Richmond coach Terry Wallace has had a dig at his senior players whom he believes underperformed in the Tigers' 30-point loss to Carlton at the MCG on Saturday, while also paying credit to the Blues who were harder at the contest on the day.
"We always thought it was going to be a game that whoever won the contested ball would win the match and that's the way that it ended up," Wallace said.
"It's not an area that we've been weak at, it's an area that we've been really strong, our contested ball and they outmuscled us around the contests in the second half and they had more contributors through the middle of the ground."
"When you go through some of their players - Murphy, Gibbs, Scotland, Stevens, Bentick - I just thought they went deeper in the middle of the ground than what we did and that's credit to them."
Wallace said the early feedback on Matthew Richardson is that he's only tweaked his hamstring, not torn it.
Richardson was not able to play any part in the contest after three-quarter time and was held to just 12 possessions by his companion for the afternoon, Jarrad Waite.
"We'll get him scanned and see how he comes up but I don't think there's any major consequence from the action, but he couldn't go back on," Wallace said.
Wallace said he didn't believe the result would have been any different had Richardson been available in the final quarter when the Blues scored seven goals to the Tigers' two.
"We didn't take our chances when we had chances in the game and probably a few of our senior players didn't play as well as what they would want themselves," Wallace said.
"That's not aiming at them or accusing them, they've been some of our better players for the year, but … they were down on their own output and expectation."
Wallace declined to name names, but Nathan Brown, who finished with six behinds for the match, would have surely been front and centre in the coach's mind.
Every time he got the ball Brown seemed fixated on scoring a goal to break the cycle of behinds to the exclusion of everything else, including passing to team-mates in better positions.
The more he missed, the more obsessed he became about finally landing one.
Asked where he believes the club is at heading into the second break for the season, Wallace said: "We haven’t beaten a side above us … so where we are is probably where we are."