Sydney coach John Longmire is confident key forward Sam Reid has regained fitness and is set to show it.

Reid showed immense potential last season, but so far in the 2012 AFL campaign he has failed to hit those highs while nursing niggling shoulder and ankle injuries.

The 20-year-old’s played every game but his knack of clutching marks has largely been missing, with Reid pulling in only 21 marks after six rounds.

He’s been restricted at training and devoid of confidence in games.

Longmire hopes that might be coming to an end, starting with Saturday’s match against Richmond at the MCG.

“He’d been able to do little bits and pieces in training – enough to get him through to the game,” Longmire said on Thursday.

“But last week he trained fully, pulled up really well from the game. He did the whole session on Tuesday and looked really good.

“You can see him starting to feel better about himself because he was out here doing the full session.”

Reid played one of his best games to date against the Tigers last year at the SCG, when he was named round 12’s Rising Star nominee.

However it’s a more miserly Tigers defence he’ll have to deal with on the weekend.

“They’re improving all areas of their game. We see that and we know that,” Longmire said.

“Certainly defensively they’ve gone from 109 points against per game down to 87.”

Longmire had a chance to garner inside information from ex-Tiger Mitch Morton this week, but he was quick to joke about the usefulness of such discussions.

“I had a chat to (former Adelaide defender) Tony Armstrong last week. Maybe if the game went an extra 10 seconds we could have said that was the difference.”

And the second-year coach needs no reminders of what Richmond are capable of, given they thumped Sydney by 43 points in the teams’ most recent meeting in round 21 last year.

“If you look at what we served up last year down there, it wouldn’t have mattered where we played, we would’ve got beaten pretty comprehensively because we played really poorly.”