Month: August 2019

Sydney Swans 6.2, 6.3, 11.4, 17.7 (109)
St Kilda 2.5, 5.9, 7.12, 8.16 (64)
Crowd: 33,722 at the SCG, Saturday, 24th August at 1.45pm

What do we remember from dead rubber games to close out the season in the past? A comfortable last round win over Fitzroy at a drenched Western Oval in 1994. Spider Everitt forewarning the competition of what was to come with 7.7 out of 20.24 against Adelaide in 1996 (Adelaide didn’t need to provide any warning, it turned out). Geelong edging us at Kardinia Park in 2003, as that rivalry really emerged. A sunny day at the MCG against the Tigers with Fraser – retiring for the first time – kicking a goal after the siren to ice a 10-point win (Andrew Thompson retired for the first, and, to date, only time also on that day). A tight and entertaining win against the Blues on a sunny day with the Concrete Dome roof open in 2012 that was Brett Ratten’s last as Carlton coach. Lenny’s, and CJ’s and Gwilt’s, last games against the Crows in 2014. Roo kicking nine against the Lions at the end of 2016, where we appeared to be racing down the Road to 2018. Our kids were untradeable, our senior players still high performers. Fast forward two years to an echoing concrete dome, with the club beaten down and the North Melbourne end having their own party as they willed Ben Brown to the Coleman Medal sent off Jarrad Waite.

***

By quirk or by quark, or whatever, Sam Rowe played his first game for St Kilda, and his 100th and last. In an era of high production values for social media content, this was a story that told itself, and never needed to be plumped-up filler for fans in the cold June cage of a faltering season. The video made by the club during the week was neatly respectful.

He joins Mark Dwyer, Fergus Watts and Colm Begley as players in recent decades that came to St Kilda to play just one match, and adds to a longer list of players that came to St Kilda for brief and perhaps curious finishes to storied careers built elsewhere: Matthew Clarke, Sean Charles, Damian Monkhorst, Tony Francis, Brian Wilson, Jim Krakouer, Geoff Ablett.

Rowe tossed the coin. He had a couple of chances to kick a goal late in the last quarter, but hooked them both. In the final minutes he put in the hardest chase of possibly his entire career. No goal that he was so deserving of, but his presence on the ground was celebration enough of his journey.

Sydney’s own retirees saluted in the last quarter. There was a sense of inevitability once the Swans kicked the first couple of goals of the final term. On the St Kilda side, there was simply not enough to play for, apart from very unsuccessfully trying to spot up Rowe on the lead. Until that point we weren’t interested in using the ball effectively anyway, be it under pressure or not, long or short, forward or back. Like we were the opposition jumpers perched in the background of Carlton’s homecoming last week, so we were for Sydney’s big day on Saturday.

A final exhibition match, a final showcase, a final celebration of whatever this past year was. Long to kick a quality snap goal and celebrate like the season was still on the line. Lonie to squirt a set shot and fail to make the distance via his pokey set-shot kicking style, and scuff a short pass to Rowe in the final quarter. Ross twice giving off a bad handball sideways to Wilkie who was stationary. Lonie missed Hannebery on his own, the bounce missed him and then Bruce, who slipped over. This was looking like a lot of park footballers, but everyone is a park footballer on the last day of the home and away season. The umpires let go Hunter Clark getting slung after getting the footy, and then Stuv throwing Parker to the ground off the ball. It’s been a long season for them, too.

