Author: Tom Briglia

Round 9, 2022
St Kilda 2.2, 4.4, 11.8, 13.12 (90)
Geelong Cats 4.3, 6.8, 8.10, 11.14 (80)
Crowd: 32,517 at Docklands, Saturday, May 14th at 4.35pm

After pissing away a win in Cairns and then not even giving ourselves a chance against a (superior anyway) Melbourne, the anticipation of watching St Kilda had dried up. Interest was low. The bandwagon emptied. Readership down. We’d gone from Jack Higgins feature articles and David King breaking down Brad Hill’s selfless running patterns to “St Kilda counting the dollars and the cost” and then First Crack breaking down how we went out of our way to not play our game style, and picking on Ben Paton and Jimmy Webster for not tracking Kosi Pickett.

That anticipation had been replaced by trepidation. I was militantly sure we’d lose to Port Adelaide because that’s what St Kilda does when it travels interstate, specifically plays in Cairns, and specifically plays against the Power. Then it was our turn to play mere extras in the Melbourne show starring Petracca, Oliver, Gawn and Langdon. Now, we were facing a team we didn’t know how to beat.

Those expecting a St Kilda 2019 redux after the last fortnight’s stumble would have taken more interest than usual in the week’s events in Sydney. Leon Cameron was out of the job he’d effectively quit live on 360 a few weeks ago, which saw Clarko jump into a PR offensive and put his hand up for just about all 18 clubs. Every coach was put on notice. Consensus was that we were about to slide further to 5-4, another step towards repeating the anti-heroics of the 2019 team that started 4-1 and became The Age’s “story of the year” before the coach was sacked 12 weeks later.

Another St Kilda and Geelong match meant another opportunity to wheel out the 2009 epics. The St Kilda socials brought out Round 14; “A Friday flashback that never gets old”, they called it. “Time to relive the 2009 Toyota AFL Grand Final between both sides on AFL On Demand” chirped the AFL socials. But that Round 14 flashback does get old. When I think of Geelong I don’t think of the Round 14 match; I think of the 2009 Grand Final. And while we beat them twice in 2010 (including a Qualifying Final win that turned the finals series on its head) I then think of them snatching a win in the final 20 seconds of the opening round of 2011 from a totally needless Jason Blake turnover that marked the beginning of the end. Geelong was synonymous with the Riewoldt generation’s early promise in the GT era, and its opportunities lost in the Ross Lyon era. Geelong has been the marker of this club feeling like it has been in a comedown for the years since; our once-rivals won multiple premierships and have been challenging nearly every single year while we’ve never truly recovered from missing out. The Cats are triggering. Since the Riewoldt generation took us to those Grand Finals I’ve aged 12 years and seen only one win over Geelong. There was no chance in hell this week would be comfortable, whatever the result. Philip told us all to believe. I couldn’t bring myself to. It’s Geelong.

***

Both teams ran out onto the field a little earlier than the usual 10 minutes ahead of the start, a large swing from the brief period a few years ago when we started running out just a couple of minutes before the bounce. We’ve made a habit of immediately giving up goals this year and we weren’t about to be thrown off by the early appearance. Geelong took it straight out of the middle courtesy of a dodgy opening bounce free to Rhys Stanley and within a few seconds Tyson Stengle was snapping from the pocket, only to hit the post.

Paddy Ryder (in a St Kilda jumper) kicked the first after drawing a free-kick from a throw-in and going around the corner. Josh Battle had a wobbly start to the game, dropping a ball at the edge of the square that Hawkins swooped on for the Cats’ first, and he almost gave up another with a straight turnover, but the ball hit the post again.

Geelong’s seasoned, bigger bodies were making a difference early and they were a lot more composed. Jones was still rusty in traffic, Ben Long slipped over, and Gresham was zigging and zagging and into trouble. Webster kicked the ball directly to Rhys from the kick-out (prompting rare evidence of strong emotions in Jack Sinclair) and no-one bothered to notice that Tuohy was cruising past and he calmly slotted the goal.

King got our second thanks to Sinclair’s rush to spoil Knevitt as the Cats looked to switch across half-back, and D-Mac’s kick to him just hit his outstretched fingertips. Only Max could have taken it. Rather than go back and test the set shot nerves he played on and goaled from close range. Save for that moment, Geelong simply looked more organised with and without the footy. Long took a nice mark at high half-forward but then sat one on top of Higgins, and Stewart came in and instead of taking a speccy, he both thumped the ball away and concussed Snags, and the Cats went through Dangerfield, Narkle, Duncan, Cameron and Isaac Smith for one of the cleaner coast-to-coast goals you’ll see. Scores were rare in the second half of the quarter bar a modern classic Geelong chain of Selwood, to Dangerfield, to Hawkins finding 1990s skateboarder Gryan Miers on the goal line.

Perhaps it was partly adjustments to the personnel changes (although Billings was among our better players early and throughout) but we’d come out a little slow with the footy again, which you’d think would have been the first thing learned from the week before. We’d played hesitant footy against the Dees almost exclusively to avoid May and Lever; were we trying to avoid Stewart and Atkins and De Koning and Kolodjashnij in the same way?

***

Things didn’t get horribly worse in the second quarter. We were fortunate they kicked 2.5 for the term and to be just 16 points down at the main change. Our better players were getting involved for the wrong reasons. Sinclair – otherwise our best on ground and most creative – had a kick-out turned over. Jones was trying to take everyone on, and while it’s hard to fault the intent (it was a sign of things to come in the second half), the execution was yielding mixed results, but his feigning of two handballs drew Paton who found Marshall for our third. Gresham was busy but still a little too chaotic.

Geelong had picked up where they left off from the week before and were winning the uncontested possession count (they were second for uncontested possession differential in the competition over the past month), and their clean, direct game looked like it could open things up at any moment. We didn’t look like kicking a goal until the moment Steele came off with a shoulder at the same time Higgins was subbed off. Gresh had a too-cute attempted pass inside 50 chopped off but he was good enough to follow it up and wrap up Zac Guthrie. The throw-up was smacked wide and went straight to Gresh; he screwed around a high kick from the boundary that comically fell into King’s arms on the goal line.

Up the other end, Cameron and Battle tangled and then Cameron and Sinclair got involved in some push and shove in front of the members (you can see Cameron yelling, “Hey pussy come here” to Sinclair. Banter). Cameron had been quiet but now loomed as a likely villain. The members became more outraged when a few seconds later Parfitt hit up Stengle and he nailed the set shot goal right in front of us.

We were faced with an opposition that simply looked better than us; an opposition faster and cleaner with the ball, that spread and fanned more smartly than we could keep up with. How do you compete with the Cats controlling the ball like that? What are you going to do about it if you’re rushing kicks forward with no one at ground level to provide any sort of pressure, and you’re not winning the midfield battle? And what had happened to our forward line? We’d gone from the highest scoring team after Round 4, when we’d kicked 22.10 against the Hawks, to kicking 22.42 over the past three weeks, and at half-time we sat at just 4.4. Sharman in the team straightened us up and drew a defender to help out Max to a degree, but the stodgy ball movement and dump kicks weren’t helping.

***

At half-time I finally met Red, White and Black’s number 1 ticketholder Rory, after several years of sitting literally in the same bay as each other. Good thing Rory could hold court with myself, Matt and Rich; I’d had a coffee during the second quarter to perk up and switch on for our chat but it had just agitated my feelings about the game, and I was offering nothing much constructive.

***

In the post-match on-ground interview, Paddy Ryder (who plays for the St Kilda Football Club) said that the half-time changes were “about just taking care of the ball and taking a few steps and using someone that’s turning up”. There were problems to come yet but the shift started with Gresham running off half-back early in the quarter, heading towards the wing, before cutting back inside to change the angle instead of blazing away, and Windhager, Hill and Sinclair had all turned up for him. Sinclair’s had Murmurs McKenzie out wide the movement had created a five-on-four ahead of the ball; D-Mac found Membrey in the pocket for the first of the quarter. But it only took a ricochet off Hill’s shin at half-back – and despite Seb putting in a desperate chase of Close and Tuohy the length of the wing – for the ball to end back up with Tuohy and he slotted a second on the run to get one back for the Cats. From the middle, Selwood sharked Paddy’s tap and Hawkins easily outbodied Dougal, and went back and kicked the goal. All of a sudden it was 21 points. Of all people, Sinclair was the next Saint to turn it over, and from half-back the Cats went neatly through Miers and Smith to Duncan. His shot from 50 would have closed the game, but it drifted just wide. We hadn’t let ourselves off yet; Battle took the easy mark from the short kick-in and then completely missed Wilkie nearby with the handball, and the ball trickled harmlessly out of bounds.

I said last week there was reason to rage about the waste of the Port Adelaide loss. There was also reason to rage about coming into a game against the ladder leaders with your Plan B (not quite as spectacular a failure as when Grant Thomas openly ditched Plan A for the 2004 Qualifying Final against the Lions). Never mind the goodwill and the media hype, 5-1 was about to turn into 5-4. We were on the brink.

But we managed to get the ball up the other end and Jones took the moment that turned things. Marshall grabbed the ball out of the ruck and quickly handballed to Jones, who was running past and curled the ball through. Marshall and Ryder were beginning a period of dominance that saw eight hit-outs to advantage to just two and multiple goals from stoppage. Marshall repeated the dose at the ball-up, with the tap heading straight to Seb Ross who sprinted out of the middle and his deep entry was just touched before reaching Sharman. It was about this time that Matt next to me said, “Something’s about to happen”.

There wasn’t a Max King quarter in the way that we got used to earlier in the season. In fact, he didn’t kick a goal in the second half. But he was at the very least halving every contest and making an impact at the fall of the ball. He helped set up the next goal with bodywork on Atkins and then Stewart at ground level in the pocket; the ball spilled out to Mason Wood whose loose shot fell across the face to Sharman (and was lucky to not be called touched off the boot). Sharman held his nerve under the pressure of three Geelong defenders sprinting in to cover the angle. The crowd was getting into the game.

Jones was finding his rhythm. Off half-back he again feigned a couple of kicks and hit up Murmurs, and then ran past for the handball and the movement drew a holding free on Membrey and another five-on-four ahead of the ball. King almost took the mark from the forward 50 entry but he gathered to Billings who was cruising past, and found Long on his own who blasted it through from the pocket.

The next goal put us in front and was ultimately the product of Paddy Ryder, playing Australian Rules football in a St Kilda jumper, guiding a hit-out behind his head in a manner that perhaps only he can, in a most un-St Kilda-like fashion, directly to Billings; Gresham was guarding the space and Billings didn’t need to break stride before finishing expertly on his left. It’s what we drafted him with pick 3 for.

That ball had initially been won from Long, who was playing another impactful in whichever role the coaches decided to put him in for the week, rushing in to chop off a Geelong kick and Windhager putting his head over the footy to win the free kick from Dangerfield. (He switched the ball, opening up the ground and the ball ultimately ended up with King in the pocket. King’s kick was a lol and tumbled over Knevitt out of bounds for the throw-in). Like Long in Round 3, Windhager had come on as the substitute for a concussed Snags and made a telling impact. He finished with 15 touches in little more than half a game, and he played like a completely different human to the Marcus Windhager that had turned out for the Saints over the past several weeks. This was the strong-bodied, contested bull that we hoped would slip past pick 20 so we could pick him up as a Next Generation Academy pick. He put in an uncompromising shift of repeat efforts, creating contests and winning hard balls, putting himself in the right place at the right time high up the ground and in the forward line and using the ball smartly, and was part of multiple scoring chains. I should mention Long here too; he had a hand in numerous chains himself in similar parts of the ground. Two unheralded guys making these contributions makes the team that much better; it’s been the story this year with guys like D-Mac and Wood and Battle too.

We didn’t find out until Sunday that Steele would be out for up to two months but as of Saturday evening he was admirably still attending centre bounces. He and Ross worked it into possession and Ross – in perhaps the best quarter of his best season to date – again quickly turned a movement into attack and was on the break. Long found himself as the target and was out of position but managed to split the contest with Duncan. King, again, and then Gresham got to the low ball, Windhager fed out to Long, who fed out to Mason Wood, who looked everywhere except the goals before realising he had space to wheel around onto his left. Five goals in nine minutes and 30 seconds. This was the unrelenting team that Ross Lyon had told St Kilda fans to get excited about on Footy Classified all those weeks ago. The team that had earned all those print and online features and glowing reviews on 360 and On the Couch.

It was time for a brief stalemate. Cameron, the most likely villain, put himself in the middle and won the clearance. Both teams wobbled a little. A Geelong forward entry that would have normally hit a target was just out of Cameron’s reach. Gresham dropped an easy ball in the centre in space. Sharman blazed away, Dangerfield was losing his feet, Atkins’ hands became uncertain. Membrey ran into an open goal but was too slow and got caught. It was Ross who provided the breakthrough in the final seconds of the quarter, at a throw-in on centre wing, with a tackle on Selwood; quick hands from Crouch and Windhager – Ratten had bought an extra player up to the stoppages from the forward line and then backed our speed with the ball – found Ross again who was already on the spread, and off his wrong right boot hit Membrey on the lead. He made up for his missed opportunity a few moments earlier and drilled it after the siren.

It was our highest-scoring quarter since Maddie’s Match 2017, when for a brief time on that Saturday night we sat fourth on the ladder; the very brief peak of the Richo era. There was a big celebration on the siren after Membrey’s shot sailed through, but fuck me there was a long way to go. I discovered via the Kayo replay that for anyone watching live at home, Fox Footy had shown highlights of the 2016 win on the broadcast at three-quarter time, just to really mess with any Saints supporter’s heads.

***

I don’t know if a week goes by without me mentioning 2009 or 2010 (I blew this week four paragraphs in), or the GT and Ross eras generally. But, as I said, the Cats are triggering. Holding a not-too-big lead of 58 to 74 – respectively, Geelong’s scores at three-quarter time and on the final siren of the 2009 Grand Final – was one thing, but the Cats were on early in the last. Hawkins hit the post (no reference to 2009 required, but I’ll make one) from a relatively simple set shot which gave us a let-off, but D-Mac had other ideas. He marked the ball from the kick-out and weighed up the options before looking to go for a long switch across the face. The behind-the-goal shot didn’t do justice as to how specifically nowhere near anything St Kilda-related the kick was, and how directly it floated straight back to Hawkins. From a similar spot to where he kicked the first goal of the last quarter in the 2009 Grand Final, he wasn’t going to miss again (although he tried hard to).

Windhager yelled a few quick words of encouragement to D-Mac but no-one physically went to him except for Paddy Ryder, in a St Kilda jumper, who was initially telling him to keep his chin up and then walked over to him and gave him a pat. He was about to have a much more profound influence in-play, although it started with a burned opportunity. We found a way up the other end – King made the contest on the wing and Long reacted fastest, Jones darted through to create and almost got caught, Steele was with him and snapped it forward and Max had worked forward and ran back with the flight into Blicavs. Windhager was yet again in the right spot and gave off to D-Mac, to Paddy, who had time and space and somehow hit the bottom of the post, and I did have the thought that if Paddy couldn’t do it then no-one could. It was one of our best passages of the evening and we should have gone out to a 14-point lead. The Cats went right up the other end, Tuohy stood up too easily in the Ross tackle, and Hawkins marked on the goal line.

Three points. Had we used up all our magic coming back into the game as we did against the Pies?

Gresham and Jones forced the ball out of the middle, out to Hill and then Wood, who in the absence of NWM perfectly weighted a kick to Crouch that broke open the play. Webster was running past and all the while Paddy had been working his way forward and all on his own. Webster found him.

This year has been about learning to trust this team and enjoy what they do. Looking forward to watching the Saints on the weekend again. Daring to trust Max King to kick goals from all angles, which had gotten us to 5-1. Daring to trust Jade Gresham to come up with a match-winning moment. Daring to trust Brad Hill to be in the right part of the ground. Daring to trust Jack Sinclair to provide speed and movement. Daring to trust Brad Crouch to accumulate and feed out. Some of that looked a little bit different this week. This was about daring to trust a team with a wounded captain that its sixth-game substitute would barrel his way through traffic; that Max King, if he wasn’t kicking goals, would be making every contest, whether it be high or low; that Jack Billings would come straight in and be in his right places at his right times; that Ben Long would play his role, wherever it may be. And, of course, to trust Paddy Ryder, playing Australian Rules football in a St Kilda jumper, in his 274^th game, to be the difference. He didn’t miss this time.

Selwood took it straight out of the middle and put the Cats into attack, but we repelled through a rushed kick from Steele and then Sinclair, who put it out to in front of the running Hill, in a sprint with Smith. Windhager, yet again in the right place, joined him in the middle, and quickly switched out to D-Mac, who had enough confidence left to just find Crouch beyond the 50-metre arc. Crouch – with what might have been the best of his 36 disposals -put it up perfectly to the group of players in the forward pocket. King had flown from three deep but Paddy Ryder, in a St Kilda jumper, emerged at the front. Since the 2009 Grand Final – right up to the past few weeks – it’s been hard to trust a St Kilda team to kick straight in any situation. But rarely have I been as confident that a St Kilda player would kick the goal.

There was still just over 12 minutes left, and it would be our last goal. We owned the game for a period. Wood and Hill were busy. Zac Guthrie’s rebound was forced out on the full. A couple of shallower entries were almost pulled in by Max. Billings had a long shot out wide that was never going to be a goal, Crouch was ambitious from the pocket.

The Cats now had to go for it. Stanley out of the middle didn’t find the chest of Close but it did find his run, and his snap hit the top of the post. Some nervous moments in the goal square ended with a long, high Ross get-out kick that went straight through Membrey’s hands, and the Cats immediately hit Cameron on 50. He finally loomed large. He slotted the long goal, and it was back to nine points.

But the momentum shifted again, and we’d have two chances to finish off the game. Billings went took a fantastic mark going back with the flight at half-forward, King flew and halved another contest, but Membrey’s snap missed. Gresham delivered perfectly to Wood who’d worked off Duncan, 25 metres out with little angle. It was the moment to seal it.

