suspension

“Great players are great players . . . We’ll manage Gary as best we can, but the reality is he’s going to get touches. That’s the sort of quality player he is . . . All the greats get touches. You can manage that at various stages, but we’ve got Ablett, we’ve got Dangerfield, we’ve got Kelly, we’ve got Duncan. They’ve got a quality, quality list that are very capable of opening up games. So if we put all our eggs in one basket, the other baskets will certainly rise up and hurt us.”

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Ryan Garthwaite v Tom Hawkins

“Young Garthwaite’s played on him before and did a good job on him, so we’re confident he’ll be able to do the job again. A lot of it is based around, if he gets clean ball inside 50, he’s going to be hard to stop. We know most sides, if you put pressure on the ball, it makes the defenders’ job a little bit easier. So we’ll be certainly looking to get that part of our game back, as it was probably not to the level that we liked last week. And we know when we do that well we’re very hard to beat.” 

Overall assessment

“They’re a great side obviously, sitting on top of the ladder for a reason . . . We’ve got some challenges with regard to the way they play the game. They control the game from the back half really well, they’re a bit of a slow build-up side, but they’re capable of scoring heavily in patches as well. Throughout the course of their wins, there’s been patches of 10 minutes where they’ve got hold of the opposition. So we’ve got to make sure we absorb that when we can and take our chances when we go forward.”