The things that made the season; they all get another run around to remind us of the dirt and gravel and dust and dried grass and the weeds that make up the bulk of a footy season, among the few things that did flower in 2019. Inaccuracy made another timely appearance. At one stage we were 4.12. Let’s take one last look at the big board:
13.7 (85)
10.16 (76)
9.12 (66)
10.14 (74)
15.5 (95)
10.8 (68)
10.10 (70)
10.10 (70)
10.11 (71)
9.14 (68)
9.15 (69)
11.14 (80)
8.11 (59)
10.10 (70)
11.7 (73)
8.9 (57)
17.14 (116)
15.14 (104)
10.10 (70)
10.12 (72)
10.8 (68)
8.16 (64) 

***

The fists are down now, if we weren’t exhausted on the ropes three months ago, or on the canvas two months ago. While the pre-season matches are exhibition shrouded in all sorts of messed up fantasies and storyline, the last round is exhibition shrouded in relief and reflection. Reflections of reflections. What happened to running teams off their feet at Marvel Stadium? What happened to Billy Slater? To the loud goal celebrations? To Jack Steele going out of his way to hit Jake Stringer and give away 50 metres after he clocked Jimmy Webster? One more time. Let’s go out and kick the footy, let’s go out and watch the footy. 

It is a lifestyle. It frames the day, it frames the week, and the season frames the year. Footy is a way of marking time. The season is a story, tied in with the calendar year. The depths of winter are framed by it. Saturday saw the completion of another season in the story of this club, and the stories of our own in supporting it. All of that goes away now – from a St Kilda perspective – and that leaves us to our own day-to-day. Something goes away. Time to sit on the grass in the sunshine and not need to think nor worry where or when we need to be this weekend.

What fucking relief. To finish off this season, we were afforded the vague luxury of not actually having to go anywhere, certainly not to outright surrender a sunny late August Saturday afternoon to the confines of the Concrete Disney Store, which on the weekend added “terrible basketball venue” to its CV. Consistently it tries to be a futuristic SPORTSBALL AND COLDPLAY stadium but has dated fucking terribly, to go with being built the wrong way. It won’t take long for the basketball court configuration alone to be looked back on as a quirk of overzealous salesmanship. Last week at the MCG was a sad reminder of what the experience of going to the footy has become with the Concrete Dome being St Kilda’s home ground. Watching the team play in the elements again on Saturday felt awfully foreign and fleeting.

Being inside all footy season is exhausting. Writing this blog is exhausting (although that one’s entirely on me). A second season of emailing the club and social media posts asking about the club for a single fucking answer about the club song that have been really weirdly dodged take their toll. Something – anything – would be nice; surely the Ultimate Membership gets me something? No? Oh, ok.

***

All the highlights of St Kilda games past don’t really mean anything over the off-season. Or for anything now. Marking the 15-year anniversary of Stephen Milne kicking 11 against the Lions on the club site and social media channels three days after the close of this season – and this decade – is sad. What the fuck is the point of that? “Remember those times, when we were good and there was a future?? Now it’s a Tuesday night three eras later and Jake Carlisle and Josh Bruce all of a sudden are on the trade table. Stuv is probably gone, Bruce was either very unconvincing or very hungover talking about his own situation on Channel 7. Is anyone that fussed? We’re going nowhere fast – certainly not because of those individuals; but from a supporter’s view a chasm lies between the heart of the club and the players on this team.

After several years of slow and staggered disconnection, the prospect of a new season is more exhausting, and the end of the footy season an increasingly bigger relief. A time to revel in the wildest, most frivolous thoughts. The knowledge that another season will inevitably come around gives us a cushion for any brazen self-dares. They’re getting wilder by the year, though. What would it be like if we followed the game but not have to deal with the Saints? What would it be like to not follow the game at all? What if we don’t need this?

Round 22, 2019
Carlton  2.4, 5.5, 8.11, 11.12 (78)
St Kilda  3.3, 7.4, 8.8, 10.8 (68)
Crowd: 51,876 at the MCG, Saturday, August 18th at 1.45pm

Much like all the wild fantasies and scandals we might have conjured up for the Ladder Predictor, including weird shifts in form and blow-out margins that wouldn’t have matched what actually happened, the scandalous storylines that open the pathway for a bemusing fairytale to unfold at this club are gone. Brett Ratten to Carlton? Brett Ratten to North Melbourne? Clarko to us? Ross Lyon to Carlton, and then we play them in the Grand Final in a couple of years? Which could mean maybe Robert Harvey to us? Or maybe Ross Lyon straight to us? Omg Lenny? IS GT COMING BACK? HOLY FUCKING SHIT MAYBE IT IS ROSS.