His shot squirted to the left.

Paddy Ryder took the intercept mark in the middle as the Cats looked to get things moving again. Long and Windhager were there at the fall, and this time Crouch cut across 50 to Billings. Now, this was definitely the kind of situation we’d drafted him at pick 3 for.

He missed. A groan from the members.

Were we about to face a Port Adelaide 2017 situation? An echo of the Cairns debacle, or, yes, of the 2009 Grand Final? If we weren’t going to finish it ourselves we’d have to defend the last couple of minutes. Sinclair was important at the fall of Tuohy’s torpedo, D-Mac dived for a low ball and won a free-kick, Windhager was involved multiple times in the contest. But just as the Geelong bench put up the “1” sign, the Cats found a break off half-back and Miers sliced across to Narkle, who found Cameron in the exact same spot as his last shot to bring the margin to within a goal.

The kick strayed wide, but there were more moments to weather. Hawkins nearly marked on the goal line but the ball bobbled out and hit the post; he then hacked a kick out of mid-air from the resulting throw-in that went straight up. The Geelong bench put up the “30” sign as we cleared the ball. A throw was paid against Paddy Ryder. Wilkie gave away a high free-kick to Smith that set up what would be Geelong’s final chance of the night. It went left.

The home crowd knew it and started to roar.

***

The ghosts of 2009 were in full howl on the night of May 14^th last year, as we kicked our way out of the game (on the way to kicking our way out of another season) against the Cats. We learned on May 14^th this year that this team is made of sterner stuff than its predecessors. Our best win of the year, and perhaps for some time.

The media bandwagon quickly returned. Max King and Sam De Koning was now being looked forward to as a “10-year battle”, likened to Carey vs Jakovich from Chris Scott through to the guys on On the Couch. Paddy Ryder is now “the best tap ruckman there is”, said Lloydy and Damien Barrett. David King was breaking down footage of Zak Jones putting in bodywork on Sam De Koning off the ball so Max could find a mismatch, and described the win as “brilliant coaching” and that he’d “never seen Geelong picked apart like that”. We were the biggest winners of the weekend, according to Gerard and Robbo.

In his post-match interview on the ground Paddy Ryder (St Kilda player) was asked about what he’d said to Rowan Marshall after the siren. “I just said to him that you’re probably not 100% fit and I can see that. I’ve played through injury before and you’ve just got to keep getting out there. All it takes sometimes is for one of your teammates or coaches to come up and tell you that they appreciate the effort, so that’s what I said. I said, ‘I appreciate your effort. I know you’re hurting a little bit, but you’re still so good for us.’” There is a care to him that elevates his teammates. He was the only one that bothered getting across to D-Mac after he gave up the goal. Amongst fans, he is at the front of St Kilda consciousness, partly perhaps because there is something incredibly un-St Kilda-like about him. No St Kilda player has played like him before. No St Kilda player has offered ruck work as art in the same way. He doesn’t yield to the gravity of the St Kilda Football Club; he is someone who can go forward and take the marks and kick the set shot goals in the last quarter against an opponent we don’t know how to win against, who represents so much of what we lost.

Just a second win over the Cats since the Grand Final years. And you wonder, where did all the time go? We haven’t had a great team since. We’ve been waiting for a new St Kilda team to emerge. Ryder, King, Steele, Ross, Gresham, Crouch, Wilkie, Sinclair. Bit-by-bit, new names are becoming St Kilda names that we look forward to seeing each week in St Kilda jumpers and, yes, that we are learning to trust. I’m not quite sure if we’ve gone through the Gateway to Being Good that it felt we might have in Canberra when we went 5-1. The state of “Being Good” doesn’t mean easy wins every week, it also means a lot of nervous moments against quality opposition in very consequential games (remember those?) over a lot of weeks, and ideally, a lot of years. You don’t know you’re there until you know. This was a necessary challenge that simply had to be met on the way to building something new.

Melbourne 4.2, 9.3, 10.5, (93)
St Kilda 0.3, 3.4, 5.7, 8.7 (55)
Crowd: 35,767 at the MCG, Sunday, May 8th at 1.10pm

One of the most disappointing parts of the Port Adelaide loss – apart from losing the game itself – was that it deprived us of a huge build-up to Sunday. A chance for the players to test themselves on a big stage, at the front of footy consciousness. The undefeated Dees facing a surprise St Kilda team that had won six in a row. For all intents and purposes this should have had match-of-the-round billing, giving more positive vibes and exposure for the club than a short-term cash injection from playing a game in Cairns ever could.

The media hype probably would have made for the biggest build-up to a home and away season game since Round 16 in 2010 against Collingwood at the MCG on a Saturday afternoon, with the winner to take top spot; 81,386 showed up that day in a record home-and-away crowd for St Kilda, and in the days of delayed free-to-air broadcasts on Saturdays Channel 10 decided to show it live. Yes, last Sunday was still first versus fourth, and Mother’s Day fixturing didn’t help, but the air had been completely sucked out of it. All things said, all comparisons made, it would have just been an outright enjoyable week as a Saints fan. But the veil had been lifted just enough. We went from our best win of the season to a loss that brought up the ghosts of five years ago, one year ago, even six weeks ago.

The media hype dried up with every shanked Max King and Jack Higgins shot at goal and Seb Ross’s just-too-short pass to Snags with a minute left and Robbie Gray slipping away from Dougal in the final 40 seconds. Fox Footy’s power rankings declared a race of three – Melbourne, Brisbane and Fremantle, and the Bizarro Rivalry Cold War took another turn on Friday night as the Dockers temporarily reached the top of the ladder. There were no Max King or Snags features this week, no David King breaking down Brad Hill’s selfless running patterns. All we had was Gerard opening the week saying “St Kilda is counting the dollars and the cost”, and AFL.com.au telling us “It’s time for another meeting, Saints”.

A more under-the-radar build-up suited some. A lot of us thought we were a sneaky chance. It has to happen eventually to Melbourne; after all, VFL/AFL history suggests that at 15 wins in a row you’re closer to the end of the streak than the beginning. I was less convinced we’d lose this week than last week – not confident at all that we’d win, mind you, just not militantly sure we’d be losing. Josh Jenkins reckoned we were as good a chance as any, but he was also very confident GWS would knock us off. Maybe all of their guys who were out with COVID the week before would be underdone. Maybe five changes would unsettle them. Maybe Jake Bowey’s streak would end at the hands of his father’s club. Maybe we are the real deal and maybe we’d learned a lot from Cairns. Maybe that was just a blip in the conditions, and not the beginning of ingrained performance anxiety in front of goal (we’ve kicked 14.35 over two weeks), or even when it just came when it came to executing simple passes and completing simple marks across the ground.

***

We’d all been craving our chance to be tested against the best. Finally, it was here. At the opening bounce, both Paddy Ryder and Jade Gresham slipped over and Petracca took it away to Neal-Bullen on the wing. We left the corridor wide open and for the first of many occasions Brayshaw was the man waiting for the quick switch, Bowey streamed past, Kysaiah Pickett onto the entry and finished with an expert checkside. It took all of 27 seconds before Kosi’s kick was going over the goal umpire’s hat.

That’s ok, we’d been here before. We’d spent a month of footy giving up the first two goals of the game (including at the MCG) and that had turned out ok. We gained some territory – Max King kicked a point off the ground, taking his run to 3.10 – and Gresham missed a shot; a stalemate ensued for 11 minutes, but it wasn’t one of any real thunder. We’d apparently gone in with the game plan to possess the ball and deprive Steven May and Jake Lever the chance to pick off forward entries, but just like Port Adelaide had attempted to change their game style against the Dees, this wasn’t generating any decent looks and Melbourne were just happy to sit around and wait for us to do something silly. It was a lot of short kicks in the back-half, and then eventually a dump kick to no-one in particular. Steele had Max on the break at half-forward and absurdly his left-foot kick missed him completely and the ball…still went straight to May. The ball went up the line to Ben Brown and eventually found Spargo for the second. Punished instantly.

This was more like the stagnant, anxious ball movement of Round 1 and the worst of the pre-season. We tried bringing the ball wide and switching to find a hole in Melbourne’s structure, but we moved the ball too slowly as it was and the Dees just casually rolled across the field as uncontested marks piled up. That’s not to sell the Dees short, by the way – their defensive structures appeared bulletproof. But as far as what we were doing with ball in hand, we were too scared to make a mistake and even then couldn’t work hard enough or fast enough to provide anything that would allow a safe passage through via short easy kicks. We’d effectively let two players in the opposition dictate our game style. There was no chance for our forwards.

Gawn was running Marshall and Paddy across the ground and provided a tall target in the front half on multiple occasions, bringing the ball to ground that ended with stoppages that the Dees scored goals from through a long kick from Rivers and then another delightful snap from Pickett. They were taking their half-chances. We were barely making them.

Pickett’s second goal came from one of the lower moments of the day. Ryder (St Kilda player) committed bravely to a high ball coming off half-back and rushed the kick forward to Membrey leading on the wing. He handballed inside to Gresham, and a moment of class and composure was required on the break. He had more time and space than he thought, as well as the option for a handball forward to Jones, but instead of assessing what was ahead or waiting for something to present he banged the onto his boot. The high ball wobbled in the air towards centre half-forward, to no St Kilda player’s advantage, and fell into the arms of Langdon. From one of the most dangerous spots on the ground to turn over the footy, Melbourne went up the other end, forced a stoppage, and Pickett finished. Four goals to nothing.

The real low point came just a few moments later. Higgins should have been given a too-high free 25 metres from goal, but Steele marked the rebounding ball and steadied on the 50, and delivered an excellent kick to the reach of Membrey at the top of the square just seconds before the quarter-time siren. The vice-captain went back and kicked it into Harrison Petty’s fingertips. The review was inconclusive but Petty, the Dees players and the goal umpire all knew it immediately. Maybe it was the sunshine of the MCG at the Punt Road end against a top team, but this reminded me too much of Heath Shaw’s smother on Nick Riewoldt in the 2010 Grand Final Replay. We weren’t playing our way – both by choice and permittance – and a leader had just been done on the goal line.

***

Melbourne cranked things up in the second quarter, playing some of their most clinical footy of the year. Gawn provided the get-out on the wing with a mismatch on Battle after a disputed ball in our forward line; Oliver coasted past and hit McDonald on the lead, and found Ben Brown running into an open goal.

Changing the angles helped to finally deliver our first a few moments later – Battle provided a running option for the switch out of the middle and Rowan Marshall marked his long kick to the square – but from the centre bounce there was an irresistible Gawn hit out to Oliver, quick hands to Petracca, and the ball was flipped back to Gawn, back to Oliver, and then chipped to Petracca, who off a step launched a 45-metre entry that fell right into McDonald’s hands. It was the best passage of the day. Each player understood exactly what the next move was and the execution was perfect. It’s not a necessity, but I don’t think our players can do that.

On the occasion when we tried changing things up we came unstuck. Jones tried cutting in from the wing to Hill but was chopped off by Neal-Bullen, and the Dees switched across half-forward; Langdon drew the handball to Angus Brayshaw and he goaled on the run from 50. Ben Brown and McDonald then both pounced on loose balls from a marking contest and a throw-in respectively and kicked nearly identical snaps around the corner from 30 metres out. Just like that, the margin was 47 points.

A four-goal patch either side of half-time offered something. Saints players started running for each other. Forward handballs to guys on the move were attempted. Max King got into the game on the eve of half-time, providing the get-out contested mark from Hill’s kick off half-back (Hill was visibly yelling for someone to move as he looked for options) and getting the ball in quick to a Membrey one-on-one for the first. Paddy Ryder was playing Australian Rules football in a St Kilda jumper and caught Brayshaw holding the ball in front of goal for the second. Max then offered half a Max King quarter in the third. Hill, Sinclair and Long all moved for each other off half-back and cut through the middle in a manner that we got used to in the five-game streak, Long found Membrey who passed to Gresham wide inside 50; he had to work off Brayshaw, win the ball back and dance around him, and Max took a contested mark in the goal square on Hunt, with the mismatch created through the faster ball movement. We all deep down considered the prospect of him missing this (or kicking it into the man on the mark), but he managed to poke it through.

NWM offered what might have been the best moment from a St Kilda perspective. Howard’s high rushed kick out of defence fell to him on the boundary and he had to feign a kick around Langdon, turn him inside out, and then step around him again in next to no space. He then delivered a beautifully weighted pass over to Mason Wood; eventually, the ball found Membrey and as the ball went into 50 the free-kick was paid to Max for holding the man. Max went back and kicked the goal.

There was a fleeting few moments at this point at which you started to think about what could be. Max’s confidence might be back. Just one more and we’re within three goals. Just win the quarter from here. Membrey had a shot from just beyond 50 that was always a stretch; he missed, and all Melbourne needed to go up the other end and for Ben Brown to snap another goal – this time on his left – was a Jimmy Webster attempted forward 50 entry in traffic that ricocheted Melbourne’s way. This was basically going to be a Diet Caffeine Free version of the late 2017 meeting between these teams with finals potentially on the line, also at the MCG at 1.10pm on a Sunday afternoon, in which we came back from 39 points during the second quarter to get within four points early in the last before fading out.

Hill was back behind the ball in a bid to keep things moving and we were playing our way that little bit more, but Melbourne weren’t ever going to lose this one. We’d gone away from our game style far too much to accommodate the opposition – largely just two of their players – and we never recovered. Fritsch waltzed into goal for the first of the last and took it out to 34 points. Goals from Windhager, Marshall and Higgins to bring the margin back to within four goals at stages were purely for AFL Tables archival purposes.

AFL.com.au’s weekly “Nine Things We Learnt” took a positive approach, saying “St Kilda’s second half against Melbourne was the real deal”, noting that after trailing by nine goals to one, we restricted Melbourne to just five more goals for the game, while adding seven ourselves, and winning the hit-outs, clearances and stoppage clearances from that point. But the thing is, Melbourne turned it on when they had to and kicked nine of the first 10. Many would suggest that Melbourne’s only been going at about 80% so far this year (if that), and that’s all they had to do for the rest of the game. They have proper stars that played and gathered numbers like proper stars. They have Max Gawn, who is a bigger presence live, despite being kept accountable by two very good ruckmen. They have Christian Petracca and Clayton Oliver. We decided to not tag Ed Langdon even though it had just worked out quite well for Hawthorn earlier (he went from nine possessions to 39 in the space of a week). Angus Brayshaw isn’t in the same bracket as the above guys but he played like it on the other wing and across half-back. Of course, both Petracca and Brayshaw – the two guys we passed up in 2014 – were more influential than any of our players. Never mind that we kicked a couple more goals than they did after giving up a 47-point head start and deciding only around the halfway point to try and play the kind of footy that got us to 5-1. The moment had passed.

This was a day of no real highlights; next to no genuine positives. The kind of day when Dougal Howard wins the Sainter of the Round and Callum Wilkie is one of your best because the opposition is so dominant that defenders have to be on their guard at every second. The crowd on Sunday never really got the chance to become engaged because Melbourne blew it out and then just had keep things at arm’s length. Only when Jones cannoned into the back of Langdon and then Oliver took a dive from Jones’s brushing elbow in the last quarter did the crowd arc up a little. (Of course, Jones got fined for that. There’s no conspiracy, but it’s something that would happen to St Kilda. Jones, who showed good moments despite clearly looking like someone who’d missed a chunk of footy, got one back from May a few moments later.) As Harmes, then Viney, then May and then Petracca all went to Jones after the Oliver brush, Nathan Buckley in the commentary said, “Where are the Saints boys? Get there. Doesn’t need to be too much but just get there and support.” Ross and Webster did half-heartedly. A few moments later Windhager kicked his first to a dulled response; the players either didn’t know or didn’t care that it was the first in his career. Only Seb looked like he was trying to get something going.

***

There was reason to rage about the Port Adelaide loss. It stupidly cost us four points and an enjoyable week of anticipation. We’ve sunk to seventh just over a week after David King said we were simply improving our defence to attack transition numbers away from having the strongest Champion Data profile in the league. Now, we’ve posted two losses now that aren’t overly honourable. It’s not an honourable loss when you kick 4.18 and can’t control a Sherrin, it’s not an honourable loss when you give up nine of the first 10 goals and the opposition spends the rest of Mother’s Day in cruise control. We’ve gone from 5-1 to the brink of 5-4 via Robbie Gray (again) and a couple of guys we decided not to pick in the draft a few years ago. In 2019, when we went 4-1 and became The Age’s “story of the year”, we beat the Dees at the MCG 95 to 55. This was a 93 to 55 loss and I’m dreading the prospect of heading for a 2019 repeat.

The Age chose to run with a story about Luke Jackson probably staying put at Melbourne as the lead article for this one, using it more prominently on their site than the match report itself. That MCG Sunday game against Hawthorn just a month ago was a bright, sunny, warm afternoon made for a sexy, high-scoring St Kilda on the up; a team announcing itself to the competition. This was a much colder and ultimately overcast day set for a spluttering team. Many have fancied themselves; we just ended up as another piece of roadkill on Melbourne’s highway to another premiership. We can feel like we took it to them for moments, but in the wash-up Melbourne fans won’t be thinking too much about this one. For them, it was a comfortable four points won from an unmemorable opponent.

Round 7, 2022
St Kilda 2.3, 3.6, 3.13, 4.18 (42)
Port Adelaide 0.2, 1.4, 4.6, 5.13 (43)
Crowd: 6,645 at Cazalys Stadium, Saturday, April 30th at 7.25pm

For St Kilda supporters, the early part of this season has been about learning to trust this team, and about enjoying what that brings.

That probably reached a peak last week with a fighting win against GWS in a cold Canberra in what was arguably our best of the year. But rarely have I been more certain of a St Kilda loss than heading into Saturday night; 149 years of trust issues will trump five weeks of feel-good footy.

