Richmond defender Kelvin Moore believes the Tigers have a chance to atone for the humiliation of the Round 1 loss to Carlton when the two teams meet at the MCG on Saturday.

After a massively hyped pre-season from both sides, Carlton hammered the Tigers by 83 points on the big stage in the season opener, a loss which many believed doomed Richmond's season as well as the coaching future of Terry Wallace.

Moore said that it was a big slap in the face for the aspiring Tigers and that there was a feeling that after winning only three of 13 matches since that night, that they owed Carlton some payback.

"We've got a few wounds to heal after Round 1 and we'll be going out and really going after it. This is a game we really need to win," Moore said.

While hopes of September action may be long gone, Moore said the Tigers still wanted to have a significant hand in shaping the top eight in the run home.

"We need to knock of a few teams higher than us and the way we do that is going out every game, going out after the ball and getting our hands on it," he said.

Richmond has shown a few positives signs since the turmoil of mid-season when Wallace departed the club and was replaced by caretaker Jade Rawlings. After being comprehensively outplayed by Adelaide for the first three quarters on the Gold Coast last Saturday night, Richmond kicked five of the final six goals of the match to pull the final margin back to 17 points.

"We've been showing a lot of positive signs over the last few weeks, and yeah we haven't got the results, but in the past I think, the game on the weekend, a Richmond side a few years ago would have lost that by 80 points. For us to fight back and nearly get over the line, there's a lot of positives," Moore said.

"I think that in the past we've questioned if we were going to win or not. You can't take anything away from Adelaide, they played very well in the first quarter, but to our credit we fought back. Not at any stage are we happy with a loss, but there were a lot of positives to come out of it."

Moore believes the turning point was when Rawlings stamped his authority on the position by dropping several senior players