Breaks worry Wallace

A STIRRING win over Collingwood has injected a healthy dose of optimism at Richmond, where coach Terry Wallace was yesterday counting the cost of another serious leg injury.

A day after midfielder Chris Newman had a rod inserted in his left leg, Wallace said broken and fractured bones among Richmond players were contributing significantly to games missed through injury.

"We were up around 100 games lost last year to injury and a lot of those were breaks," he said. "We haven't done any studies into whether that's a trend in the game or not, but we're exactly the same this year with the boys, like Mark (Coughlan), who are going to be out … so we certainly don't need any more."

Wallace said the club wasn't "crying poor" or making excuses, but said "anyone who reckons the game has gone soft … they ought to have a look at the injury lists at AFL clubs".

Club doctor Greg Hickey said Newman's surgery had gone well and he was expected to make a return to football early next year.

"There's a lot of work that needs to be done … a lot of things that can potentially hold him up, but at this stage we couldn't have hoped for a better early phase to the injury," Hickey said.

Newman's broken tibia was similar to the injury of teammate Nathan Brown last year, except that Newman's was "a lot cleaner" than Brown's, which left him with leg soreness. "With Nathan's there was quite an irregular fracture … Chris' came together really well, it's going to be really stable and we're really optimistic he's going to make a quicker return."

Wallace said the number of players sustaining broken bones at Richmond was "more than I've ever known" and attributed many of the injuries to the increasing speed of the game.

"What amazes me is people who say the game has gone soft. One day, go down and watch from the front row, right on the boundary line … that's where you really get an indication how quick and how dangerous it is out there. People just don't understand how quick these guys are going."

Coughlan, recovering from surgery to his anterior cruciate ligament, said the pace of the game had definitely increased but was not the cause of his season-ending injury.

"I slipped on my left foot and placed all my weight on my right foot and it just buckled on me," he said. "I'm not feeling too bad — it was a tough one to take at the time."

Tigers forward Matthew Richardson, who last week had screws removed from the wrist he fractured in round nine, could return against Port Adelaide on Saturday. "We'll give him every opportunity," Wallace said. "It's a pain situation and whether he can deal with the pain."