Richmond’s National Recruiting Manager Matthew Clarke has provided an explanation for the rationale behind the decision to trade out the Club’s first pick (No. 20 overall) in last night’s AFL national draft for Geelong’s future first-round selection.
“Obviously, we were sitting on the night and seeing what players were going to get through to our pick . . . The first round was affected by a lot of the Academy players as well, so our pick started to push out,” Clarke told Richmond Media.
“We thought there was some really likely types there that we liked. A few of those guys went off the board from specific position types that we wanted to fill on our list.
“And when we got to a certain point, we were happy to trade our first-round pick from this year into next year’s draft with Geelong. We’d taken a few calls from some clubs for our pick.
“We think we’ve really strengthened our position next year in the first round . . .
“Then we were obviously looking to the rest of the draft, and we filled another couple of spots.”
Richmond subsequently drafted giant Queensland ruckman Samson Ryan at pick 40 and exciting Northern Territory small forward Maurice Rioli junior, son of Tiger great Maurice Rioli senior, at pick 51.
The Tigers now hold a particularly strong hand in next year’s national draft, with two first-round picks, two second-round picks and two third-round picks.