GWS in Canberra presented a big enough banana peel. But a 1-5 “Port Adelaide” in “Cairns”? Are you shitting me? That’s a recipe for St Kilda disaster. One win over Port in 11 years, including very tight losses in 2012, 2013, 2017, and last year. We weren’t going to get away from gravity two weeks in a row.

For anyone who was an impressionable child in the early 1990s (or older), interstate games have been fraught with all sorts of danger. Last week I reeled off a list of those late 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s losses where we lost the ability to play Australian Rules football and were overwhelmed by anxiety. Round 15 in Adelaide in 1997, Fremantle in 1998, Brisbane Lions in the last game of 1998, Sydney a week later in the Qualifying Final, Fremantle in 2002, losses in Tasmania to Port in 2004 in 2005 (and then a win in 2006 courtesy of a shanked Motlop kick after the siren), “Whispers in the Sky” against Freo in 2005, West Coast in the season opener of 2006, Freo twice in 2006, including Sirengate. These were mostly played in years in which we were a much more competitive team. The Richo era was all about dire performances interstate with a hallmark of slow starts; games that were done by quarter- or half-time. Big losses at the Adelaide Oval in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, to go with the heartbreak of the Port loss in the latter year; big losses in Perth in 2015 and 2016, Canberra in 2019 – hell, even Geelong was horrible – but a more nuanced foe emerged in recent years: novelty stadiums, mostly via games (and consequently) premiership points that we sold for cheery dollars. Launceston failed while Hawthorn made it work. Wellington was zero wins from three losses. Gold Coast in Townsville in 2019 barely went OK, Shanghai not so much. Melbourne in Darwin in 2020 was a two-point loss to a (then) lesser opponent as the season spluttered. Adelaide in Cairns last year was a disaster, a 36-0 lead given up as we spent the second half waiting to lose, and St Kilda simply had to keep us in suspense until the final seconds, just to really string us along.

History was going to repeat.

The fantastical St Kilda F.C. Archive posted the entirety of that 2017 loss to Port Adelaide during the week. I had to steel myself for this week. I watched from the stoppage on the wing with about 90 seconds left, as we held a 10-point lead after a stirring comeback that should have made for what would have been the best win of the season. I watched Seb Ross put in a weak inside 50 that went straight to a Port defender, I watched Port rebound, I watched all the weak one-on-one contests that led to Aaron Young’s goal that put the rest in motion. I watched more weak and anxious one-on-ones, and then Paddy Ryder’s wonderful hit from a throw-in to Robbie Gray for a goal with seven seconds left, also made possible by a trailing Seb Ross and a disappearing Blake Acres.

Yes, history was going to repeat.

***

Tonight is absolutely the kind of the game St Kilda loses.

— Red, White and Black (@RWBFooty) April 30, 2022

The journo who opened up Ratts’ press conference after GWS with “6-1, how do you feel?” jinxed this one a week out. I absolutely jinxed it further in a meeting during the week when someone brought up the Saints and I joked “You get sick of winning”. I was obviously, obviously joking – I am a St Kilda supporter for fuck’s sake – but even before I opened my mouth to say it knew I would be tempting fate. The Footy Gods won’t allow you to even indulge in humour at your own expense without punishment. I put money on Port Adelaide out of guilt, but also out of supreme confidence that we wouldn’t be able to dodge a second banana peel in two weeks. Things just don’t work like that at St Kilda.

The media hype this week wasn’t in the same overdrive, but it started to focus on a few specifics. Bitcoin enthusiast Jack Higgins moved into the footy consciousness – one of David King’s top five in-form players in the comp; Nathan Jones was talking about him on Dwayne’s World, and he drew enough attention for Leigh Matthews put a question mark over his work rate. Andrew Wu ran a feature on Snags that described him as “the talk of the football world for his goals”. For the right reasons we were the subject of David King’s analysis; this week it was Brad Hill’s work in the forward line to make space for Max King, after he’d been praised during the broadcast on Friday for working hard to stretch the field as we tried working the ball forward. Even D-Mac got the club website treatment. David King said if we brought our defence to offence transition to mid-table we’d have the best Champion Data profile in the league.

***

The Bureau of Metereology offered typically warm Cairns conditions with a 70% chance of showers. The humidity at night on its own would make for very similar conditions to another Saturday night game against Port a few years ago. Why would the AFL schedule a game for this time of year in Cairns if they want to showcase not just the game to a non-heartland market? Of course, Port had been played into form the week before by West Coast, and they would avoid us at home in front of fans for a ninth straight year. We’ve gone to Tasmania, to Shanghai and to Cairns, and brought on a pandemic to make it all happen. This time, we’d return to the scene of one of last year’s biggest crimes (out of several whoppers).

Signs were good early despite the slippery conditions. After spending most of the year giving up the first few goals we owned the first quarter everywhere but 30 metres within goal and on the scoreboard. Tom Campbell, who for some reason plays for St Kilda now, welcomed himself by kicking the first behind. In hindsight it may have been folly to push for a second ruck to come in given the conditions. Otherwise, the Saints had a good early run with the umpires across the ground, really. Max won a soft pushing free from his most hated part of the ground – 25 metres on next to no angle – but a dissent 50-metre penalty took him to the goal line. It was the perfect chance to get his confidence up early after the 1.7 in Canberra.

Our structures and contested work were looking solid. Port could barely string a couple of possessions together and were forced into going down the line to little or no effect. By the same token, we couldn’t quite get the link up between players and much fluid ball movement happening, and even if we did, a lot of our entries were long hurried kicks that brought Aliir Aliir right into the game. We broke through by slicing through the middle to Hill, who took on Houston and Amon from the handball and delivered to Higgins, delivering exactly what he was brought to the club for. Higgins missed the set shot.

In our quest to stretch the ground, Hill was again finding space on the wings, and added to his physical game with a big hit on Jonas. Long was reprising his reliable role off half-back, and NWM was also offering some speed and run out wide. But nothing was really changing with the entries. Repeated entries, sure, and D-Mac gave us some reward for effort with a nice goal, but even with Max King launching at everything he just wasn’t bringing them down, and there wasn’t enough coming from our guys at the fall. We were too predictable.

We finished the quarter up 24 to 8 in inside 50s, but only for a quarter-time for a 2.3 to 0.1 lead. There was no way we going to have the same amount of space for Higgins to trying blasting the cover off the ball and Max to miss easy set shots on this night.

The second quarter started a little better. Aliir was everywhere still, but we managed to avoid him by cutting through the middle off half-back via Steele and Ross, who found Hill who again provided the perfect pass to a leading Higgins. Snags honoured Hill’s good work this time and a 19-point lead had been opened up.

***

Port got their first just a few moments later when D-Mac let the ball go straight through his hands and Ollie Wines shat out a goal from the spill. They were the opportunities that needed to be taken.

The ball movement dried up again as Port muscled their way into the contested ball. Ratts was starting to look frustrated in the box. Ryder missed a shot out of the ruck with more time than he thought he had. Sinclair and Hill off half-back kicked it straight to Aliir; Aliir lost his feet a few moments later and still won the crumb from Campbell’s kick. Butler and Hill had the break on the broadcast side and the ball slipped out; Gresham twice blazed away and missed. Membrey and Steele dropped sitters around the ground as the ball became almost unusable. Campbell managed to pick out three Port players. Membrey finally found space off Aliir and kicked to two one-on-ones but to no one’s advantage. NWM made a mockery of the conditions with an awesome pick up just inside 50; but he still hasn’t quite settled with ball in hand inside 50 yet. His hurried kick was turned over.

Port were good enough to change things up at half-time. As soon as the Channel 7 graphic showed “St Kilda has outscored their opposition by 146 points in second halves this season”, the Power had found Robbie Gray on the lead. They were moving the ball faster; the quarters began with a much for usable footy and they made the most of it, working into space, kicking short and sharp and fast. Farrell was hit up just a couple of minutes later, and all our inside 50s and domination of the first quarter and parts of the second had just about been wiped.

Again, we were face-to-face with 149 years of trust issues. In the lead up to the GWS game, part of me had started daring to trust. I’d dared to trust that Max King would kick goals from all angles; that Seb Ross and Dan Butler to get arsey handballs out of traffic, that Nasiah would hit targets; that Jack Steele would lead from the front; that Jack Sinclair would be used in the right part of the ground; that Jade Gresham would pop up at the right time. Simply, we have to win these. A tough draw is coming up. Melbourne, Brisbane twice, Sydney twice, Geelong twice, Fremantle again, Carlton to come. The early season honeymoon period is now giving way to games really counting for something. While Luke Dunstan is getting a game with the best team in the league, The Bizarro Rivalry Cold War with Freo took another turn during the afternoon as the Dockers announced themselves as the real deal and Blake Acres got the post-match interview treatment on Fox as one of their best. We want to announce ourselves, too. We’ve been waiting for a long time.

But the leaders weren’t really leading. Steele and Crouch weren’t at their best when we needed some more presence in the contest against Wines and Boak and Rozee. Sinclair was effective but dulled. It felt like the magic was gone. Butler went the banana that has come off in recent weeks through Gresham and Crouch, but it drifted wide. Ryder’s long set shot missed, so did D-Mac’s low percentage kick from the pocket. Butler chose to not pass to Higgins all on his own 40 metres out. Ken was looking smug in the box. Gray was gifted a 50-metre penalty that was incorrectly if it was given for Dougal moving off the mark and incorrectly given if it was for Steele running inside the protected zone. He kicked the goal. Scores were level.

***

There wasn’t a Max or Snags quarter this week, but there were Max and Snags patches.

A long entry finally came off (sort of ) when Max was dumped at the fall by Bonner and won a free kick 20 metres out. Finally, a chance to get one our way. He tossed and turned the ball in his hands repeatedly as he was walking in and fluffed the ball drop, and the weak kick went to the left. We’d gone from 3.3 to 3.11.

A spoil on 50 was forced from Port’s kick-out, and Windhager turned beautifully out of the fall and bulleted a kick to Higgins just on 40 metres out, on little to no angle. Snags missed again. 3.12. Windhager and Hill worked off half-back a couple of minutes later and it was down to a foot race between Gresham who won the free, but the banana missed again. We would go into three-quarter time at 3.13 (we were 3.12 in the 2017 game). Luke Darcy’s mic started cutting out as the game hit a penultimate crescendo, as Motlop ran in and bananaed a miss. A one-point lead at the final change with nothing trustworthy or sustainable about what we were doing. This was a horrifying mash-up of the 2017 game and the 2009 Grand Final.

There’s a magnifying glass on every moment in a loss like this. We have a second loss of this season that we can attribute largely to poor disposal and poor kicking at goal; and yet another game that for better or much worse revolves around Max and Snags. In Round 1 they combined for 1.7 and a lot of dropped marks. On Saturday night they combined for 2.5 with multiple easy shots at goal missed. We’ve had wins this year we can owe to them; we’ve also had multiple losses last year and this year we can owe to them.

Max actually opened the final quarter with a goal – it came from a Brad Hill tackle, and then another Brad Hill another excellent forward entry to Max on the lead, 25 metres out on a slight angle. Max sent it through. The margin was seven points, and we won the ball out of the middle with a Steele tackle on Rozee, Gresham hit up King again in nearly an identical spot. He had the chance to all but bust open the game then and there; to open up a 13-point lead and give the team belief that yet again we would be able to run the opposition off their legs. His shot drifted across the face.

***

Given a reprieve, Port wrestled back the game. An unlucky ricochet out-on-full free-kick led to Todd Marshall converting a very decent set shot, and then it was Port’s turn to miss opportunities. Amon delivered the perfect pass to Farrell who missed from close range, and then the ball came straight back in and Robbie Gray swooped. It was made for him; he turned around the corner but missed. Scores level. But he would have his moment yet. Of course he would.

Has anything been so pathetically inevitable? Perhaps last year, against the other South Australian team at the same ground. This was the same process – a sad, two-and-a-half-hour march knowing exactly what would happen, just waiting for it all to physically happen out so we know how it played out and what it looked like on the footage. A lot of the trust built up in the previous five weeks was being burned with every weak kick off the ground, every harried long kick into the forward line to no one in particular’s advantage, and every missed shot at goal. You keep thinking, ok, maybe someone will bob up. Maybe Gresham. Maybe Higgins. Maybe Max. But apart from that brief moment when Max had the ball in his hands with the chance to open up the game, this felt like a countdown to disaster. Certainly when a string of Port Adelaide behinds put them in front and Bonner looked set to stretch the margin beyond a goal, and even when we found ourselves in front thanks to our own run of behinds. No one was stepping up. Howard in defence tried playing on around Marshall and danced his way into trouble and a smothered kick that fell over the boundary line. Steele spilled another short hit-up, Crouch finally found time and space on the edge of 50 but grubbed the kick to King on the lead. NWM, clearly one of our best and most daring all night, put in a fantastic chase along the wing that gained the best part of the distance between the arcs but Ross fluffed his lines.

There was a turn to attack again. NWM, again, rushed himself with the sticks in sight and tumbled a ball through from just inside 50 when he probably had a little more time than he thought. Ryder followed up his own ruck contest from a forward pocket throw-in and gave off to Higgins whose kick faded to the left and hit the post. Howard and Wood did well as Port came out of defence, as they chose to go shorter from the kick-in after long kicks hadn’t worked all night. Ross’s long ball to the square came off Membrey’s hands; Battle, thrown forward out of desperation, couldn’t get to it and Aliir rushed the behind. Scores level.

There were two moments in which we had control of the ball in the final minutes that in isolation could have gone a long way to us winning the game. Long at ground level, D-Mac and Seb Ross won the ball back on the defensive side of the wing and Ross’s pass fell through Hill’s fingers, but he reacted quickly and kicked the ball off the ground and the ball went straight to Max, by himself just inside 50. Maybe he was gassed from reaching a contest in the same spot a few moments earlier, because he hadn’t moved; he picked up the ball and immediately turned and sliced it high, either unaware of or too tired to take the opportunity to take a few steps and straighten up given all the space he had around him. In the goal square, Burton had Higgins covered and rushed the ball. We were in front; it didn’t feel like it.

Port won the ball from a harried kick from Paton and skirted the broadcast side to go deep into attack. Rozee found the ball in the pocket but was chased out of it, and Butters’ snap just went across the face. Scores level again.

The second moment was actually played out in two parts. Howard went long from the kick-in to a two-on-one (that’s in Port’s favour, mind you), but the ball fell to the front into the hands of Ryder. He found Gresham on the wing, but even with plenty of space he couldn’t manage to kick it to advantage at half-forward (or into space over the top) and the ball came back. Membrey effected a spoil from Duursma’s torp and followed up his own work and we were able to relaunch of the defensive side of the centre square again. Long had time and gave off to Ross running past. Ross, whose weak kick forward in 2017 began the calamitous minute of football, had been arguably our best on this night. He only had to hit Higgins on the lead with a 30-metre kick and we’d have the ball in our hands at the top of the 50-metre arc. But his kick fell short; Higgins was left scrambling on the ground to retrieve it. Burton, Wines and Farrel worked it away and out of the disputed ball Rozee gave off to Butters, and Houston’s kick wide into the 50-metre arc found Robbie Gray, of all people, who just like five years earlier was somehow all by himself in space. The ball sat up for him and he steadied on the boundary line. Any score would probably do with just over 30 seconds on the clock. He kicked the point. Howard’s kick-out into the middle was won back by the Power, and back into Robbie Gray’s hands.

***

They’re the best games to win and the worst games to lose. They’re a lot worse when you kick yourself out of it. There was nothing honourable in this one. Just an awful of anxiety that yielded 4.18, our most inaccurate performance since…well, last year, when we kicked 5.17 against the Cats’ 10.8 in the game where Max dominated but kicked 1.5.

Richo said after the 2017 loss to Port that it was “a bloody costly way to learn your lesson”. Did we actually learn anything? Five years later, we’re still making stupid basic mistakes interstate against Port Adelaide, leaving Robbie Gray free in the dying seconds and giving Ken a licence to look smug.

The five-game winning streak is dead, long live the possibly three-game losing streak that’s heading our way. Our excellent April finishes in ignominy. This was the third of Gerard’s three weeks before he wanted to make a judgement on whether or not we were the real deal. A mini-blockbuster on a Sunday afternoon at the MCG against the Demons on a Sunday afternoon beckoned – what would have been our biggest home and away game in Melbourne perhaps since playing for top spot against Collingwood in Round 16 in 2010. It would have been better for the club than some quick dollars in Cairns could ever make up for. Those dollars certainly wouldn’t make up for finishing in certain parts of the ladder by the end of the season, if that’s what Saturday night costs us (indeed, on Monday morning, Gerard opened his show saying “St Kilda is counting the dollars and the cost”). In the pre-match, Channel 7 had played some upbeat highlights about the Saints guys enjoying themselves on their few days away in Cairns. I hope the two-minute puff piece that this game allowed for was worth it for everyone at the club, the AFL, Cairns Regional Council and the Queensland government. Playing in Cairns wasn’t the reason we lost – the Herald Sun’s expected score was 67 to 54 in our favour; we kicked 1.15 from our last 16 shots, and Port were playing on the same ground – but playing in Cairns is the reason why we played on a neutral ground in conditions that absolutely made this game a 50/50. Even with those odds, you know which side St Kilda will fall on. We’re just left to replay all those last moments in our head hoping they turned out differently.

The ghosts of 2017 remain. I posted on Twitter early on Saturday afternoon “Tonight is absolutely the kind of game St Kilda loses.” Someone replied, “I’m so tired of the whole loser narrative surrounding St Kilda. It’s about time the supporters stopped perpetuating it”. We’re tired of it too. But we’re not the ones out there. We pay for memberships and for tickets and go through the logistical rigmarole to attend and watch games and provide the clicks for the club’s feel-good content. We don’t get hundreds of thousands of dollars each year or media careers out of this. The club’s had 149 years to change our minds and build our trust. Saturday night was another chance. Again, they blew it.

