What Was Jonty Faull’s Mid-Season Breakout Actually Showing Richmond?
Richmond’s full member feature “🐯 JONTY FAULL'S QUIET BREAKOUT IS ONE OF RICHMOND'S BIGGEST POSITIVES OF 2026” opens a question worth examining before jumping to the answer.
Faull had kicked one goal across his first five games. Across the next five he kicked six, while also becoming more involved around the ground and beginning to show more of the contested-marking traits that had followed him into the AFL system.
But which part of that improvement was actually the useful signal for Richmond? Was it the goals, the accuracy, the extra involvement away from the goal square, the contested work, or simply the fact that several parts of his game began moving together?
How should a rebuilding club read a young key forward when development is rarely linear? What is noise created by matchup, opportunity and team performance, and what starts to look repeatable enough to build around?
And if Richmond believed it was seeing a genuine step, what did the next test need to be? More scoreboard impact? More work higher up the ground? Better connection with Richmond’s other tall forwards? Or evidence that his game could survive when opponents began planning specifically for him?
The member investigation goes beneath the encouraging numbers and asks what Richmond was really learning about Faull’s trajectory.
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