After conceding the final eight goals of tonight's game to Adelaide, to turn a contest that was tied up early in the last quarter into a 50-point drubbing, Richmond found yet another way to lose a match - its seventh of the season.

The trouble is there's nothing registered yet in the win column, just a big fat bagel, giving rise to the obvious question: will the eat-'em-alive Tigers, the Tigers of old that were once so strong and so bold, that once spawned Jack Dyer, Mopsy Fraser and Francis Bourke, win a match this season?

A month ago the odds quoted on a winless Richmond season was $5. A spokesman for TAB Sportsbet said tonight that price had now come in to about $4 and - ghoulish as it might seem - a market would be opened later this week on when the Tiges next won a game. Sometime soon, it could well be an odds-on proposition.

With Hawthorn coming up next week (and the Hawks are likely to welcome back Buddy Franklin, Sam Mitchell and maybe Shaun Burgoyne), followed by Essendon, Port Adelaide at AAMI Stadium, St Kilda and West Coast, the next five rounds present one or two possible chances at an upset, but the smart money would probably be on a 0-12 Tigers' scoreline in mid-June.

Of the horror seasons in recent times, Melbourne lost the first eight matches of 2007, Fitzroy lost every match bar one in its farewell 1996 season, its only win coming in round eight, while North Melbourne lost the first 15 games of 1972. The Richmond Class of 2010 is shaping up to give those records a good run for their money.

The news is just as grim off the field. As the Sunday Age reported this morning, there are rumblings among discontented former players and officials (and Richmond has always been well represented on that front), and talk of a coup. President Gary March is apparently in the gun, under fire for overseeing a do-nothing board in the past four years.

But this is generally what happens when things fall apart on the field. As the losses mount up, the malcontents find voice, a lynchmob forms and soon enough scapegoats are found and heads roll.

What must grate on the club, and its followers, is that barely a month ago Melbourne was hot favourite for the wooden spoon. But in the space of five matches, the Demons have won three times and shown, at last, that they have a future which their fans can get excited about. Richmond, meanwhile, languishes at the foot of the table without any of that hope to cling on to, and is now the unbackable favourite to finish last.

The Tigers matched their hosts in Adelaide today for all but the final 20 minutes, with young players Robin Nahas, Dustin Martin and Shane Edwards all doing well. When Jack Riewoldt goalled at the two-minute mark of the final term, the scores were level at 52 points apiece.

Then, just as they got themselves into position to break their duck for the season, they inexplicably fell apart.

Now they have to endure another week of post-mortems such as this, more grumbling from agitators at board level, more deeply unhappy fans, and the screws on first-year coach Damien Hardwick and his team of assistants being turned that extra notch.