Richmond ruckman Ivan Maric is confident he and his teammates can turn their fortunes around, despite a disappointing start to the season.

Like North, the Tigers have won just two of their first five games. On Saturday, they fell to the Cats by nine points in a performance that drew much criticism.

But Maric says there are positives to come out of a tough first month. 

"We hate losing. Ideally we would have liked to win every game. It’s great though, because we have realised what we need to improve on," he said.

"There are always a lot of areas to improve on. Our team defence is probably our number one priority. If we can get that right it is going to improve a lot of things.

"So we’ve focused on that in the last few weeks, and that’s what we will be training today, and will be continuing to train for the rest of the year."

Key-forward Ben Griffiths is likely to be available for Saturday's clash at Blundstone Arena, having missed last week with calf soreness.

"It’s extremely disappointing to get the little calf injury, but I’m really confident it’ll just be this week (sidelined)," Griffiths said ahead of the Tigers loss to Geelong. 

The Tigers are also hopeful of regaining Brett Deledio (calf), with the midfielder missing since round one. 

"He'll ... try to convince the coaches that he can play," Maric said.

"It's really early in the week, but we definitely need him.

"He's improving every day."

Maric said Richmond will look to Hawthorn's performance as motiviation to bounce back against North.

"We want to be able to just rock up every week and just play our way. You look at teams like Hawthorn - they went through a bit of adversity in the first quarter against Port Adelaide (round four) and they just kept coming back.

"That’s what we want to be like. We don’t want to rely on the fact that we are underdogs or favourites. We just need to keep playing the same way.

"You can’t let the fear infect your mind and the way you play, because as soon as you second guess yourself, the game is too quick.

"You just need to take the game on, not think of the consequences and see what happens."

The Tigers will no doubt have bad memories of the last time they met Brad Scott's side, a game in which they surrendered a 35-point half-time lead.

A big crowd is expected for the first match at the newly redeveloped Blundstone Arena.

Limited tickets remain, with the crowd expected to push the stadium's capacity of close to 19,000. 

RELATED: Ticketing information