Vice-captain Sanderson and veterans Graham and Riccardi have 621 games of experience between them, and last played against St Kilda in round one. They have since been sidelined by injury and witnessed Geelong suffer defeats to Carlton and Sydney.
Graham (chest), Riccardi (groin) and Sanderson (calf) all trained at Skilled Stadium on Wednesday, though defenders Tom Harley and Darren Milburn did minimal work.
Cats football manager Garry Davidson said Harley, who wore a compression bandage on his right calf, would be fine to play against the Tigers and that Milburn had suffered a corked thigh in round three. Ablett left the main group after training for about 20 minutes. He played half a match in the VFL last weekend.
“We’ve got a few choices to make. Probably the hardest choice, it’s amazing, we haven’t won a game and yet we’re struggling to put people out of the side. So it’s a bit of a task,” Geelong coach Mark Thompson said before training.
Thompson said Graham would play in attack alongside fellow talls Henry Playfair and Ben Haynes.
The Cats were spirited in a narrow away loss to Sydney at the weekend, but Thompson said his players need to improve their decision making under pressure and take more risks.
“We were up in the game and we were still sort of playing wide and safe. It’s just not on; we’ve got to get better than that.
“We played better and the review was a little bit better, but we still showed in that last quarter some incidents that we need to improve on. We’ve just got to continually strive to get better.”
Midfielder Corey Enright had surgery on his fractured wrist on Tuesday night. The club expects him to recover in four to seven weeks.
Meanwhile, Thompson does no expect his rival coach Danny Frawley to be distracted by his verbal jousting with St Kilda’s Grant Thomas, after Richmond suffered a heavy defeat on Monday.
“It’s a little bit out of hand at the moment, but it will settle down and they’ll get enough time in the week to concentrate on their preparation… I think if they both had their time over again they’d probably do it differently.”
