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They weren’t thrashed. And they weren’t disgraced. But Richmond’s loss to North Melbourne on the weekend was a cripplingly tedious affair, the sort of day where you wonder whether any progress has been made at all. Games between bottom sides, as the Tigers’ win over West Coast in May demonstrated, can be as entertaining as a top-four clash. But Sunday’s game was blighted by cynical coaching, uncontested marks and a certain futility. A few of Richmond’s older players seemed to have checked out, the forwards barely got a look in and most of their best young talent were watching from the stands.

A team would normally be pilloried for a performance like that. A coach with nine wins from 60 would normally be out the door. But it’s been tempered by their drip feed of injuries, which has featured most body parts and vital organs – hips, feet, knees, collarbones, throats, groins, brains, ligaments and tendons. The nature of the injuries and the protean timelines have only added to the frustration. Tom Lynch lost the use of his voice box and had to undergo speech therapy to rediscover his vocal projection, Josh Smillie was sent to Philadelphia to reprogram his body, and Sam Lalor is still nursing what’s not entirely convincingly referred to as a “partial Achilles tear”.

Lalor is the most sorely missed. To watch him read the ball off the ruckman’s palm, the way he tilts backwards when he exits a stoppage and his perfectly executed shoves to buy seconds and space, is to remember Dustin Martin at a similar age. He’s a player to turn up for, to give hope, and for opposition coaches to worry about. When they were being towelled up in a sleepy shift at the MCG, he’d have three or four moments where he looked like the most assured player on the ground. Now the 34-year-old Martin is playing for Port Douglas and the 19-year-old Lalor is still unavailable.

Lalor was of course the dux of the draft class of 2024, just about the best collection of young talent the sport has seen. Fans at Punt Road paid $25 to watch the comic stylings of Ben Dixon and to see their club draft eight new players, including six in the first round. It was a difficult draft to predict, with no clear standouts, abnormal hype and considerable depth. In the Carlton room, senior staff, most of whom are no longer at the club, were ecstatic to snare Jagga Smith at pick three. Fremantle were just as rapt to get Murphy Reid at 17.

Richmond’s haul was cause for great optimism. But there were some risky picks in there. Lalor, who most draft experts had as their top selection, had missed a lot of football with hip, quad, hamstring and ankle injuries. He’d never done a proper pre-season. Trent Cotchin presented him with his jumper and the 34-year-old former captain looked like the draftee. Taj Hotton, perhaps the most talented of the lot, was coming off an ACL tear. Jonty Faull, who’d gone higher than expected, had missed six months with stress fractures in his back. All of their eight selections were private schoolboys. Most of them were tall. Most of them had played together in the same underage teams and competitions. A lot of them, when you research them now, are pictured on crutches.

Richmond laid their bets and waited. That’s all you can do in a rebuild – teach, hope and wait. Everyone knew the reality. Everyone knew it would be a slog, that there’d be thrashings and periods where nothing went right. Everyone knew they’d have to sit back and watch some of their fiercest rivals at the other end of the spectrum win premierships. Everyone knew that many of these draftees wouldn’t work out, and that the coach probably wouldn’t see out the rebuild.

Eighteen months on from that super draft, we thought we’d be in a position to track their progress. But it’s the following year’s draft that has given them what they need most – speed and durability. And Seth Campbell, who has been a key figure in almost all the wins under Adem Yze, was taken at the lower reaches of a rookie draft where the majority of selections were clubs redrafting delisted veterans.

Some rebuilds are incremental. Some are ill-defined. Some are dead ends. Richmond’s isn’t any of those. It’s incredibly frustrating. And it’s unusual. There’s been some memorable performances under Yze. There was the win over Sydney in the haze at the MCG, in a year where the Swans were by far the best home and away team. There was the almost comical win over Carlton in round one the following year. There’s been honourable losses, such as last week against Brisbane in Hobart. But mostly there’s been a kind of drift, a deferral, a constant asterisk that’s made it impossible for them to develop a cohesive and sustainable style of play, and just as impossible for us to judge them.