Richmond coach Adem Yze says he hopes Tigers supporters "would have been proud of (Saturday night's) effort, despite the end result.

His side was tenacious but fell short in the Dreamtime clash, going down to Essendon by 12 points.

Yze coached from the bench, saying it was an attempt to keep his players' spirits up, focused on the task at hand and not dropping their heads when things went awry.

"That (effort) is what we expect every week. But part of that is there's an honesty around the way we review the game, and there's still elements of our game (where) we're not good enough," Yze said.

"The main thing was around our spirit and energy and doing our jumper proud, and we expect to do that every week. That's the standard we want, it was a great game of footy, credit to Essendon, their execution was very, very good in the (dewy) conditions.

"We still gave them too many goals from our back-end, things we can control. We'll look at that honestly again, train it, hopefully get better and don't do it against Geelong."

Yze brought Samson Ryan into the forward line, swinging Noah Balta back to defence for the first time this season.

"I wish we had two of him. I just feel like he's a terrific threat forward of the ball, he's a powerful athlete, they're hard to find, good forwards. Obviously when [Tom Lynch] was out earlier in the season, we thought that combination could be really potent, with Josh Gibcus (also) going down," Yze said.

"We just didn't look stable down back. He's a big presence, he's a good leader around our footy club, and we just wanted to try something different.

"He was solid down back, and there was a discussion about whether we threw him forward during the last half as well, so credit to him, he's such an important player for us, and he worked his way into the game nicely again."