Round 6, 2022
GWS Giants 3.4, 7.7, 7.9, 8.12 (60)
St Kilda 4.5, 5.8, 9.12, 10.17 (77)
Crowd: 11,207 at Manuka Oval, Friday, April 22nd at 7.50pm

Anything can be a banana peel if you’re the St Kilda Football Club. Going in 4-1 against an opposition whose premiership window is slamming shut, their coach under the pump and all the media hype surrounding the return of a game-changing bad boy? Banana peel. A 19-0 start with three middling-to-poor teams to come in the final three weeks of the year before finals? Banana peel.

This wasn’t quite the same week on media street as the flurry leading up to the Gold Coast the previous Saturday (I neglected to mention Peter Ryan’s “Saints’ King-dom come” on game day), at least, right until AFL.com.au on Friday ran with a headline mentioning the f-word – no, not the M-rated “finals”, and not even the MA-rated “four”, but the XXX-rated “flag”. The last time we were 4-1 and made it to game day The Age called us “the story of the year”. We lost, and Richo was sacked three months later.

Really, all the build-up this week was around Leon Cameron and Toby Greene. Cameron almost gave up the job mid-interview on 360 on the Monday, and Gerard and Robbo spent the next two nights discussing it, with the show giving the story the moody vignette treatment on Wednesday. Summing it all up, should Cameron go, Gerard posed of the Giants, “What was the point of 2022?”. To make St Kilda supporters nervous, I suggested from my couch.

Toby Greene was given a whole 35 minutes one-on-one with Derm in Fox Footy’s new Face to Face program, which was probably both a lazy production decision and also a reflection of 2022 demands for Content All of the Time and broadcasters’ and the media’s thirst for players to become celebrities so they can feel aggrandised themselves. A bog-standard quote becomes a news item or an intense and moody graphic on social media and then a whole Twitter conversation. I don’t know if Jimmy Webster selling his house would have quite been the news item in years past.

Toby’s six-match suspension finished just in time for him to take on the Saints. No conspiracy there, of course, just something that would happen to the Saints, much like the overcorrection from the Match Review Panel and Paddy’s bump. The extended Channel 7 intro to the main broadcast was all about Toby, including a quick mention of his assault suit played as a bad boy character quirk.

A chance for St Kilda redemption in the Friday night slot after Round 1 likely spelled more calamity given our lack of prime-time wins in recent years. Not helping was Jones out with the Health and Safety Protocols, and then Joey during the week decided to give Lachie Whitfield a rocket; he literally said “he’s doing nothing”. Just in time for him to take on the Saints.

***

After four wins on the trot that began with giving up the first two goals (three in the Freo match), we went with the bold move to not only win the centre clearance and kick the wrong way out of the middle via Brad Crouch, but also kick the first goal, through Rowan Marshall drawing a free kick against human-as-mountain Braydon Preuss. It was part of a big opening for Marshall, including a huge leap in a ruck contest and laying a big tackle, picking up where he left off from his season-best game against Gold Coast. Perhaps we’d be ok without Paddy for a second week.

Things started looking a bit dodgy not soon after when Higgins blasted a point from near the top of the square after a deft wobbler from Butler. Up the other end Greene made an instant impact, of course, recovering from a marking contest while Dougal was slipping and sliding behind Idun and his high kick to the goal square somehow ended with Bobby Hill beating all of Webster, Dougal and D-Mac. 

Higgins had a shot at redemption soon after a lucky high-tackle free as he stayed low and decided to kick around the corner. Again, he tried to kick it into Lake Burley Griffin but missed another from close range (10 months later, BT ran with the Missy Higgins gag). Kicking the first goal and Higgins missing easy shots sounded a lot like the Round 1 misadventure. The ball went up the other end for Greene to find space on Wilkie, gather, turn and just miss. He was already looking dangerous.

We didn’t look like a team that warranted any of the f-words until Long’s switch in defence and an excellent kick from Battle hit Paton, who went short to Crouch and passed perfectly to Haye, who took a classic arms-out-in-front strong mark on the lead. He went back and kicked it from decent range.

Preuss himself loomed as a banana peel. Swamp pointed out during the week we have the largest number of Rising Star nominations against in the competition. Preuss doesn’t actually qualify, but in just his 21^st game this would be the perfect chance for him to get his big break. We’re only happy to make anyone else’s dreams come true. A goal and a big mark put him on the radar.

Gresham picked up where he left off from the previous week and snapped through an awesome banana goal that was more at home on The 90s: The Decade that Delivered. We were kicking the harder ones, it seemed, but it was immediately undone as we couldn’t work with our numbers from the bounce Ward punished the clumsiness from outside 50.

The inability to get some fluid consistent movement of the ball meant another lot of Sherrins being bombed from high up onto a double- and triple-teamed Max. Again, he wasn’t losing contests but the ball use going forward was haphazard and not to anyone’s benefit. He finally found the run and jump at the end of the quarter and took a huge mark on 50, but his post-siren kick hit the woodwork. The signs otherwise were good – 24 tackles was our highest in a quarter this year – but we probably should have been up by more than seven points.

***

As soon as “Hayes suspected ACL” was mentioned on the commentary Tom Green cruised through and Matt Flynn took a huge grab in front of goal. Marshall would have to take Preuss on himself, and a forward target that could take some heat off Max was gone, but more importantly after just five-and-a-bit games we’d lost a player who’d earned the club’s respect for his work rate right across the ground, never mind the work he put in to get his career to this position. (Part of me was angry that he did the initial damage to his knee because Haynes’ forearm was being forced into his head with no repercussions). It was great to hear Ratts straight after game say he’ll be getting a new contract. He’s the kind of player that is the yardstick for effort; that you’d think that if everyone tried as hard as he did all the time we’d be nearly unstoppable.

Something was up. King took a great contested mark against Lachie Keeffe but missed again. D-Mac and NWM kicked balls out on the full, Windhager had some sloppy moments, Matt Flynn won a soft free and put GWS in front. Long slammed Bobby Hill into the turf off the ball in frustration. Toby Greene missed a shot but the ball came straight back and he made up for the miss.

The Giants had ramped up the pressure and we were -8 in ground ball gets at half-time. The running game had dried up and like Round 1, we were too often going long down the line hoping Max would bail us out with a big grab. Otherwise, if we tried holding on to the ball we were drawn into the short chip game as seen in the worst of the pre-season.

The GWS momentum was briefly broken when Crouch took it upon himself to banana a goal through from the boundary after a wayward Perryman pass. Again, it was the hard one that went through. GWS quickly got it back on their terms via some D-Mac umpire dissent for saying the ball hit the ground, and Ward cashed in immediately. The rule had been in the spotlight all week so even if the ball did hit the ground (which it didn’t) and regardless what you think of the rule as a player, just shut the fuck up for a second (we’d been lucky earlier when Ben Long was penalised for a blatant arms out). D-Mac’s reaction of controlled mild entertainment to the umpire giving the 50 was very funny.

Max finally got the jump in a one-on-one closer to goal next to Flynn and it was time for him to hit the scoreboard, but he missed with a limp shot that floated left (after putting some alpha bodywork into Flynn after he took the mark). Idun, who was creating problems in his move to the forward line, just missed a snap. The Giants were up and about and we were barely hanging on. At half-time, Hill and Gresham each had only five touches. GWS was winning score from stoppages 4.1 to 2.1 as Marshall was getting worked over (last week we’d won the stat by 40 points). Hill finally found the footy on the wing in an attacking position and went for a long run; he cut in to Max who gathered the ball on 50 and wheeled around and the ball floated wobbled in the air before falling on the wrong side of the post. This was a different type of Max King quarter.

***

It’s at this point we were face-to-face with 149 years of trust issues. During the week I’d dared to trust Max King to receive the ball from the air and to kick goals from all angles; to trust Seb Ross and Dan Butler to get arsey handballs out of traffic, to trust Nasiah to hit targets; to trust Jack Steele to lead all day and night; to trust Jack Sinclair to create, to trust Jade Gresham to both create and finish (also from all angles). But how many times have we seen Saints teams wobble like this interstate? This had all the hallmarks of those late 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s losses where we appear to either outright lose the ability to play Australian Rules football on the plane or are overwhelmed by anxiety, and possibly some misfortune. Round 15 in Adelaide in 1997, Fremantle in 1998, Brisbane Lions in the last game of 1998, Sydney a week later in the Qualifying Final, Fremantle in 2002, losses in Tasmania to Port in 2004 in 2005, “Whispers in the Sky” against Freo in 2005, West Coast in the season opener of 2006, Freo twice in 2006, including Sirengate. That’s just some of them.

King opened the second half with another mark and another miss. Five kicks for 0.5 in just over 37 minutes of football. It didn’t help that a lot of the shots were from tough angles, but by the time he’d taken his night to an absurd 1.7 halfway through the last quarter you would have thought a few of them would have gone through given some the shots he’d kicked over the last few weeks (I think he becomes the first Saint to kick seven behinds since Stephen Milne kicked 4.7 in a draw against Richmond early in 2011). We found the ball back from the kick-out and Gresham wheeled around from 50, and Haynes touched the ball on the line. Our magic was running out.

But the moment came soon after. Preuss took the mark on the 50 from a quick GWS rebound, but rather than go long or assess his options, he quickly went for the handball to Green going past and completely missed him. Steele won the ball and got the handball out; he’d been taken high and Hill ran onto the ball and took the advantage along the wing. During the game and in the wash-up he was praised more for his hard running to stretch the field while we looked to move the footy (great interview with Brad Crouch on Saturday discussing it here), but here he had his moment with the ball in hand and deftly cut in to find Higgins by boot. Still inside the centre square and with no one in the forward line, he wheeled around without looking and blasted the ball again. The ball simply had to go through. The bounce wasn’t perfect, but it found its way. The Jack Higgins quarter had been activated.

***

During the replay of the goal, the inset shot showed Marshall was off and into the rooms, with a corkie on top of the corkie he copped last week. This one was worse, and he’d spend most of the rest of the game on the exercise bike. Josh Battle would have to complete the set of positions he’s played on the ground and have to give away centimetres and kilograms against Preuss in playing as the ruck and effectively an extra midfielder. Soon after being thrust into the role he worked off Preuss to charge into defence and chase down Himmelberg as the Giants entered 50 on the rebound.

Higgins followed his goal just over a minute and a half later with a snap from 25 out after a tumbling Gresham kick found Keeffe, and Max pounced on him and forced a wayward handball that Snags was there to immediately deal with, and then gave some to Keeffe as the ball sailed through. A bit of swagger is creeping back. Seb Ross helped engineer Snags’ third in six minutes with some good bodywork on Whitfield who was trying to complete a mark, a steady gather and tidy enough pass on his non-preferred to Higgins on the 50; as he had against the Suns Higgins had read the play expertly and was already running into space. Like a number of important goals that this season has conjured up so far, this one would require an excellent individual effort. Snags turned his back on the play and rocketed the ball through.

Max finally broke through for his first of the match after winning a holding free in front of goal. A 13-point buffer had been opened up – all four goals were from turnover – and we really should have had more by the end of the third. Wood and Paton burned entries, Snags was smothered on the goal line, and Wood missed an easy shot under Taylor’s pressure. But we’d needed to change what we were doing within the game, effectively two men down, and it was happening. By game’s end we’d be 19 to the positive in ground ball gets.

***

GWS hadn’t won a final quarter this year. Really, all we had to do was break even, but that wasn’t going to be as comfortable as it sounds. We spent most of the quarter weathering an orange and charcoal storm. Repeated stoppages, repeated defensive 50 entries. The game finished with a comical hit-out count of 77 to 19, with Josh Battle playing one of the best one hit-out games from a ruckman you’ll ever see in really what could be a career-defining performance as he was repeatedly worked over by bigger bodies but competed and competed at the stoppages.

The Giants would win the stoppage clearance count but good opportunities in the final quarter were few and far between as Steele, Crouch, Ross, Gresham, Battle and even Windhager went to work in close. Preuss was consistently trying to create movement and clear the congested space by thumping the ball and it finally paid off when Whitfield ran onto a knock for a deep entry and Paton got caught holding the ball at the top of the square.

This was going to be a true grind. Marshall tried coming back on and planting himself in the goal square but Hill missed him. Max bobbed up with two more behinds – including a painfully close snap around the corner from another tough angle – and he and Gresham had opportunities to ice the game late. Wilkie dropped an easy mark at centre half-back to keep things interesting, but we also got help from the Giants. Flynn took a contested mark just 20 metres out on an easy angle but unnecessarily gave the ball off the Himmelberg, and his snap was lucky to be called a point. It bought the margin to 11 points, and a reverse Aussie Jones point against the Lions in 2004 ran through my mind. Gresham’s set shot from near 50 was thumped through for behind from an unmarked GWS defender who could have easily taken the mark, and took the margin back to an even two goals.

There was barely time to take a breath. BT and James Brayshaw started talking about the game as if it was a done deal in the final couple of minutes. I impolitely requested them to stop this from the couch, and there was just a little more to play out. Greene broke through a Webster tackle on the boundary line and Coniglio and Taranto worked through Sinclair; Coniglio could have hit up Whitfield or Flynn on a much better angle but he elected to go the banana. It clipped the inside of the post, and instead of a potential 2017 vs Port Adelaide-style finish we got something closer to Round 7, 2013 vs Carlton.

***

Games like this are often sealed when the team that has been weathering the storm find an opening late. Something breaks. Ours came from Butler’s pressure on the wing on Haynes and some quick hands from D-Mac, Max and Crouch that released Ross, and his pass was excellently-weighted to Higgins who again had worked forward to a great spot. Crouch had kept running, overtaking his opponent, and Higgins showed again how much he’d learned from Round 1 and gave off to Crouch for an easy goal. The game was done. Exhausted, victorious. We would be able to listen to The Fable Singers post-siren on the broadcast and watch all the Channel 7 prime time post-match faff about the Saints, including heartfelt questions from Richo to Jack Steele about what he’s liking about this team the most and BT asking Brad Hill about which pizza he wants. We would get through without Greene kicking four and being the story of the week, we would get through without GWS pulling their season out of the fire under all sorts of pressure against a team supposedly on the up. We would avoid the banana peel, we would be able to enjoy another week.

The spotlight shifts a little away from Max this week and onto Snags. Every game this year has been largely about either or both (by game’s end they averaged the most and second-most scoring shots this year respectively); we now have three wins in five weeks that we can largely owe to Higgins. He has now kicked hauls of four in a 10-point win, five in a 26-point win, and four in a 17-point win, each of them with game-turning bursts.

This may well have been the best win of the five. Two weeks ago we played the sexiest football this club has produced in years on a beautiful afternoon at the MCG. On Friday night we won ugly, coming from behind with two men down and no ruck in the freezing dark of Canberra, and it was at least as satisfying. Battle’s game typified the entire team’s performance; he finished the game Hollywood-placed cut under his eye with a blood drip that was happy to walk around with and show off afterwards.

I’d built up beating Gold Coast way too much that in my mind it became the Gateway to Being Good, completely forgetting there’s the weekly grind of a season to get through. As we settle into the colder months and Bob Murphy’s rhythm of the season, another test awaits next weekend. For now, it’s about this team looking like it wants the challenge, and we as fans learning to trust it and enjoy it again, bit by bit.

Round 5, 2022
St Kilda 3.3, 6.7, 9.8, 13.9 (87)
Gold Coast 3.1, 6.1, 7.4, 9.7 (61)
Crowd: 18,724 at Docklands, Saturday, April 16th at 1.45pm

This was a week in the footy consciousness that St Kilda hadn’t really had since 2010. Except maybe for when The Age called us “the story of the year” when we went 4-1 in 2019, and our coach was sacked three months later.

We were the week’s big winners for Gerard on Monday’s 360, although he said he still needed to see the next three weeks (Robbo was more sold). Nick Dal Santo uttered the words “Dusty” and “Petracca” in the vicinity of “Gresham”. We were front and centre in the Real Footy podcast. Paddy’s bump and suspension was big news, partly because of the grey area the AFL finds itself in with these incidents, partly because St Kilda actually mattered in the context of the competition. We got the deep dive and a lot of praise from David King and Leigh Montagna on Wednesday’s 360.The crowning glory of the week was perhaps the most effusive Ross Lyon we’ve ever seen: “If you’re a Saints supporter, get excited because their teamsmanship and their commitment is at levels I haven’t seen for a long time”. (Read: “since my heyday”).

St Kilda was part of Mick’s multi to cover the line at 19.5. Janice Petersen wore a top that was close to the jumper we wore from 1893 to 1914, complete with thick black collar. The hype rolled on right through to the feature article on Gresh on the AFL site on match day as he prepared for his 100^th game (by going to Elsternwick Subway with Rowan Marshall). This was all tempting fate, and the club leaned in and wheeled out Gresh’s match winner from 2018 against the Gold Coast on the socials (as well as a more extended highlights package for his 100^th).

pic.twitter.com/q2ulREGg5q

— Red, White and Black (@RWBFooty) April 13, 2022

I wanted to embrace it as much as I could. Even though there is a wild amount of media coverage (not to mention tin pot blogs like this), just as soon as you beat Hawthorn on a sunny Sunday afternoon with the sexiest football you’ve played since the GT and Ross eras, it can all be taken from you by a loss tucked away under the roof on a sunny Saturday afternoon to the Gold Coast Suns (or the Gold Coast SUNS, as they keep trying to remind us).

Really, I ended up reading into it all too much. Ross the ex-Boss’s praise had become a giant fuck-off banana peel and by Saturday I’d built up this match up to be a Gateway to Being Good. (The warm weather and hype was more suited to September than mid-April.) By the end of Saturday ABC Grandstand posed the question of whether or not we were a top four team. Dare to dream, I guess? But we have 149 years’ worth of trust issues. Let the record show that the last time we were here, the coach was sacked. There was also one year not too long ago we started 19-0, and nothing came of that.

