TERRY Wallace sat his team down after yesterday's loss and posed the question to his players: what was it about 19 of them that did not match up to Alan Didak?

That sort of open-ended inquiry could provoke troubling answers for a coach, but the answer for Wallace was equally problematic.

Didak, an exquisitely talented player but seldom a high possession earner, had 12 kicks in the last quarter. Nineteen Richmond players had had 12 kicks or fewer for the entire match and it was a worrying statistic made worse by the lop-sidedness of another statistic column: handballs.

Richmond became handball obsessed yesterday. It appeared that to stem the Collingwood onslaught — the Magpies led by 56 points midway through the second quarter — Richmond decided that holding on to the ball and moving it by hand rather than foot was the safer option to frustrate Collingwood.

Thirteen Richmond players had more handballs than kicks, several of them dramatically so — Shane Tuck, for instance, who managed 23 handballs but just six kicks. Greg Williams could have destroyed a side with those figures, but Tuck is not Diesel.

"Clearly we had too many midfielders with high handball-ratio stats and nowhere near enough kicks," Wallace said. "That's not the way we want to play; clearly that's not the way we want to play … If you get as much possession of the footy as what we had today you can't be finishing with 170 kicks in a game of footy; if you're not getting over 200 kicks in a game of footy, you won't win.

"Unless you're getting some of your midfielders and running backs with high kick numbers you're not going to win games of footy and that's what we spoke about."

Wallace insisted the reason for the sudden imbalance was curious to him.

It was not an instruction to move by hand, as the Bulldogs appeared to do with great effect on Friday night; the Richmond players instead were drawn into the panicked chipping game by Collingwood's relentless pressure.

Intriguingly, the Tigers should have been freer to move because Collingwood had been unable to take the ball away from the ball-ups. This was despite their ruckmen more often getting their hands to the ball first.

Either they were tapping to the wrong places, or the midfielders were unable to take possession and clear it.

Collingwood was better at hunting down the player with ball and retrieving it. This sort of pressure was present across the ground for Collingwood but most notably absent in Richmond's forward line.

The Tigers had a single-focused forward structure that seemingly required Matthew Richardson to kick double-figure goal tallies for Richmond to win. When the marking contest was halved and the ball in dispute it did not remain an argument for long.

The Tigers applied no pressure as Collingwood took the ball, carrying it the length of the ground.

Heath Shaw, the dominant figure on the ground from the outset played, nominally, on Nathan Brown for three quarters. He was the bedrock upon which Collingwood's creativity was built.

The Magpies' midfield, although beaten at the stoppages, boasted the superior result for its run and delivery.

Scott Pendlebury had his best game of the year, Dane Swan his quietest in some considerable time. The Collingwood midfield looks better when Leon Davis and Didak move up the ground which is something that has been made possible by the arrival of Paul Medhurst.

Dale Thomas' game was electrifying but his finest moment was not his last-quarter screamer in the goal square, nor his earlier rolling dribble goal. The moment came in the second term when he turned Jordan McMahon around on the wing having kept his feet at a marking contest. He then collected the ball off the deck and ran away from McMahon around the wing and put his kick on Rocca's chest having had to kick across his body to spear the pass low and flat at full pace.

John Anthony came into the Pies' side and played his first game. His VFL career has been as a defender but he began this at full-forward. His first two kicks were goals. He is steady and revealed no obvious tricks, but is regarded for a James Clement-like composure in defence.

COLLINGWOOD 5.2 11.7 15.9 18.14 (122)

RICHMOND 1.1 4.5 9.10 11.12 (78) Medhurst 3, Thomas 3, Rocca 3, Anthony 2, Cloke 2, Davis, Maxwell, Wood, Fraser, Johnson. Richmond: Pettifer 2, Pattison 2, Newman, Polak, Brown, Richardson, Morton, Tambling, King.

GOALS Collingwood:

BEST Collingwood: H Shaw, Medhurst, Thomas, R Shaw, Davis, Cloke. Richmond: Foley, King, Tuck, Newman, Thursfield, Johnson.

REPORTS Pettifer (Richmond) reported by field umpire M Nicholls for allegedly striking Maxwell (Collingwood) in the second quarter.

UMPIRES Margetts, M Nicholls, McInerney.

CROWD 70,802 at the MCG.

THE UPSHOT Richmond's games are often over by quarter-time, the Tigers congenitally required to give the opposition headstarts. Bad teams let them back in, but not the good ones.

TALKING POINT Richmond's handball frenzy. Player after player had more handballs than kicks. Wallace could not explain why.

HOT AND COLD Heath Shaw was superb as the game's dominant, most creative and attacking player — and he was on Nathan Brown. Graham Polak was belted in the first by Cloke then all but knocked out.