RICHMOND is still a strong chance to draft Ben Cousins today despite the AFL's decision to deny the club's request to transfer the recuperating Graham Polak on to the rookie list.

While the club's official line was that it was "highly unlikely" to pick Cousins in today's pre-season draft, sources last night suggested that Cousins was a better-than-even-money chance to be selected.

Key officials were discussing the issue last night, including coach Terry Wallace, general manager of football operations Craig Cameron and chief executive Steve Wright.

The club's board, which had already given approval to recruiting Cousins, had largely left the decision to the football department and executive last night.

The club was mindful not only of its list management needs and youth agenda, but also the Tiger army's groundswell in favour of Cousins, fanned by club ambassador Kevin Sheedy and talkback radio, with supporters having deluged the club with messages imploring it to pick the Brownlow medallist and recovering drug addict.

In an Age poll, 78 per cent of the 5000-plus respondents said they thought the Tigers should pick Cousins.

A matter of hours after the AFL Commission declined Richmond's application for Polak, who is recovering from head injuries sustained in a collision with a tram, the Tigers said it was highly unlikely that Cousins would be picked with their one selection in today's pre-season draft.

Even then, however, Cameron left the door ajar for Cousins, in that he did not categorically rule out the former West Coast champion and suggested that the club needed to pause — "take a deep breath" — and absorb a decision that caught the club by surprise. Had the Polak application been successful, the Tigers would have had no hesitation in using their extra selection to pick Cousins. Now that it has been rejected, Cousins' chances of reviving his career rested last night on Richmond's willingness to abandon the club's insistence on linking Cousins' arrival to the Polak transfer.

In the AFL community, at club level, it was seen that the AFL had called Richmond's bluff.

If he is not picked, Cousins will have no avenue to play AFL football in 2008, and his career would likely be over, ending a post-season saga that has had three Melbourne clubs — Collingwood, St Kilda and finally Richmond — contemplating recruiting the recovering drug addict, with the Magpies, Saints and Brisbane Lions dropping out, in that order.

"It's unlikely the Richmond Football Club will select Ben with six. Our position with pick six has been fairly well documented," said Cameron, who said the club was disappointed by the decision.

"This (the AFL's decision) is a decision that was unexpected by us. It's our prerogative to take a deep breath and consider our position. But it is highly unlikely we will select Ben."

The Tigers had been optimistic that their application would be successful, and the club had made it clear that it wanted an extra pick in the pre-season draft, believing that it would lose access to a young player without the additional pick it sought to create via shifting Polak.

In rejecting the Richmond application for Polak, the AFL drew a distinction between Polak and Essendon's Adam Ramanauskas, who was permitted to be placed on the rookie list in 2006, when he was recovering from cancer treatment.

One of the obvious differences between the Polak and Ramanauskas cases was that whereas the Essendon's bid was backed by rival clubs, the Richmond application was not supported by the bulk of the clubs, 14 of which made submissions, the majority opposed to the Richmond proposal. The AFL cited club opposition among the factors that led it to reject Richmond's bid.

AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said the prospects of Richmond picking Cousins had no bearing on the decision to reject the Tigers' application, the AFL boss saying that the league had given Cousins "the green light" by approving his application to enter the draft.

"He (Ramanauskas) was delisted, that was done before the national draft," said Demetriou. "He was not a contracted player at the time and the decision to put him then on the rookie list gave him an opportunity to remain in the AFL system."

Demetriou confirmed "the majority of clubs" were against the application — many because it represented a corruption of the rules — but added: "That was just one factor in the commission's decision-making … when it was all said and done, we've got rules in place that deal exactly for this situation. The mechanism is there for Polak to be placed on the long-term injury list and a rookie elevated from the rookie list for as long as Polak is out of football."