Richmond’s General Manager of Football, Craig Cameron, has outlined the key factors behind the Club adopting the mature-age recruiting philosophy that has netted it such valuable talent since Damien Hardwick’s arrival as senior coach.
Through the AFL’s new free agency system, the Tigers have secured the services of experienced league pair Chris Knights (from Adelaide) and Troy Chaplin (from Port Adelaide), to go with other recent, successful acquisitions at the Club, in Ivan Maric, Shaun Grigg, Bachar Houli and Steven Morris.
“We made a decision, when Damien came on board . . . We’d lost a lot of older players, about 1800 games of experience at the start of Damien’s coaching period and we were facing compromised drafts with the introduction of the Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney,” Cameron said on the “Tiger Trade Central” panel show.
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“While we wanted to go to the draft and build our own list, we also realised that we couldn’t do it purely that way.
“We needed to bring in some experienced players and some people, who would actually help us get through that period and beyond, to the stage where we started to play finals.
“We made a decision that it’s very difficult to ask your recruiting manager, who’s looking at youth, to also go and look at players that are playing in the AFL, almost like a pro-scout situation.
“It’s very hard to ask them to do both, so we went and employed Blair Hartley, from Port Adelaide.”
The Tigers felt Hartley was ideally suited to the role . . .
“He’d done opposition analysis at Essendon, so he’d obviously studied the way opposition sides play, and he’d also been national recruiting manager at Port. So, he had a good mix of recruiting and opposition understanding,” Cameron said.
“He came on initially to do our opposition analysis, but also to look at all the other clubs’ lists, understand how we play, and select players who could come immediately into our team and help us, given the way that Damien was going to play.
“We’ve resourced that area properly and I think it’s worked well for us.”
