Essendon great Matthew Lloyd has called out the lack of discipline at the Richmond Tigers, spotlighting two-time premiership player Marlion Pickett’s behaviour.
In a segment on Nine’s Footy Classified, Lloyd highlighted several on-field incidents from the Tigers’ 44-point loss to the Swans on Friday evening that constituted penalties.
These included Kamdyn McIntosh’s “unforgivable” strip after a mark, Shai Bolton’s “retaliation” towards Errol Gulden, and Pickett’s various antics throughout the match.
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“I’ve got this guy in my sight,” Lloyd said.
As vision played of Pickett pushing Nick Blakey back to the ground before engaging in a tussle with Justin McInerney, Lloyd pointed out how unnecessary and unruly his actions were.
Vision then showed a moment in the final quarter where Pickett needed to go back with the flight to take a mark but instead attempted to smother before again bumping Gulden in frustration.
“For every moment like this where he tries to act the bravado, tough guy… Moments later, when you’ve got to put your head over the ball, he does that. But then moments later, he crashes into the back of a player,” Lloyd said.
“They’re the things, when you’re winning you cover over a lot of those things like (Richmond) have for years. But not anymore.”
When asked about the costly instances, Tigers coach Damien Hardwick said he and his players needed to “take responsibility” for their actions.
“Marlion’s one guy we can isolate but Marlion plays the game the way he plays – he’s tough, he’s hard,” he told Footy Classified.
“Sometimes he oversteps the mark and we’ve got to wheel him back a little bit but that’s the reality of the game.
“Those sort of players you don’t want to wind them back too much because otherwise they are not the player they want to be so we’ll work with it, we’ll get better.
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“At the end of the day, it probably flows from my energy of trying to get them up and about as well so we’ll all take responsibility and work on it.”
Richmond sits 15th on the ladder and is 1-3 to start the season, with a draw against Carlton in the opening round.
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