Whatever grown-over, baited pathway that lies beyond the Road to 2018 isn’t going to suddenly become apparent and neatly paved because of a late-season change of coach. There’s no Teague Train charging through the Frankston line to Moorabbin station. There was no McKay or Walsh or Cripps or Curnow or Curnow or Dow or McGovern or Setterfield or Casboult or whoever waiting to be rearranged in a large navy blue jigsaw and unlock the code to reawaken a giant club that had laid dormant since the Semi Final weekend of 2001, with intermittent disturbances.

***

Just like our Saturday match-up against Melbourne at the MCG earlier this year, this game offered a glimpse of an early 2020s Grand Final match-up featuring St Kilda and another emerging or Secure Long-Term Future club. For some reason we’re wearing our clash jumper as we did in 2010, but preferably a version of the candy stripe, or maybe what we have now. This weekend it was the 2022 Grand Final Day jumper match up. St Kilda’s clash jumpers are far more “St Kilda” than Carlton’s clash jumpers are “Carlton”, or Melbourne’s jumpers are “Melbourne”. For that reason I can’t quite imagine a Grand Final in which St Kilda is playing Carlton with the Blues in a clash jumper, or the Dees in theirs. The 2017 match-up was a test for the AFL but I’m sure they would step in and make us wear white shorts with the home jumper? But that’s a conversation for a different dimension.

Saturday afternoon at the MCG with two founding clubs of the competition. There’s nothing quite like it. For as long as the roof remains closed at the Concrete Disney Store who knows where or when we are? If Saturday’s game had been played there, the roof would have been closed. Sunshine for one day. I said the other week some moments feel like they’re made for the seat you’re sitting in. The play or the moment unfolds and you have the perfect view. Some days at the footy feel like they’re made for wherever your life might be at that point.

***

There was anticipation around the ground as I walked in a stupor at 12.15pm from Wellington Parade to Gate 2. There were already queues of Carlton fans outside of the ground waiting to pick up tickets. People had already got their hands on the navy blue hand sign wavy things. Out in the sunshine, to watch a game in the actual weather. Remember that? People are still doing this. Walking around outside the ground was a much needed reminder that all of this was still a thing. It was a relief.

Of the 51,000 crowd, 80% would have been Carlton fans. This was the awkwardly presented membership make-up game for Shanghai, and having the city end entirely for St Kilda looked great, but that was basically it. If just about any other club was playing there would have been 65,000. Keep in mind the stakes for this one were zero.

***

Before a game of such stature, nothing short of the classics on the big screen at the MCG would suffice. And so, Carlton’s match day humans presented us with St Kilda vs Carlton in Wellington on Anzac Day of 2015; early in a year that saw the teams finish 14th and 18th respectively. The most striking thing about the game was the aesthetics – St Kilda in one of the three one-off NZ jumpers (this was the one with grey), and Carlton in their weird sort-of panelled clash jumper in front of a stadium one large tier of yellow seats. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yncPGRsy2KY

***

If you hadn’t bothered keeping track of anything this year, there were a few hallmarks of a late season dead rubber, and that’s beyond the mincing of disposal and non-physicality. Cripps trying to kick a goal out of mid-air, Hind trying to dribble one from the pocket. Footy back to its purest form. Nice to have the run around. Nice to be out of the house.