***

The closer we got the first bounce the more panicky I got. It was an absolutely gorgeous early autumn day in Melbourne on Saturday, hitting 28 degrees with only a light wind. I got off the 55 tram and walked through the sunshine in the city, under the Gresham Street sign on Bourke Street, crossed the bridge, and was met with…the Concrete Dome roof closed. We were about to be unceremoniously dumped by the competition’s whipping boys in an echoing tin can. I put money on the Gold Coast at $3.35.

We started this one with the tried and tested method of giving up the first two goals of the game. In every one of our four wins now we’ve given up the first two (first three against Freo). Unlike the last couple of weeks, this wasn’t two in the first couple of minutes, but Gold Coast had settled into the game quickly. They were linking up with sharp, low, direct, quick kicks right across the ground. After being tagged out of their Round 3 match against GWS, Touk Miller had bounced back against the Blues and resumed looking his dangerous self and set up both Ben Ainsworth and Levi Casboult on the lead for early goals with perfect passes inside 50.

We needed Callum Wilkie’s first-ever goal and then some inspired stoppage work from Paddy and Gresh to get us on going in the past two weeks; on Saturday it was a string of multiple efforts from multiple players out of a ball up near the middle of the ground. Ross worked off Miller; D-Mac went to ground in a tackle and traded knocks with Sinclair, and then lying on his front managed to knock the ball out along the ground to Ross. That was all it took for the Saints to complete the transition from defence to offence. Ben Long was running off the back of the centre square, received the ball and gave to Sinclair, who had bounced up and handballed forward to Steele. Long kept running and thumped the ball to the top of the square. King was triple-teamed – the first time he’d be outnumbered on many occasions for the day – and Collins tried claiming the mark as the ball popped up and back down. Hayes was also there and with brute force wrestled the ball out of Collins’ hands, forced out a handball to Higgins, and Snags gathered the ball and snapped around the corner.

That’s a lot of blog space to spend on what was just our first goal of the game, but it was going to take repeated efforts like these, peppered with some individual moments of nous and brilliance, to cut through a grinding game. Higgins had a second goal not long afterwards that came from Marshall forcing a kick out of a ruck contest that was met by King up on the wing who handballed to Gresham running past. Higgins has already seen the whole thing unfolding and was sprinting ahead towards an open goal by this point, and Gresh found him. But St Kilda had a tough time getting the ball moving at the best of times and wrapping up the Suns the other way. It took all of four neat sharp kicks from half-back for the Suns (Miller again) to set up Levi to go ahead with their third. They owned the corridor a few times, together with the lone seagull who spent nearly the entire game in the centre square.

Gresh created the third with a dead butterfly kick from 45 metres out near the boundary after we won a throw-in just outside the arc. On the other side of quarter time, Marshall kicked a beautifully-weighted ball to King in the pocket, who found himself on the right side of a one-on-one for the first time, and no could do anything about the high point at which his hands met the ball for the mark. He slotted the goal from a tough angle.

As soon as a very slight buffer had been established in the second quarter – it was nine points, with eight scoring shots to four – the Suns went on a three-goal run. Perhaps we were getting a bit complacent, perhaps the Suns just match up very well on us, perhaps we’re just not that good that we should be expecting an unrelenting four-quarter performance every week. Holman outmuscled Sinclair, who got distracted pleading with the umpire for a touched ball in the marking contest, and Rankine had kept running from the wing and combined with Chol and Ellis for a goal from the square; Dougal Howard outright missed the Sinclair target from the back pocket with a 20-metre kick and found Holman instead, who went back and slotted the goal; a quick Miller clearance from the wing bounced off hands and Chol was quickest to react, grabbing the ball, turning and expertly dribbling through a goal on his left. Within a few minutes, the game had turned the other way.

***

We’ve all been nervous about the Gold Coast going past us. Now that the Dees have saluted and left us with the only true long drought in the competition, the (next) final frontier may well be the AFL’s Latest Best Joke going past us, making finals, and winning premierships. We laughed them off nervously when we fell over the line against them in each of the past four seasons – by four, one, four, two and nine points – but it’s time for this St Kilda team to add other things to its highlights reel. It’s also time for Gold Coast to do anything at all. Are they our next rival? Do they have a list with a higher ceiling? Well, they might be the closest thing we have to a rival right now, and they still may have a higher ceiling. I was worried we were watching them go past us in real time (as I thought Collingwood might have) when Chol kicked his goal. Were we also about to be the first fill-in coach to lose a game for the year? The Suns had brought down the unbeaten Blues a week earlier, and we’re the kind of team that a crappy Fremantle could bring down while we were on a high two years ago.

Momentum either way had been scarce up until this point, and our missed opportunities were beginning to pile up. Max missed what should have been a regulation goal around the corner after another perfect Rowan Marshall pass to the opposite pocket. He made up for it soon afterwards with some substantial help from the umpire who let his hands in the back of Ballard go, but then Membrey – quiet by his standards – missed a shot that was an exact replica of King’s, and then Hill found some space inside 50 and missed after Long raced to intercept the kick-in. Steele then sliced a kick from 50 that landed in the arms of Lemmens.

The next goal actually brought about what would be the final lead change of the game. Paton’s 25-metre kick off half-back to Windhager in the middle had too much on it; players converged on the spill and after some contested footy Long thundered in head-on and put on a comprehensive tackle on Powell; Ross was there to put on a nice handball over the top that released Hill, and he was off; he steadied and found Hayes on the lead 45 out. In Row S, Matt and Rich sitting next to me both said he wouldn’t miss. “He loves the big moment.” He kicked it straight through the middle.

***

I was secretly thinking about the 2009 Grand Final half-time score line – we were up 6.7 to 6.1, both teams one goal shy of the same time of that very awful day. Had we burned our opportunities? It didn’t feel like this game would be broken open, or that we’d have too many more opportunities to burn. We were in for an arm-wrestle. More than nine minutes passed before a score was registered in the third quarter. It was Higgins’ third goal, courtesy of a Mason Wood spoil and a diving knock-on from Seb Ross that released Battle on the wing who found Sinclair by himself in the middle. He waited for the right movement ahead as he ran, took a bounce, danced past Fiorini and delivered expertly to Snags on the lead. After another 27 possessions and an afternoon of hard running off half-back, AFL.com.au suggested Sinclair was “the AFL’s most improved player”. A lot of Saints fans will tell you he’s certainly has been our best.

There was no Max King quarter this week, but there was a second grinding win in a month with Snags and Max kicking a combined eight goals. Like they did against Fremantle, they owned the third quarter; at least as much as a quarter in this game could be owned. It was only three goals in total this time, but enough to create a match-winning lead. Long – in arguably his best game, after having been shuffled across the ground no less – and Hill were involved again, breaking a run of several minutes played in the Suns’ forward half; Long’s quick kick out of defence skittled the slipping Powell and Hill was on the charge (it was nice to have a bounce actually go our way), speeding through to gather the ball and handball to Membrey. Snags again sensed it all and was already running into space on his own into 50, and charged in for his fourth. At a forward pocket throw-in just a few moments later, a tumbling Jack Hayes-shaped figure committed to a chaos contest that opened the space behind him; Mason Wood was the quickest to the react to the scramble but his handball didn’t quite make it to King’s hands, instead an agile Max reacted with a volley that went through and opened a 23-point lead. He’d been double-teamed all day but found a way to a third goal.

Never mind this potentially being a Gateway to Being Good; we just needed to get through the rest of the third quarter. Gold Coast took control of the game again. For all intents and purposes Lienert, Wilkie, Howard and Battle did incredibly well to soak up the pressure of repeated entries and only let one through it was only when Miller again found space through the middle to hit up Corbett on the lead that they found a clean opening.

After becoming the highest-scoring team in the competition with two thrilling weeks, we got something that wasn’t so aesthetically satisfying to watch. The crowd sat in tense silence for most of the game, perhaps hoping we’d bust things wide open yet again. It only happened bit by bit. Membrey was good enough to take his moment in the first minute of the final term, staying down while his opponent was drawn to Max, and swooped onto the ball that came over the top and goaled. Ross furthered the lead by finishing off his own forward 50 entry (with Max halving another double-team contest) that put the exclamation mark on his early season form and drew some much-deserved attention from Saints fans.

***

For such a difficult game there were some thrilling individual moments that cut through. Hill’s charge past Powell onto the rogue bouncing ball that ended with Higgins’ fourth was the most high-octane, but the peak might have been Gresh’s banana goal from the forward pocket with a few minutes left that truly sealed the game, and bookended his 100^th match with excellent finishes from difficult shots. We’ve got guys consistently taking it upon themselves from tough situations to back themselves in, and it’s coming off in important moments (see also NWM’s bullet kick to Wood that helped set up Gresh’s sealer). Higgins did the same soon after, happily ignoring options in the 50 and banging through a set shot from beyond the arc. When was the last time before the last few weeks we could actually enjoy these kinds of moments? Gresh’s sidestep and goal against the Cats in 2016 maybe (that night actually ended well), but otherwise it reminds you how dark the days were when Jack Steven volleying a goal from the pocket while we were down by 58 points was as spectacular as it got.

At no point did this feel like a true four-quarter performance, but we actually ended up winning every quarter and have now won 10 on the trot. A lot of that had to do with 17 more clearances and 7.6 to 1.2 scored from stoppages. That tally included our first three goals to work back into the game and multiple goals from centre bounce, including the very important first early in the final quarter to settle things. We were all freaked out by the prospect of playing without Paddy, more so given Witts is one of the better big guys in the competition, but Marshall rose above his quieter form for his best game of the season in the oversized midfielder role, while the undersized Hayes (albeit with a fantastical physique) competed very admirably in the ruck and in all parts of the ground. It was secretly nice to see him punch the ground after the final siren after he spilled (another) excellent NWM pass.

The midfield has gone from one of the shallowest in the competition to one of the most effective. Seb Ross is stringing together his most impactful season without the pressure of needing to be our first or second-best mid. Crouch won’t get many plaudits for this but was always in the right spot to feed the ball out. Jack Steele didn’t need to carry the team for the midfield to have an effect, gathering “only” 27 touches, which included an overly confident one-handed grab working off Ballard in the middle. He also provided the funniest moment of the season so far, racing off half-back in the final minutes with the ball safely in his hands, being held firmly by him, not being tackled, unmarked; and for no reason the ball ballooned out of his hands and over the boundary.

Brendon Lade was quietly confident in his press conference: “We’ve got some real clarity in our roles and what we need to do”; “People look at our side and they’ve commented all year, ‘where are all your superstars?’…we play pretty well as a team.” We had Higgins and Hayes come straight back in and make an impact, Ben Long was moved to half-back and played perhaps his slickest, most reliable game (and still gave the opposition plenty to be worried about), D-Mac continued to relish his role on the wing; Howard, Battle, Lienert and Wilkie continued to work effectively as a unit. And on top of all of that, Sinclair is vindicating Champion Data’s “elite” categorising, Gresham, if he plays like this every week, will be a bona fide star of the competition, and Max is equal-leader in the Coleman Medal.

***

A month ago we were the worst-placed team in the competition. Walking out of the Concrete Disney Store on that Friday night it felt as though 2022 has instantly been reduced to reluctantly following the Saints for bright spots like Max King and Jack Hayes. A week ago we might have been the most entertaining team, certainly the highest-scoring. Saturday wasn’t the kind of sexy performance like the Hawthorn game that will have us called “the story of the year” again, nor Ross Lyon telling all us Saints fans to get excited. (There is a rude amount of teams with at least four wins at the moment, all passively competing for that air time). The State of Being Good comes with tough, ugly wins, and we’re going to need to ride a lot of uncomfortable afternoons and nights if we’re going to get near it. As this club tries to build something, those wins need to be celebrated just as much.

Round 4, 2022
Hawthorn 3.3, 5.8, 7.11, 10.13 (73)
St Kilda 6.1, 12.3, 15.8, 22.10 (142)
Crowd: 30,926 at the MCG, Sunday, April 10th at 3.20pm

A big part of this week was learning to trust St Kilda. It’s going to be a big part of the coming week, too.

Even saying “learning to trust” implies that it’s on us as fans to do the heavy lifting. Prior to Sunday I would have said, no, string together two good full quarters (let alone two full matches) and maybe I’ll come on board. It’s a bit like the 2019 membership campaign that asked us “what would you do, if you were called upon?” when we’d just seen the Road to 2018 jackhammered.

Well, we’re all very pleased to be sitting here in the knowledge that the Saints went a whole lot better than two good quarters on Sunday. We got one of the most impressive performances from a Saints team since the first half of 2020, and this was probably more complete, more dynamic and more promising. It’s a performance that has already created a shift in media narrative, for whatever that’s worth. The Age was prepared to call Max King’s three last quarter goals a “trademark” last quarter burst. That’s three games in three weeks he’s kicked at least three goals in one quarter, and he’s equal leader in the Coleman with Tom Hawkins, but I’m not sure if he’s yet quite earned the title “King of the World” that they gave him on Sunday night. Gerard and Robbo discussed on 360 whether or not we were the real deal. Gerard said he’d wait three weeks but there was something more immediate. Robbo seems convinced. Gerard also said he’s taking talkback calls on SEN about Jack Sinclair. They opened 360 with Paddy Ryder being suspended for two weeks. Very suddenly – for a week anyway – St Kilda matters again.

After however many years of heartbreak and disappointment we still need to get a kick out of these things. There’s a very, very, very fine line when supporting St Kilda in enjoying the positives – a big win, a good start to the season, promising young players – without getting too far ahead of ourselves. But we’d be silly not to indulge just a little bit at the moment. Just a little bit.

***

I’m one for melodrama and fatalism. During Round 2, I pondered if we were the worst team in the competition, and if not, considered us to be at the very least the worst-placed team. At 3.21pm last week I uttered the words “Clarkson 2023” to Matt and Dad sitting next to me in Row S. This week, the auto-generated push notification that comes through from the Saints app at the start of every game actually hadn’t had the chance to appear by the time Dylan Moore kicked the first. By 3.22pm he’d kicked another and if The Age can call Max King’s last quarter flurries a “trademark” then we’ve also registered and patented the two-goals-in-two-minutes head start to the opposition. Maybe we’d Saints blown all the goodwill of the past week already.

But this felt more of a levelling start; it brought us back to earth rather than dragging us below the surface. We knew that this scenario (eventually) turned out OK last week. We didn’t have to rely on powerhouse forward Callum Wilkie to steady things this time around; this week it was Paddy Ryder, in a St Kilda jumper, with ruck tapwork-as-art from a ball up just inside 50 near the boundary to the unmarked Gresham. Gresham, on the move and on his opposite foot, just as artfully curled the ball through for our first. It was gorgeous, and very un-St Kilda like. And there was a whole afternoon of un-St Kilda like fun to be had.

Max made his introduction to this one a whole lot earlier. All told he didn’t quite have the singular impact on the game as he did in the previous two weeks, but that said more about the rest of the team than him. But he was there when the game was live. He saluted next with his reprisal of last week’s long set shot goal after casually receiving the ball from the air via Brad Hill. It would take a long strike from just inside 50 on the difficult side for a right-footer, but again he backed himself in from the difficult spot, and again it came off. A few moments later just outside 50 he won a free kick in a one-on-one (although the mark he simultaneously took would have been one of his best for the day), swung around onto his right and bulleted a pass to repay the favour to Hill for Hill’s first of four (yes, that’s right).

The Hawks showed what they were capable of with Ward running laterally off the mark from half-back and slicing a pass across to opposite flank to Day, and Breust was instantly out at half-forward. His long kick forward saw Gunston fly for the mark, Moore was at the fall and a handball to Mitchell Lewis in the forward square had the Hawks back in front. It wasn’t the only time the Hawks looked threatening this way, but it was the only time it came off and threatened the balance of the game. The next time they tried slicing through the middle Newcombe’s kick to Frost was interrupted by D-Mac, and with the help of Marshall and Gresham at the fall D-Mac got it back and found Butler in an open goal.

By this time Seb Ross had taken a dashing run off the back of the centre square and evaded Howe, took a bounce and found Paddy Ryder (St Kilda player) in a two on one but with a dangerous enough pass that he drew a (borderline) free kick for somewhere in between. Ryder wheeled around and had put us in front. We weren’t seriously challenged again.

***

Gerard said on 360 that we “ambushed” the Hawks. Our set-up across the ground halted the Hawks’ ball movement and we dominate the ball in play; the tackle count was won easily and while ground ball gets were led by Tom Mitchell, the stat was otherwise headed by Saints (Sinclair, Steele, Crouch, D-Mac, and then Butler and Gresham up forward). Our own fast ball movement across the ground caught the Hawks off guard and they couldn’t get their good early season turnover game going. Hill up forward took away one of the Hawks’ biggest weapons in keeping Jiath and his rebounding in check (and to the point where the relatively undersized Hill actually outbodied CJ on multiple occasions).

The ball movement and forward line were functioning beautifully – to the point at which we finished the day with the highest-ever score by a team with 46 or fewer forward entries. After looking static in Round 1 and toothless for a lot of Round 2, we’ve very quickly become very watchable and dangerous. The speed with which we moved the ball allowed for space forward targets to move into and we finished with 22 marks inside 50 to 10; otherwise Butler, Gresham and Hill were getting to work at the fall of the footy (when Max King was invariably bringing it to ground). It all amounted to plenty of shots from good range and good angles and we went into half-time at 12.3. Some awkward Hawthorn moments helped too. Gresham ran into an open goal after Scrimshaw didn’t realise he’d marked a touched ball, and Seb Ross intercepted a short kick from Hardwick out of full-back and set up Membrey.

Butler played one of his better games since 2020 and he too was prominent when the game was live. His cute stuff was coming off; King created a contest off a Lienert spoil than landed in Wilkie’s hands on the wing and Butler was at the fall, and his perfectly weighted kick found Hill between Jiath and Hardwick at the top of the square. Butler was then at the fall of a stoppage just 20 metres out and as he cruised past the ball ricocheted off him and back into the hands of Paddy Ryder (in a St Kilda jumper), who curled it through for his second (I might be kind crediting Butler’s involvement here). Butler and Steele nailed set shots from no angle. At the other end, Mitchell Lewis at one stage had 1.5, which had a lot to with Hawthorn taking shots out wide. We were denying the Hawks space in the corridor and any movement off half-back was stilted. Howard hasn’t been at his best this year but together with Lienert, Wilkie and Battle we have a tough defence to crack. Either side of half-time the Hawks kicked five behinds in their last real look. We replied with a run of misses in the third ourselves (it would have been great for NWM to kick that set shot) but it only delayed the inevitable. The Saints were humming.

