RICHMOND has admitted a possible David Armitage move to Tigerland was knocked back by St Kilda during trade talks.

The Tigers ended the trade period with no players coming or going but it has now emerged they targeted the Saints hard nut as well as former Melbourne co-captain Jack Trengove.

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There is also speculation Richmond had interest in Adelaide veteran Scott Thompson as it tried to add midfield depth to help Trent Cotchin, Brett Deledio and Dustin Martin.

Football manager Dan Richardson today moved to reassure frustrated fans that the quiet trade period wasn’t for lack of trying.

“Often in these sort of situations you do a lot of hard work and sometimes it doesn’t come to fruition necessarily, but in saying that we’re comfortable with the path we’re on which is to retrain our draft picks and get some good young talent into our club come draft time,” he said on SEN radio.

“To Richmond people out there rest assured we worked hard ... if you look back we’ve made more changes to our list since 2009 than most other clubs and at some stage you’ve got to bring the right talent into the club through the draft. Now the pressure is on our recruiting staff to do that come November.”

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The club denied talk of an Armitage approach early in the trade period but Richardson admitted today the Tigers had asked about the 26-year-old.

“We certainly made some inquiries to St Kilda but that was knocked on the head pretty quickly by them, they didn’t have any interest in trading David,” he said on SEN radio.

“There are a lot of those discussions that take place, some of them become public, many don’t.”

After the Armitage approach was rejected Richmond set its sights on Trengove but that deal fell through when scans revealed he had more damage to his foot.

“We were all set to go in a lot of ways but the last scan just showed that it wasn’t looking quite as good as first thought,” Richardson said.

“We were disappointed about that because we did put a bit of work into that and Jack was, I think, pretty keen to come to the Tiges.”

He said Richmond would aim to add a classy midfielder with pick 12 in next month’s draft and recruit some outside speed with later picks.