Coach Damien Hardwick confirmed Newman was in doubt for Sunday’s clash with Melbourne at the MCG with the defender suffering from hamstring tightness following last week’s loss to the Sydney Swans.
He didn’t train at Victoria Park on Thursday morning and will be tested later in the week before the Tigers make a call about his fitness for the Demons match,
Regardless of Newman’s availability, there are certain to be new faces in the Richmond line-up.
Hardwick didn’t confirm who might earn a start this week but flagged David Astbury, Troy Taylor, Jeromey Webberley and Matt Dea among the inclusions.
“We’ll have at least two [players] debut this week, possibly three,” Hardwick said before training on Thursday morning.
“There’s a number of guys that have put their hand up … we’ll address that [at match committee] this afternoon.”
Richmond is 0-3 after three rounds and has been convincingly beaten in each match, but the coach said he had seen signs of improvement.
Hardwick said the Tigers were functioning well in some areas but kicking a winning score, or developing the players to do so, might take some time.
“You look at the game on the weekend [and] we had the same amount of inside-50 entries, our clearances were good, our [number of] turnovers were good … thing is and we always knew our forward line was going to be the last thing to develop,” he said.
“We’re asking Jack Riewoldt and Mitch Morton to play against gorillas. In all honesty they’re third and fourth [string] forwards as compared to ones and twos.
“But we’ve got a couple of guys that can come and fulfil that role but it’s going to take some time. You look at [Ben] Griffiths and [David] Astbury out there and they are big, big men or they are going to be big, big men, it’s just going to take some time to get that.
“So for us, although the scoreboard said we went down by 55 points, there were some positives in the fact that we were getting the ball inside 50 for starters, we won the clearances and we won the turnovers.”