***

Jack Steele is gradually returning to Jack Steele 2021 Mode. He kicked a goal in the first quarter from a strong mark on the lead (a proper running, full-chested lead, not a Max King ambient separation) and would be filthy with himself for not converting a second in the third quarter. He is assuming the role of captain again in the way he is playing and the way is with his teammates. He pulled Paddy aside after the Will Day bump and Paddy giving away a 50-metre penalty that ended with a Hawks goal, and gave him a very considered one-on-one talking-to to refocus him. As per the St Kilda Football Club (1873-present), of course the AFL decided to overcorrect after fluffing their lines with Tim English and gave Paddy two weeks. I’m sure the prosecution will argue that Paddy should have welcomed Day running directly into him. There’s no conspiracy, but of course it would be St Kilda in this situation.

We relied almost exclusively on Steele, Ross, Crouch and Gresham at centre bounces this week. Windhager had a handy post-car crash debut and was the only other midfielder to attend a centre bounce (only six for the day). Crouch was fantastic again, leading all comers with seven tackles and generated eight clearances, while Ross played some of his best footy in years. There was no Jack Sinclair at centre bounces this week; instead, he did the damage in open play, darting off half-back and up to half-forward, delivering multiple perfect passes to Membrey and Max, including an intercept in the middle of the ground (after a comedic Brad Hill stumble) and a deft running kick on the outside of his boot to Max (who set up the recovered Hill with the next kick) that elicited an audible “Oh!” from the crowd. Maybe Champion Data was onto something when they rated him “elite” on the eve of the 2018 season (and did so again earlier this year). Wearing a famous number (with a career-best 35 touches to match) and a wild mullet, he’s motored into fan favouritism and the wider footy consciousness.

Gresham went from a 32-possession game last week to a 20-possession, four-goal game, including setting up goals for Max and Hill in the last quarter. He’s been getting better every week this year and we now have a midfielder that can accumulate possessions and kick goals. Nick Dal Santo described him as our Petracca or Dusty equivalent (nearly eight years later for the former). His work in the midfield is a big reason why Sinclair can start off half-back and Hill can go forward at the moment. So much that needed to change on the run after Round 1 has done so. Gresham, King, Crouch, Steele, Sinclair, Butler, Battle, Lienert (there’s something about the SANFL, the Saints, and composure at the moment), Ross, D-Mac, Ryder and Hill, all in different ways, have been part of it.

Last week Brad Crouch finally played the kind of game through which St Kilda fans could get attached to him. This week it was Brad Hill’s turn. He’s had a few games where he’s racked up some decent numbers and has created a lot from behind the ball, but these had been littered with too many moments that frustrated (see several dropped marks under heat, multiple scrubbed kicks). On Sunday he played a game that showed tangible, more immediate results for his work: 23 disposals, nine marks, five inside 50s, and yes, four goals; excellent reading for anyone in any position. It’s obviously not the only reason we’re playing this way but his move forward during the third quarter last week directly coincided with this team’s turnaround.

***

It felt as though the stadium was expecting a big last quarter from Max from the moment Sinclair honoured the 35 on his back with a perfectly weighted chip kick into his path near 50. Max kept up his good long-range record this year and then Butler repeated the Sinclair dose a couple of minutes later with a near-identical kick to a near-identical position, except this time Max had held space on his opponent who was caught goalside and he simply stepped towards Butler.

Max finished with a career-high 17 touches, took 11 marks and dropped a few that he could have taken, but his threat draws multiple defenders and he brings the ball to ground at the very least. He’s never beaten in a contest. He was the target in three entries in the last quarter that ended with goals, including drawing an extra defender from Ben Long’s entry to the top of the square and that allowed Membrey to stay down on his own and snap his fourth goal from close range.

Admission: I haven’t yet come to fully enjoy watching Max King because my first thought is always “Please don’t do your knee”. Yes, that obviously stems from the time he literally did his knee but it’s also renewed Ben King-induced anxiety, as well as the fact that this is the St Kilda Football Club and history proves we’re simply not allowed to enjoy any things (don’t get me started on Gresh and Paddy’s respective Achilles). Prior to the Buddy 1000 game, Tom Browne suggested Sydney go after Max King, and we do have form offloading big forwards to the Swans for big results (their first Grand Final in 51 years, and then their first premiership in 72 years), so there’s that to worry about in the future too I guess. Either way, I just hope no one touches him, ever.

For the first time in years – probably since the prime of Nick Riewoldt – we again have a player whose presence we all anticipate ahead of the ball. You can hear the crowd volume rise as the ball goes into attack, the collective sound of thousands of people exclaiming “Max King!” Party time really began as soon as Max kicked the first of the final term. Another seven goals, three of them his, and a hand in nearly all of them. Every forward foray looked dangerous. One of the better moments of hte year was Max bringing the ball to ground, chasing after it low down and handballing to NWM hard up against the boundary; NWM spun away from Scrimshaw and gave off to Gresham, who feigned a kick and stepped inside CJ and snapped his fourth. Max has become the de facto standard-bearer for the best parts of this team.

Max’s last was probably everyone’s favourite, simply for the theatre of Butler running down CJ (who had to wear a lot in defence), and Gresham kicking to Max by himself near the top of the goal square in front of the Saints end. Everyone could enjoy the flight of the footy on the way to his hands for the day’s crowning moment (he’d had a similar moment a few minutes earlier but dropped the footy, then gathered the ball and kicked it on the full). Max was there again a minute later to compete in the air for the ball that ended up with Gresham and then Hill for his fourth on the run, and a bit of well-earned Me Time with the crowd.

For the third week in a row, Max fucking King.

***

We’ve kicked 32.14 to 11.13 since halfway through the third quarter against the Tigers. Sunday was our highest score since Round 23, 2016, when Roo was wearing the number 12 and kicked nine goals and took 21 marks. Sunday equalled our 69-point win over the Hawks last year (and this one was topped and tailed by the Hawks kicking the first two and the last two goals), to share the title of our biggest win since the 71-point win over the Blues just a few weeks earlier than that last game of 2016. Courtesy of Swamp, this was the first time since Round 12 in 2016 that a team had four players kick four goals (that was Fremantle against Brisbane). The previous time before that was…Hawthorn against St Kilda at the MCG in Round 7 of 2014, when we managed to lose by 145 points on a slippery day, and that was a week after coming within a kick of going 4-2 to start Richo’s tenure.

Sunday felt a combination of Rounds 4 and 5 of 2019. Round 4 of that year was the last time we went 3-1, with a win over Hawthorn, before a remarkable win over Melbourne at the MCG the following week that had us equal top of the ladder. There was a shift in media narrative then, too. Gerard said on that Monday what we were doing was “sustainable”, and The Age called us “the story of the year”. Richo was sacked 12 weeks later.

***

Absolutely nothing beats a day game at the MCG. Our home ground is a Concrete TV studio, where games of footy are filmed on what amounts to a stage with professional lighting and sound (too much of it). At the MCG you see and feel the change in daylight as the game evolves throughout the course of an afternoon. No matter the weather, you feel like you’ve been somewhere. And there is nothing like an MCG crowd in full appreciation of a St Kilda team. The last time that genuinely happened might have been the 2010 Preliminary Final. It was a fitting result in our first outing in front of the Shane Warne Stand.

This was also the first time since 2016 that we heard The Fable Singers after a win at the MCG. It appears the club has listened (after four years) and made the change back to using the original version at all grounds (The Fable Singers was used in Perth as well). It feels like some order has been restored, and it was almost nostalgic to hear it at a day game at the MCG with crowds in all the stands. There’s a cheeky thrill in entertaining the idea of whether the Saints are back, too (but let’s not get too cheeky).

COVID made a mockery of “there’s always next week”, and Putin is threatening “there’s always next year”. What absolute decadence to sit in the open air of the MCG on a beautiful autumn afternoon in Melbourne and watch the Saints win.

Round 3, 2022
St Kilda 6.2, 8.4, 11.8, 18.9 (117)
Richmond 6.4, 10.5, 12.6, 13.6 (84)
Crowd: 31,933 at Docklands, Sunday, April 3rd at 3.20pm

St Kilda Messianism has just entered its newest phase.

I had written in my pre-match notes “Max and Higgins aren’t going to bail us out every week.” Well, well, well. (I’d also written, “Higgins this year is just as likely to kick four behinds as four goals”, so the reverse mozz didn’t quite fully work).

We’d all raved about Max and Snags last week, with Josh Battle thrown in for good measure, and Josh got the AFL.com.au feature treatment. Speaking of mozzes (reverse and otherwise), I know we need CONTENT ALL THE TIME and there’s a lot of features flying around these days, but I did immediately recall the Robert Walls’ glowing feature article in The Age about Brent Guerra following his seven goals in Round 9, 2004 and which effectively spelled the end of his better form for the Saints.

Maddie’s Match has been the only real “marquee” game we’ve had some ownership of. We did occupy the season opener in all of 2005, ‘06, and ‘07, and we all prefer to forget Good Friday 2018. (New Zealand was literally a whole different country altogether). We’ve had only the very occasional prime time game in recent years. As Rory noted, Maddie’s match 2017 remains probably the only real prime timer with something on the line that this generation of Saints has won (outside of Round 18, 2020 against the Giants and then the Elimination Final, and even then you could argue that was all off-Broadway). Sure, this was “only” a Sunday 3.20 game on Channel 7 (a look over the highlights reveals Matt Hill calling; the Saints would storm home from the turn to finish two lengths in front) but we needed to make up for our Live and Free Friday night debacle against the Pies in the season opener.

COVID unfortunately appears to have put an end to the purple jumpers. We went from what should have been the most spectacular version in 2020 – a purple hot cross bun – to now just purple socks (proudly pulled up by Paddy Ryder, who plays for St Kilda now. I don’t know if you know this.). The flourishes on the new scoreboards and lighting system at the Concrete Dome balanced out the lack of purple on the jumper, but it’s a shame that touch has gone.

***

Daylight Savings finished on Saturday night, meaning clocks turned back from 3am to 2am. Please also adjust your body clocks further for the day ending mid-afternoon when you walk into the Concrete Dome because the roof’s shut for no particular reason and we’re sitting in artificial lighting.

After Round 1 we were lamenting that nothing had been learned over the off-season. We were set for another year of the gap between our best and worst being as wide as the gap between the fence and the boundary at Waverley. Last week during the second quarter I wondered whether or not we were the worst-placed team in the competition; at 3.21pm on Sunday I uttered the words “Clarkson 2023” to Dad and Matt sitting next to me in Row S. Five handballs out of the middle and Tigers had a trademark goal on the board in 19 seconds, and then a handball and a long kick from Bolton out of the middle made it two goals from 34 seconds of play (and that’s including the time it took for the goal umpire to signal).

Never mind the discussion of whether we’d gone into this one too tall, or how much a freshly-injured Dan Hannebery had cost us over the past few years. We’d barely sat down and enjoyed the team running out to The Fable Singers when for the third time in three weeks our season was facing its mortality. It was really fortunate that we had reliable pressure forward and set shot goal kicker *checks notes* Callum Wilkie ready to pounce on a wayward kick across the face to steady things early. The first quarter then turned into a bruise-free football shoot-out. Six goals each and a quarter-time scoreline barely heard of since the 2000s. The Richmond/St Kilda Trade Union of small forwards had got to work: Butler had a couple, Snags had one after a dashing run through the middle and well-weighted kick from Sinclair, and Matty Parker had a couple (just like pre-COVID times).

The thing is, regardless of where you think Richmond will finish this year, they just looked better, right from the time Liam Baker swept onto Gresham’s handball at the game’s opening bounce. The way they move the ball is almost hypnotic. Spent force or not, their system is more finely-tuned. Their players are more responsive with and without the ball. The yellow Sherrin moves almost on its own. Richmond players merely guide it forward and to dangerous positions using their hands and boots and bodies. Once they strung together a couple of possessions in a row and the ball got moving there was little we could do about it. The opening was ominous enough. They kept it going with the Baker, Ross, Ralphsmith, Ross handball combination along the wing, ending with a Shai Bolton flick up to Lynch for a goal. They pounced on anything slightly rogue, from the opening bounce to the Mason Wood spoil near full-back that was instantly turned into a goal by Parker.

It’s not just chaos footy all the time, either. In the second quarter, Nankervis picked up a spilled ball on the boundary and handballed to Baker, who in a second sized up a forward 50 entry and then split traffic going for a short central option in Edwards instead. Edwards didn’t need to wait before any movement ahead emerged and found Bolton on the lead. Absolutely no fuss.

It was those kinds of moments that made it feel like a matter of time before Richmond broke the game apart. Paddy Ryder, in a St Kilda jumper, was giving our mids the best service they’d had since, well, he last played. But the Tigers were more dangerous across the ground. Here I’m using Nick Riewoldt’s “Eyeball” test, i.e. “They were just better.” It’s not going to hold up in court, but it was holding up from Row S. The lead was gradually inching beyond two goals. Soldo at back of the square, short to Dow, out wide to Graham, on the lead to Castagna. Long set shot kick for a goal. Easy.

We were barely hanging on. An excellent moment from Rowan Marshall kept us in it – a strong mark on the lead on the wing and a perfect low kick to Membrey and King. They raffled it with Membrey the winner; he popped up at a few very crucial times with goals and defensive efforts when we were up against it.

Gresham was providing his much-heralded Point of Difference in the midfield on his way to what was probably a career-best game (he’s liked playing Richmond over the journey) and Ratten made the in-game call early in the third – Gresham was doing enough to allow Sinclair (perhaps our best in the early part of this year) to spend more time off half-back, while Brad Hill would spend more time in the front half. Hill only had six possessions at half-time including a kick-out that went straight to McIntosh, and the return entry fell to Parker for his third. Hill was absolutely hating footy when he gave up a soft ball in the goal square to Nankervis for a soccer goal, and then at the other end a couple of minutes later his scrubbed left-foot kick grazed the inside of the goal post.

***

Cam noted in the comments last week that we’d only played two good quarters in the first two games and still sat at 1-1. There was good and bad in that; we’d gotten away with a win, all things considered, but the fickle 2021 Saints were still here. Round 3 is probably when you can start identifying trends, and one difference emerged on Sunday: this 2022 version is made of sterner stuff. A 34-point deficit against Collingwood was reeled back, and the slow start in Perth reeled in, where in previous years both games would have turned ugly. Richmond threatened to blow us off the park. Halfway through the third quarter it would have made a lot more sense for Richmond to be the team to kick 10 in a row.

Avid watchers who have followed On the Couch to the 6.30pm time slot will have seen this week’s show highlight Membrey’s gut running defensive effort to hold up Broad as Richmond were coming out of defence at this point in the match. It gave Sinclair enough time to press over and spoil Parker and then knock the ball on, and to give Ross the opportunity to win a contested ball running head-on into Broad. He took the footy and gave off a quick handball to Membrey, who started running the other way with the ball; a give off to Gresham, a catapault throw missed by the umpire to Hill, to Brad Crouch for an excellent composed goal. A dangerous Richmond attack with a 25-point margin had been halted. The reaction from the crowd was more of relief than that we were still in the game than St Kilda having just willed themselves to the beginning of a 10-goal streak. 

Matt has mentioned a few times that Brad Crouch hasn’t yet ingratiated himself to St Kilda fans. A lot of that has to do with the type of game he plays – he accumulates possessions consistently and without too much flashy stuff. On the one-year anniversary of his debut, he played a game that supporters couldn’t ignore – 11 clearances and nine tackles, including a pressure effort early in the third when the game really was on the line, and the goal to boot. His big body created chaos against a Richmond midfield missing its best. Jack Steele finally had a well-rounded support crew humming.

***

There’s something about our third quarters in 2022. In Round 1, we went on a 5.6 to 0.0 run (including an early last quarter goal), and then last week’s third quarter yielded a run of 5.3 to 0.2. This week, it sparked a 10.4 to 0.0 run (spoiled by a pokey Dougal out on the full in the last 15 seconds). It was yet another fascinating momentum shift this year in broader AFL landscape. Something was going around this week alone: Adelaide’s heady finish on Friday, Geelong kicking the last eight in overwhelming Collingwood – who themselves had kicked nine out of 10 – while Carlton kicked eight out of the first 10 and the Hawks kicked seven of the last eight.

Why does it take a game turning to custard before the players pull their finger out? Sunday probably wasn’t a Marvel thing. We all thought Dimma’s comments about the Tigers and Marvel last year were a little bit funny because we knew they weren’t on their way to yet another premiership, and we’d only won four of our last 10 at the Concrete Disney Store ourselves. Three years after Simon Lethlean declared we were the fittest team in the comp and we’ll “run teams off their legs”, perhaps we really have something to show for the pre-season under new head of performance and conditioning Nick Walsh. Richmond has now faded from two games in three weeks.

But what did we actually do well? It’s hard to reconcile the gap between Richmond’s best and our best. When Richmond is switched on I look at them and think, “Ah, yes, that’s what a good football team looks like. I remember now.” We’re not quite as structured around the ball – it seems as though our guys are left to their own devices to win contests more than other teams. But we outworked and outran them. We outlasted them. The passage that led to Crouch’s goal was an excellent example, and you could follow that right through to the last of the 10-goal streak. A fast tackle from Brad Hill on McIntosh at the throw-in, Steele out to NWM with a quick kick forward; Butler was out of position but created the contest against Jayden Short, and as the ball was knocked out both Hill and NWM had already run ahead to meet the contest. NWM gathered the ball and gave it off to Butler, who had sprung back up, and gave off to Membrey who found Hayes, who had sprinted forward.

