The fallout from Mark Ricciuto’s explosive criticism of his own club continues to spin with Essendon great Matthew Lloyd suggesting the Crows would be privately filthy.
Football commentators around the country, including outspoken pundit Kane Cornes, have spoken publicly to share their concern about the appropriateness of Ricciuto’s decision to torch his team’s players.
The Crows slumped to a 0-2 start to the season with their loss to Collingwood in Round 2 and now face rivals Port Adelaide in a blockbuster Showdown.
Ricciuto, who is a football director and one of the most powerful voices at the club, said the current playing group’s “skill levels are just shocking”.
He said the losses to Fremantle and Collingwood were “garbage”.
“They’ve been underachieving,” he said on Triple M in Adelaide.
“They can’t kick, they can’t handball, they can’t kick a goal, they’ve given away free kicks, they really can’t do anything worse.”
Lloyd has now said senior figures at the Crows would not be happy with Ricciuto’s scathing criticism.
“They’d be pretty upset, you would’ve thought,” Lloyd told Channel 9’s Footy Classified.
“I love Roo … but that is as negative as it gets.
“It was just pretty much saying ‘we’re a hopeless list’.”
Demons legend Garry Lyon said Ricciuto’s comments would have “blown this town up” if the saga had been centred around a club based in Melbourne.
“That’s over in Adelaide so that doesn’t get the traction here (in Melbourne). But if that was Tim Watson (his radio co-host) the footy director of Essendon who said that, that would blow this town up,” Lyon told SEN.
“What sort of pressure does that put on the coach, Matthew Nicks, the players in that town?”
It comes after Cornes earlier described Ricciuto’s comments as “pretty embarrassing”.
“If Roo was saying, ‘Look we’re really breaking down in our team defence and the opposition have been able to cut through us too easily and we’ve been too easily score against and our team defence hasn’t been tight enough and that’s something were going to work on’. Or if he had said: ‘Look, we’ve just been outmuscled in the centre bounce clearances, we’ve played against some bigger teams and they’ve really got a hold of us’… but he’s not saying that,” Cornes said on SEN.