The midfield was a different beast. This game did nothing to dispel the notion that a 34-year-old ruckman carrying an Achilles problem might be our most important player (Spoiler alert: It’s Paddy Ryder, who plays for St Kilda). But Gresham has added speed and agility in the middle (his cat-like pounce and turn on the ground and then follow-up knock at the start of the final quarter helped set up King’s first), and Sinclair has been there with him helping to reshape this midfield. Crouch has found some excellent form, Ross had some great moments around the footy in one of his better games for a long time, and Steele is gradually returning to his best (and he’s still among our best anyway).

Until we’d had the game won the first two goals were in the back of my mind. What if we’d lost the game in the first 34 seconds? We’d spent our petrol tickets against Collingwood getting back to parity. This ended up being a mash-up of the first two games. It looked like we were heading for a carbon copy of the Pies game with an early goal in the last quarter (courtesy of Max King marking the centre clearance with his legs) to put us in front, following a third-quarter rush that kept the game alive for another half-hour at least. (Membrey had run in on an angle to put us in front but missed late in the third with a weak banana kick that some of Higgins’ Round 1 misses). The first echo of Fremantle came a few minutes later when Max rose in the pocket among four players to bring down the Ben Long kick, landed lightly and scooted off and snapped his second goal. He was on his way.

***

For the second week in a row, Max had spent much of the game in virtual anonymity. Last week it was two disposals at half-time, before three goals in a few minutes in the third and what proved to be the sealer late. This week, it was six touches and a behind to three-quarter time, before four goals from six shots.

Grimes going down certainly helped. But the forward line was functioning differently with the way the team was playing higher up the ground. His second goal came from one of the more thrilling passages of recent Saints Footy; Sinclair working into space out wide out of defence, a neat quick kick to Hill and then to Long, both of whom had worked ahead of their opponents. Long went long, and Max rose.

Max had more space to work in with this type of movement and once he got separation on Tarrant and Gibcus and a half-decent delivery there was nothing anyone could do. Long, Membrey, Paton, Gresham and Steele all obliged through the quarter. Like I said last week, he doesn’t need to make barnstorming leads and mark the ball at full pace on his chest, Plugger-style. He simply finds space and calmly receives the ball from the air.

Footy is heavily reliant on system. It means a lot of goals are from low-risk situations, usually closer to goal. The rush that comes with mercurial solo efforts in all parts of the ground are rare now. There is a joy to seeing Max take a mark on the 50 metre-line, on a tough angle, and for him to turn his back on the play and take the responsibility to kick the goal. He did it again a couple of minutes later on a sharper angle when he won a holding free-kick, and shut the door. After 1.3 in the first game at this ground he could so easily have dropped his head, let alone the first half last week, and the first three quarters on Sunday. Instead he was backing himself in to be the matchwinner when the game was on the line.

He’s only 41 games in and this is the St Kilda Football Club after all, so I’m not going to call anything yet. But it is such a thrill (that word again) to watch someone from the side you barrack for play in this way. We were spoilt for choice in the 1990s and 2000s for these types of players; not so much in the 2010s. Few have promised great things ahead. And it is that much more special knowing he playing for the club he grew up loving.

While we’re feeling good, special mentions have to go to Mason Wood, who played one of his best games (to go with Gresham and Crouch). His goal from a step outside 50 came when we needed a moment of brilliance and helped get the run on, and he moved very well through traffic to have a hand in multiple goals. Ben Long too, who was thrust into the game kicked two goals from uncompromising attack on the opposition. Also, NWM for some of the cleanest possessions in a Saints jumper in years. His 40-metre bullet pass inboard to Rowan Marshall out of defence in the last few minutes was itself a small victory lap for the day. D-Mac has found himself.

The last quarter saw 7.1 from 14 inside 50s. Max could have made it more from his six shots. It took inside 50s efficiency for the game to 55% compared the Tigers’ 35%. Watching on the replay the light show makes it look like there’s a constant power failure at the ground after every St Kilda goal. (Sure, we kicked a lot of goals but that’s not enough to short an entire stadium’s lighting system.)

Anyway, Max fucking King.

***

The last time St Kilda won a match with the final scoreline of 117-84 was Round 22 of 1997 against Port Adelaide. It was the last game of the home and away season and secured top spot on the ladder on the way to the Grand Final loss. Last week was a 65-55 scoreline; the only time we’d won with that was in 1913, another Grand Final year (there have been only seven). So the omens tell us we’re on track to lose another. Otherwise, the last time we went 2-1 was 2019, and we played Hawthorn in Round 4 then too, and that season saw our coach get sacked.

***

St Kilda turned 149 years old this week. Congratulations / Happy Birthday to all who celebrate. Or sorry that happened. There’s a whole lot more to commiserate over the journey. But footy is a week-to-week proposition. When the darkness descends early again and the wind starts to bite a little, you revel in 10 goals in a row and Max King kicking four in the last quarter, and the Saints going 2-1.

Round 2, 2022
Fremantle  3.0, 5.1, 6.4, 8.7 (55)
St Kilda 0.4, 2.7, 8.10, 9.11 (65)
Crowd: Halfish of capacity at Optus Stadium, Sunday, 29th March at 6.10pm

All sorts of overreactions are derived from Round 1 results. Six months of anticipation leads to two hours of footy, which leads to a manic declarations of new top four contenders and seasons written off, ripe for a whole year’s worth of 360 vignettes. For St Kilda fans, the 2022 season was facing its own mortality before the weekend of Round 1 had officially started. A whole pre-season to sort out a game plan that will make your team the centre of the universe, and then when that doesn’t work a nine-day break to fix it all. Over nine days you can mostly just hope that maybe Round 1 was a horrible massive mistake and that everyone is sorry.

The only real positive out of the previous week was Jack Hayes. He was Gerard’s Monday Hero, and for a week at least, the ruck in Matthew Richardson’s rolling All-Australian team. We held onto that as hard as we could, otherwise we were pre-emptively mourning a rebuild that had been busted (again). Maybe the Richo era had never really ended; the only change was the semantics – the long-time disconnect between kickers and catchers is now called an inability to complete our plays.

The next test was The Bizarro Rivalry (our in-depth look at the history between these two ridiculous clubs will be restored as part of our Great Server Disaster of 2021 recovery program), in the official debut of the new clash jumper (and new clash socks). Ratts noted on Fox Footy before the game that going interstate after what happened last week might be a good thing. You’d think it shouldn’t matter where we were playing after what happened in Round 1 but I guess from my couch there’s something extra to an “Us vs Them” environment.

There was an obvious increase in pressure and movement around the ground early, but it still felt like former St Kilda supporter Gerard Healy was being way too kind about it all in Fox Footy’s special comments, given the stop-start ball use and whole quarter return of 0.4. For anyone that was bothering to tune into two mediocre teams at 6.10pm on a Sunday, there were a few heated moments that included Blacres nearly taking Max King’s head off in front of goal (no free kick), and then Josh Battle summing up whether or not he should send Blake into the interchange bench horizontally. The first quarter also included Snags missing a set shot, taking his season tally to 0.5. Sinclair and Gresham were providing their “point of difference” through the middle, which is all well and good, but the Dockers had Andrew Brayshaw and Hayden Young providing genuine young midfield talent. Steele wasn’t quite himself last week (he was still quite good) but he opened up this game with a very uncharacteristic skewed pass to Max going forward that went straight to a Dockers defender. (He finished with a massive 13 tackles but maybe still wasn’t quite himself on Sunday either.)

I was at a wedding and then The Shady Lady on Saturday night and a hot topic of multiple conversations with St Kilda-supporting friend Georgia across both venues was that Ratts was maybe being a bit too nice all the time; something that might be reflected in the team’s lack of campaigner on the field (although the club has probably lacked it throughout most of its 149 years). Ratts, who has embraced a new hairstyle, pulled out the quarter-time spray and it worked to an extent. We had a lot of the footy in the second term, repeatedly winning the ball in the middle third of the ground and dominating the inside 50s for the quarter. But the old chestnut of not being able to complete our plays, kickers not connecting with catchers – however you want to describe it – was chewing up a lot of our momentum; something we couldn’t afford to happen for a second week running. The ball movement flitted between tentative and wayward. An extra split second was required for a player in a red-backed hot-cross-bun jumper to consider whether or not they would give off to the player running past, if there was actually one to begin with. Forward handballs have been on-trend in the opening rounds but we weren’t daring enough to use them out of the middle and there were never enough guys around the ball at any given time for them to happen in open play. “Ah, yes, we need more structure. More system.” is the easiest thing on the planet to write but I’m sure an organisation like this doesn’t exist with the endgame of producing unsure footy come the weekend.

It was easy to spread the blame. Butler scuffed an opportunity on the run, Gresham danced away from the mark off one step at half-forward but his kick went straight to a Freo player, Sinclair took two bounces streaming forward and kicked it wide and out on the full, Higgins got space on his opponent just inside 50 on an angle, marked the ball, kept running and kicked it to a Dockers player in the square. There were some frustrating almost-marks from the catchers, namely Wood and Hayes close to goal just moments apart. Max King was anonymous, to the point I thought he might have been concussed by the Acres hit. To kick our first goal we had to cut out the middleman of the forward line – Butler ran all the way from 70 metres after an intelligent Brad Crouch kick into space from a turnover.

It was at some point during the second quarter as we burned another forward 50 entry that I started to consider whether or not we were the worst team in the competition. I would have bet the house (that I’m renting) that in that moment we were at the very least the worst-placed team. But could we be the worst? I’m not sure where the “good” version of generating 16 to five inside 50s for the quarter for a half-time return of 2.7 left us. We might well be the most uninspiring team at the very least. Most anxious? What’s the coaching equivalent of giving your players Prozac?

***

Brad Crouch had a great contested game and was a big reason why we won the centre clearances (14-4) and overall clearances (37-26), but his scuffed set shot kick at the beginning of the third quarter was a low point. We’d watched Carlton go further past us on Thursday, Collingwood too on Saturday, Hawthorn very possibly on Saturday night (and Gold Coast as well, despite their loss), and we’d watched Paddy McCartin start trending amid the #Buddy1000 festivities on Friday. As his wobbly kick from 30 metres didn’t make the distance and trickled over the boundary line we’d gone from simply stuffing things up to trying to find the funniest ways of doing so.

Snags made up for it only a few moments later from the resulting throw-in with his second, with a quick snap around the corner intercepting Will Brodie’s handball. It was the kind of opportunistic goal we’re rare to capitalise on given we waste enough shots of our own accord. Sean Darcy leaving the ground opened the door for Lloyd Meek to become the next unheralded player made to look good by St Kilda and he pinched one back. He and Lobb had moments that made the defence look undersized in Dougal’s absence and presented a potential threat for the second half. Some people take hat-tricks on their birthday, some kick six in a two-point St Kilda win in Perth, some get COVID and are replaced in the line-up by Darragh Joyce.

There were some good things happening without the reward. Crouch was getting the ball, Sinclair and Gresham were working in the middle, Hill was trying to make things happen off half-back, D-Mac was winning one-on-ones and scooting away into space, Battle was playing a break-out game as an intercept defender, and there was a presence at ground level from the small forwards. But it wasn’t being finished off.

The turnaround started in earnest with Crouch getting to the centre bounce tap down and having his head nearly ripped off. Ross took the advantage and Hill was running past, and without breaking stride bulleted a pass to Max on the lead. The newly reinvented Facial Hair Guy had had next to no impact on the game by half-time (just two disposals), but he got a couple of metres on Kevin Parker’s on-field avatar Alex Pearce and Hill was good enough to lower his eyes, hit him up and give him his chance to get into the game. Max kicked truly from just inside the 50-metre arc.

Crouch got the resulting centre bounce clearance with a wide kick and good efforts from Byrnes and Hayes ended with a deft left-foot pass from Byrnes finding Max again about 35 out. Max again was “on the lead”, but not in the way we have known barnstorming leads from full-forwards of years gone by. Max marking on the lead is simply the opening of space between he and his opponent, and the casual receiving of the football from the air. This set shot was tougher than the first but he made it look just as simple. Two goals in two minutes. Back to five points.

Moments later, Gresham – whose pressure had created the wayward handball snapped up by Higgins’ that led the first for the quarter – ran onto a tumbling ball from Ross out of a stoppage just as it reached the boundary line and in one motion screwed a kick around to near the top of the square. Max was there, and held on to the mark despite the direct attention paid to his eyeball from Pearce. Three in four minutes. A one-point lead. And, all of a sudden, a lot of push and shove. Max had got stuck into Pearce as the ball went through and it immediately drew in Griffin Logue, Jordan Clark and premiership player Joel Hamling. Byrnes, Ross and Membrey were active in the spotfires for the red team. Max is the kind of player that looks naturally almost too lackadaisical at all times and it was almost a relief to see him getting stuck into his opponents. We don’t want him to be too nice. Maybe Ratts’ spray had sparked something. (Also very lol to see runner Tony Brown dash all the way to the goal square just give him a small hug and a pat as it was all breaking up; no verbal message relayed).

The next goal was a 47-second journey from a James Aish behind to thrilling Snags goal. The best of the 2020 season is the new reference point for what good Saints Footy looks like – simply too long has passed since the GT and Ross eras to make very easy links – and this was a neat little throwback. A Paton mark at half-back, short kick to Ross, Sinclair running past for the forwards (!) handball, and a long kick to space in attack. The bounce favoured Logue but he was pounced upon by Membrey and Higgins. Membrey found the ball as Higgins peeled off towards goal, and Butler sped past. Membrey in all honesty fluffed the handball; Butler had to correct his grasp on the footy while being tackled by Clark, and it took two attempts to get his hands free. The ball spilled out – it probably should have been paid as incorrect disposal – and Higgins threw a boot at it and it knocked it through. More push and shove came after he may or may not have said something in the celebration to some very irate Dockers defenders. Great for Max get in another shove or two.

Four goals in just over nine minutes.

Sinclair was part of the next goal, too. It probably came from the best non-Paddy Ryder tapwork seen for years from a Saints player. Rowan Marshall thumped the ball laterally with his right arm to the defensive side of a throw-in and the footy went straight to Sinclair. His kick went to the vicinity of Snags, Max and Membrey and Snags was ridden on by Young and received the free-kick. The ball was coming in fast and repeatedly, and the Dockers were frazzled. Snags practiced the deep breathing routine as Jonathan Brown in special comments alluded to Nick Riewoldt saying during the week he should have been dropped after not giving off to Gresham during the third quarter against Collingwood, and sympathetically noted that he’d given the handball off to Gresh early in the last quarter. It must have released something in Higgins; he wound up and the kick looked like missing – until it didn’t. The ball was heading across the face and swung back late. Snags looked relieved and a little chuffed.

Five goals in 12 minutes.

***

Much like the week before, we’d helped ourselves to a nearly irresistible run in the third quarter. Round 1 was 5.6 to 0.0 by the time Gresham put us in front early in the last. This week it was 5.3 to 0.2 in just over 19 minutes of play, and the record will show that those three behinds all came in the last four minutes of the quarter from shots that weren’t impossible. Gresham hit the post on the run in space – really good teams nail those – and then Max and Snags missed shots that were gettable considering what they’d kicked earlier in the quarter. Given the way the game was being played, any of those would have almost shut the door on Fremantle.

But this is St Kilda, and they weren’t going to let us fans get away with a comfortable finish. We hadn’t made nearly enough of our run against the Pies, and we needed to wring every little bit out of this one. Steele missed a set shot early in the last and from that point we appeared to give up on proactive ball movement in favour of seeing what dangerous levels of inside 50s we could absorb. Battle had been clunking marks all game (strangely, he and D-Mac spent the last 10 minutes on the bench) and together with Lienert, Wilkie and Joyce managed to thwart repeated entries for nearly the entire quarter, until first-gamer Nathan O’Driscoll jagged one from a tight angle on the run with six minutes of play left. This is The Bizarro Rivalry and this is where the stranger things do happen. Stress-eating hangover KFC before at the beginning of the game had given way to stress-eating M&Ms by this point (my strict regimen of tuna salads during the week gives way to denser fare on the weekends) and the 380g bag was getting a good working over.

We still needed to attack. The chance came from a free-kick to Hayes that was probably a milder version of the Acres and King collision (that wasn’t paid to Max). Hayes’ kick forward found Pearce, but in a microcosm of the input of the small forwards, Butler and Gresham pressured successive handballs backwards for the Dockers, and Snags ran onto Aish as he tried kicking it out of defence and the kick was dragged short. In his (unofficial, but effectively) first game Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera gracefully, as Huddo described it, rose up and took the mark. He waited patiently for the right movement up forward and delivered a kick that fell directly into the hands of Max, who didn’t flinch backing into more bodies. As he had done a few times that night, Mason Wood was there taking heat off Max in the contest. (Huddo: “Where’s Max King?…THERE HE IS.”)

Max went back and kicked the goal. He had a very similar shot in similar circumstances in the pre-season match against the Bombers. Joey and Bucks in commentary spoke about how important the experience would be for the real thing. They were proven right within a few weeks.

Notwithstanding a second consecutive week that saw a questionable umpiring decision in front of goal involving Jack Hayes with just a few minutes left, the gap at that point was just too much. A Jimmy Webster tackle on Travis Colyer with 30 seconds left in the Dockers’ forward line ultimately sealed it. Our second win in Perth in 11 years, and The Fable Singers played outside of Docklands.

***

OMEN WATCH: In all years* in which St Kilda has won a match 65-55, they've gone on to make the Grand Final.

* 1913#AFLFreoSaints

— Gigs (@AndrewGigacz) March 27, 2022

This wasn’t a huge redemption story for the club after Round 1. We weren’t outrageously good, nor were Fremantle. They were also missing Fyfe, Mundy, and Cox, and had an underdone Sean Darcy (and then no Sean Darcy), although it has to be pointed out we were missing a bunch of our own best 22 also. However, it was a redemption game for two lifelong St Kilda supporters. It was the game we’d been hoping to see from Max and Snags since they were at the centre of two of the most dramatic games of our 2021 – Max dominating against the Cats on a Friday night, taking 10 marks but only to trip over in front of everyone by himself and kick 1.5 in a tough defeat, while three weeks later Snags gathered 23 touches and 12 marks but kicked 1.6 in a nine-point loss to the Swans, including two set shot misses that would have put us in front in the final minutes. Last week, they’d echoed those games kicking 1.7 between them as Max dragged in his most-ever disposals and Higgins was accurate kicking away from breaking the game open. Max was a tease, Higgins, according to some, should have been dropped. Now, we have a win that we can owe to them.

For Max more specifically, it was the kind of game we’d been hoping to see from him since we picked him up at the end of 2018. It was the game he’d always threatened to play. His six goals at the same ground last year against the Eagles were for a team trying to stay in touch. His goals on Sunday ripped the game open, and then closed the deal.

A win in Round 2 doesn’t automatically halve the agonising that came with Round 1’s performance. We do, however, have a lot more positives to enjoy for this week at least.

Round 1, 2022
St Kilda 3.2, 5.6, 9.12, 12.13 (85)
Collingwood 4.5, 7.9, 10.11, 15.12 (102)
Crowd: 40,129 at Docklands, Friday, March 18th at 7.50pm

Between the time we watched yet another success-starved club break a premiership drought and unfurl their flag, the world had found another way to go to shit and now we’re all a dodgy Putin “miscommunication” away from World War 3 and/or nuclear obliteration. But there’s still time for Max King and the Saints at the Concrete Disney Store on a Friday night. Where else would you rather be? (The answer is probably “the MCG”, but this will do.)

A lot goes into the pre-season for fans. It’s rarely fear of the unknown; it’s anticipation of what might be. If you choose to do so, or you’re in a position to be able to, you pay your membership. The Saints are kept close over summer by the reminder texts that your next instalment of Saints EasyPay is coming out of your account in the next few days. You watch all the puffy preview clips of “Sounds of the Saints” on the club socials, and read all the puffy “x is having a massive pre-season” articles. You watch the new year’s membership advert. You critique the new clash jumper. You find yourself watching a livestream with nearly 70,000 other people of the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant on fire (this was no ordinary pre-season). You get bumped for Saints TV after being offered to do a team season preview on a podcast. You watch the intra-club match, a day in which the club simply can’t lose. You watch the pre-season matches hoping for no injuries (there were injuries). You go through the emails sent by the club and figure out what’s what for ticketing and scanning into the ground on game day. (To your dismay, the Parker Room, AKA The Doorman, is temporarily out of action). Some 308 days since the last home game with a crowd, you reacquaint yourself with the trip into the ground. You meet up for a pre-match drink with the people you go with every week – Dad, Matt, Richie. You watch Peking Duk as the pre-match entertainment and then the brass band play the Saints theme song as a welcome back to the fans. The team runs out to The Fable Singers and you can’t wait to see what it is they’ve been working on for the past six months.

So it’s really disappointing when you go through all of that and you’re welcomed with a Daicos family homecoming, Jordan de Goey being made a hero, someone who couldn’t get a game at another team tearing you apart in the midfield, and a 19-year-old kid stepping up in the final quarter to help wrestle the game from you. A black and white victory lap for all of the changes made on and off the field by Collingwood.

***

Collingwood looked like a different team. The introductions of Nick Daicos (getting stuck into him after the early turnover in front of goal fell very flat) and Patrick Lipinski aside, this was not the dour outfit that finished 17th last year. When they had the ball, they spread across the ground and gave each other options short and beyond. They used the ball smartly. When they didn’t have the footy, they compressed quickly and strangled our ball movement. They moved with purpose.

We, on the other hand, looked like we hadn’t learned anything new. The Carlton practice match had a lot of Geelong-style short kicks and marks out of defence (assumedly brought through by Corey Enright). Perhaps we liked the short game because we can’t seem back our skills generally – that was an issue Ratts brought up afterwards, to the point of ruing not debuting Nasiah – but we didn’t bring anything obviously different to this game compared to last year. The signs were bad from the start. There’s still no obvious cohesive press or structure or system; as if we’re just hoping we win a lot of one-on-ones and that things will somehow come together in the moment.

With no Ryder and Jones and a not-quite-ready debutant in their place, the midfield was shown for its lack of depth and smashed. No surprise that the ball spent a lot of time in Collingwood’s front half in the first two-and-a-half quarters, and when we got our hands on its we couldn’t find nor present an option in their high press. We looked confused and anxious. How many times did Dougal, Hill, Wilkie, Battle et al. pause in the back half and wait for something to happen – giving the Pies even more time to get sorted – only for the ball to not hit a clean target? Inevitably a rushed or long kick would be forced; it would hit the deck and the Pies would invariably have the numbers at ground level. We can’t just have “hopefully Brad Hill runs past or Max King marks it” as a game plan. Kanye was knocked back for this.

This shouldn’t have been a huge surprise. Confidence admittedly waned while watching the Wednesday and Thursday night games (with the Bevo and Tom Morris sideshows providing all sorts of other wild distractions). We’re absolutely not going to pull off a Melbourne 2021 season. The Dogs are obviously competitive with the best. And we might have just watched the first hours of Carlton going past us (before watching Collingwood go past us in real time). We don’t look like any of those teams. We simply don’t have players that are as good, no system, no consistently uncompromising approach either with or without the ball. Sure, no Jones, Ryder, Billings, Clark, Ryder, Coffield, and even Highmore hurts, but if your system is good enough (or appears to exist in the first place) then you’ll be able to cover those outs much better than we did on Friday. And worrying about unforced skill errors feels like a very not-quite-AFL-standard problem. A running theme through the Richo era was connection between the “kickers and catchers”. Ratts referred to it as “completed plays” in the post-match press conference. It follows that basic skill errors aren’t going to help complete many plays. They were everywhere. Really basic things – Byrnes couldn’t pick up the ball at half-forward with three guys around him waiting for a handball, Kent dropped an easy mark near goal in the last quarter, Mason Wood gave off an uncommitted handball to no-one that was turned over and ended with a Collingwood goal. These are all just really easy examples to pick on out of a very large sample size. When the ball did make its way forward – we only had 47 inside 50s – the entries were wasteful and our small forwards were almost exclusively frustrating or anonymous, and the ball bounced out too easily.

***

The third-quarter flip showed again how big the gap between our best and worst is, and also how fickle we are – not just from week to week but minute to minute. Running in numbers, moving the ball more quickly and changing the angles all magically appeared once it appeared to be too late. Again like the Richo era, the best is still probably based a little too much simply on an adrenaline rush. And the best simply doesn’t last long enough, and when we’re on we have Jack Higgins doing an Adam Schneider 2009 Grand Final redux in front of goal. Two missed set shots, blazing away while off balance in space and ignoring Gresham next to him, and then missing a snap from the top of the goal square to draw the game level were wasted moments from Snags as we made our run. (He really does try.)

By the time Elliott gave off to Sidebottom out of a stoppage for a beautiful goal off one step, the margin was 34 points and the game should have been over. We had no right to be anywhere near it (an Elliott snap a few moments later almost did finish it there and then). Maybe the gravity of the situation shocked the players into action, I don’t know. Sinclair moved onto the ball and kicked a goal to start the run (helped by one of Darcy Moore’s several curious moments). Sinclair and Gresham at the bounces gave us a little more pace, and maybe there was just a bit more old-fashioned wanting the footy more. The momentum shifts from the Grand Final through to the opening games of this year have been fascinating.

The shift also coincided with Jack Hayes becoming a major influence on the game. I can’t remember the last time we brought someone new to the AFL system who made an immediate impact like that on debut. The debut of Gil’s sexy new scoreboards allowed for more real-time stats leaders throughout the game on the older screens, and so fresh was Jack to the system that his player graphic was initially accompanied by Jack Crisp’s photo, then Tim Membrey’s, then nothing at all.

He looked our most reliable set shot of the night – he kicks through the footy! – but he did great work all around the ground. His third quarter was fantastic. He cut through traffic on the forward flank and delivered to Jack Higgins (for a miss); he took an intercept mark on the wing that led to Membrey’s set shot and goal; he helped get the next clearance out of the middle after his ruck contest with Grundy, and at the following throw-in in the forward pocket earned a free-kick and slotted the goal (worth noting that both times he won the free kicks the incoming ball hit him on the body very ungracefully). Everyone’s favourite part of the night was his third goal, a curling snap on the run after he worked forward to join Butler ahead of the ball. In the vacuum of the moment between the ball leaving Butler’s hand and finding Jack, someone near us gasped, “Jack Hayes!”, and a cult hero was born. In the moments after he halved a two-on-one on the wing and won the free-kick, and then almost comically hauled in another intercept mark off-balance as he was absolutely gassed and hoping to get to the bench.

Membrey and Gresham were other rare bright spots on a dark night. Hayes’ third goal started with Membrey harassing Crisp on the wing, with the wayward kick falling to Gresham, and Membrey’s effort came with three goals, and despite missing an important set shot in the last he bullocked his way through bodies at the top of the square with a few minutes left for a snap goal to bring the margin within 11 points. We’d done everything we could to burn easier opportunities in the quarter.

Gresh was a welcome returnee – 24 zipping touches and 2.1 – but he’s still trying to kick the cover off the ball at every opportunity. Hayes’ third goal actually came from him trying to torpedo the ball over the last defender to Butler; the kick was a classic tumbler and it required all of a very kind bounce, a deft Butler tap and an excellent finish from Hayes to come off.

Max, who has turned himself into a Facial Hair Guy over the off-season, got to plenty of contests but just couldn’t quite complete enough marks around the ground and close to goal. It’s a familiar tale of this very early part of his career – drops what he perhaps should have taken, misses two set shots, and then kicks an expert dribbling rover’s goal running past a contest. His kick out of mid-air that hit the post in the third quarter was thrilling; it should also have been a quick gather and handball to Rowan Marshall on his own and running into goal.

***

Higgins partially made up for his misses in the third with a level-headed handball to Gresh in the goal square early in the last quarter that put us in front, but we’d juiced everything we could out of that run. From just on the 14-minute mark of the third quarter we’d kicked a wasteful 5.6 to 0.0, and it was met with three goals in less than four minutes from Collingwood. We never got the game back on our terms. A fair bit has been made in the wash-up about some of the umpiring – the Jack Steele deliberate out of bounds (that was a genuinely bad decision), and then the Jack Hayes no-mark and no free-kick call with a couple of minutes to go, but at the ground the latter didn’t look like much either way, and I would rather point to what was one of the more uninspiring showings for 75% of the match before blaming anything else.

The last time a Daicos debuted against St Kilda, Collingwood waltzed to a 178-point win at Victoria Park that remains their biggest ever victory, and our biggest-ever loss (and, for 13 weeks, it was the biggest winning margin VFL history). And that’s saying something for a club with the fewest premierships, most wooden spoons, lowest score ever, etc. etc. etc. Obviously – obviously – this was not as bad, but 1979 began an eight-year streak that saw five wooden spoons, two second-lasts and a third-last. Obligatory Round 1 overreactions dictate that the club is not sitting in a good place right now, and I’m not sure how much we can afford to mess around with no clear direction while other club bosses crack the shits about how much AFL assistance we’ve been receiving. All that said, we did lose to North Melbourne in the first game of 2020, and we also won the first game of last year, and look how both of those seasons panned out. (Three weeks before that 178-point loss in 1979, we’d beaten reigning premiers Hawthorn in Round 1.)

At the start of a new season we hope that maybe our team will become the centre of the football universe. SEN’s Crunch Time on Saturday morning was effusive about Collingwood’s early signs of transformation and rightfully panned the Saints for a lack of system and desire. Be careful what you wish for; in a contract year for our coach, we might well be a constant talking point for all the wrong reasons.

***

As well as the Concrete Dome’s new scoreboards, Friday marked the debut of a new lighting system for the field and in the stands, and a tacky light show to go with it all after Saints goals. (In true Sydney tacky-glam style, 120-metre-long scoreboards were installed at Homebush over last week, and were used as glorified electronic billboards in the latest of Victoria vs NSW sport dick-measuring contests). The Concrete Dome – on game day under the control of the Saints – only played the Collingwood song after the game, which was disrespectful to Pies fans given how long they’ve waited to celebrate a win in-person, and then the club’s engagement team drained Tim Membrey of whatever remaining energy he had left by interviewing him on-screen. He just didn’t want to be there after all of that, no one wanted to hear it, and the team had to wait for him longer out on the ground before they could hide themselves away. Just leave them all be.

We’ve all been morbidly fascinated (and exhausted) over the past two years by how many different ways the world can go to hell. We enter another season in which footy faces an existential reckoning, and we re-evaluate our relationship with the game yet again. And it remains that it’s nice to be at the footy watching the Saints with the people I love. It’s nice to have a head full of steam walking across the bridge in a heavy crowd after the game. It’s nice to have a St Kilda loss as the first thing on my mind when I wake up in the morning. It’s a luxury.

In the final home and away match of the 2009 season, the top-of-the-ladder Saints cruised to a 46-point win over hapless, helpless wooden-spooners Melbourne on a sunny Sunday at the MCG in a comfortable tune-up for September. Three weeks later, at the same ground, the Saints got over the line against the Dogs in a famous Preliminary Final.

St Kilda lost three games that year – by a total of 13 points on the sound of the respective final sirens. The Saints would beat the Dogs in the Preliminary Final again in 2010, while the Demons were condemned to spend several more years as the weakest team in the competition.

Both the Demons and the Dogs, it would prove, were closer to a flag. Richmond, too, who in the eras of Sheldon, Alves, GT and Ross had become the competition’s biggest and best joke.

Now, all of the mistakes made over 55 years have come home to roost. Blowing a 28-point lead late in the third quarter of 1971, waving away a 13-point lead at half-time in 1997, kicking ourselves out of it in 2009, giving up a 24-point lead in the first half of 2010 and not being able to score one more time late in the game; let alone the Preliminary Final should- and could-have-beens in 2004 and 2005. And that’s just the times when things seemed to be going well. There is still an element of shock that the Riewoldt generation never delivered a flag, but right at this moment it’s no surprise the club is in this position. The reassurance of “you did the best with the tools you had at the time” just doesn’t cut it.

Melbourne always loomed as an appropriate final benchmark. The worst non-expansion team of the modern era who even we could afford to pity at times. What more appropriate race to find ourselves in? 

Once the Dogs swept through in 2016, you could have made the argument that Melbourne and St Kilda were set for a repeat of the 2000s rivalries that came with other drought breakers in Geelong and (eventually) the Bulldogs. Two young teams that appeared to be on the same trajectory, both armed with high draft picks. St Kilda stunned many – from casual observers to just about every other recruiter in the land – by choosing Paddy McCartin over Christian Petracca with the first pick in the 2014 draft, setting the stage for yearslong debates about who should have done what. Some tight and some spiteful contests with the Demons over the following counted for varying bragging rights – Joey’s final-seconds goal in 2015 to extend a winning streak to nine seasons, Membrey’s emergence in both 2016 meetings as we looked like the perhaps next big thing, a late-season virtual Elimination Final in 2017, an upset narrow win in 2018.

Paddy isn’t at the Saints anymore, and his career so far has been ruined by concussion, never mind the well-documented related off-field issues he’s had to deal with. Petracca has just turned in one of the most complete Grand Final performances in VFL/AFL history, 2014’s pick 3 Angus Brayshaw there with him – and Alan Richardson, too. Billings and Bontempelli was an argument settled quickly, and 2014 now too, comprehensively. Melbourne might have flailed momentarily after 2018, but we didn’t get within an echoing Concrete Dome roar of being humoured as rivals or brave challengers or contenders alongside them at any stage. After a promising 2020 we played juddering footy in 2021 that has left us again a middling team with a questionable list and no clear path to contention (and a familiar Messiah Complex regarding the young forward wearing number 12), while the club has trashed itself aesthetically with a ridiculous version of the home jumper and a song change no-one asked for.

Two years ago I reflected on St Kilda’s 2010s – what it meant for fans, what it meant for the club. Our social construct of decades aligned neatly with that period beginning with the closest we’ve come to winning a flag outside of 1966, and then a great fall, some optimism (we finished two spots below the premiership-winning Bulldogs in 2016, with a rocket), before the arse fell out and we closed the decade with the realisation that the rebuild after the GT and Ross eras simply hadn’t worked. There would be no imminent return to contending or relevancy. We are still floundering. Meandering.

And so, we spent the last Saturday of September this year at home watching Petracca and Bontempelli running around as the best players in the game, and each as their team’s most likely matchwinners. The latter was ultimately vanquished, but he was the chief reason there was a contest at all, and he’s already won a best and fairest in a premiership year anyway. Petracca is now a Norm Smith medalist, and most importantly a premiership-winning player too. None of Nick Riewoldt, Lenny Hayes, Robert Harvey, Tony Lockett, Nathan Burke, Stewart Loewe, Nicky Winmar, Fraser Gehrig, Nick Dal Santo, nor Trevor Barker can lay claim to that.

Melbourne’s triumph is a before-and-after event for St Kilda. Any remaining semblance of cover has been blown. At least we weren’t Fitzroy, left with a 52-year drought and then nothing at all. At least we weren’t the Swans, with their move to a different city and 72-year hangover. At least Geelong had it as bad as us. At least we weren’t the Bulldogs, who couldn’t make a Grand Final to begin with. At least we weren’t Richmond, the laughing stock of the land. At least we weren’t Melbourne, who had not been fashionable in any way for 57 years.

There is now no other great drought. St Kilda has always been exceptional, from not bothering to win a game for the first three seasons of this competition as part of a 93-year wait for the singular event of 1966, through to the GT and Ross eras that were show-stopping, turbulent, and heartbreaking in extremes. Now, we again have the raw data to back it all up.

It’s just us now.