Membrey set the tone with a set shot miss from a clinical opening bounce clearance and mark on the lead. Nothing was going to be easy. Let’s take a look at the board:
13.7 (85)
10.16 (76)
9.12 (66)
10.14 (74)
15.5 (95)
10.8 (68)
10.10 (70)
10.10 (70)
10.11 (71)
9.14 (68)
9.15 (69)
11.14 (80)
8.11 (59)
10.10 (70)
11.7 (73)
8.9 (57)
17.14 (116)
15.14 (104)
10.10 (70)
10.12 (72)
10.8 (68)

Acres probably opened with three specifically bad kicks out of four, including two terrible forward entries. No rhythm and no momentum in this one. Bruce and Stuv ran into goal and messed it up. Bruce’s captain’s moment never came, Stuv was clearly struggling second up.

Eventually Nick Hind decided to take four bounces and floated a goal through against the flow. Like Stuv last week, it was a reminder of how rare it is that one of our own players will seem to physically break through the will and gravity of a match. What else did we have? Very quietly, not much really. It was a meek sign-off. Long’s goal? Oh yeah, I remember when he did that when our season mattered. Hunter Clark’s finesse, Rowan Marshall’s work out of the ruck before Kreuzer wore him down. In the way we could manufacture something the week before, we absolutely could not on Saturday. We kicked 3.4 in the second half.

Casboult at one end, to the lead of McKay, to the threat of McGovern. Simpson charging through the middle in the last quarter had the air of Ablett’s charge out of the centre in our last game at the MCG last decade. McKay’s wheel around and goal; Daisy’s side step; Casboult’s goliath protection at the top of our goal square. This was their day, and their time is coming. Never mind the noise when Jack Billings’ post-siren goal sailed through in Round 5 as we sat on top of the ladder. Did you hear that roar when ? It wasn’t just for this game, it was an affirmation that the Blues are back. That the appointment of David Teague was more than just riding the 2019 caretaker’s momentum.

This went into the file of watching a team run over the top of the Saints at the MCG, and feeling that the ground was simply too grand and too much for this club. Round 21 of 2002 against Collingwood, a shock loss to the Bulldogs in Round 12 of 2004, the 2005 Preliminary Final, the 2006 Elimination Final, Round 14 of 2007 against Collingwood (featuring Daisy Thomas), the 2009 Grand Final. You have that feeling in your core sometimes – not today, whatever the stakes.

***

Really, I’d forgotten what it was like to go the footy and enjoy the fucking day. Artificial light. I had a great day out with Matt and Dad. Dad and I spoke on the phone the next day and specifically talked about how much we liked the MCG and how nice it was to be out in the weather.

***

Melbourne loomed as our next vague rivals. Geelong and St Kilda was made for the early 21st century period of premiership drought breaking, and it made sense the Dees would be next after the Dogs and Tigers wiped out anything else beyond Carlton and Fremantle’s 1995. Our next rival appears to have already gone beyond us. The Carlton and Brisbane Lions that were a permanent fixture of derision and irrelevance look like the next big things (if the Lions aren’t there already), and perhaps what we refer to as the team of the 2020s later this century.

***

At what point is it late in the season? At what point does the early season feeling give way to the reflective nature of Rounds 20-plus? What were we doing or thinking in Round 15 or Round 16? The day-to-day reveals the banality of the actual lumps of dirt that make of the earth of the season – we’ve been filing out of this season for a couple of months now, and games have become a little bit more of an impost to the rest of the weekend. There is more relief now when a season is done than ever before. Footy season is a state of being. All of sudden this is the last rushed minute left to grab the membership scarf and get everything together (which I had all morning to sort out) before ungracefully rushing to the 58 tram. The last tram ride into the city, the last Saturday afternoon to watch the Saints play in actual weather and the actual earth’s atmosphere. This Saturday, the season will disappear in anonymity.

St Kilda 4.3, 6.5, 8.7, 10.12 (72)
Fremantle 2.3, 6.4, 9.8, 10.9 (69)
Crowd: 17,715 at Marvel Stadium, Sunday, August 11th at 1.10pm

By the end of Saturday night, Round 21 had seen GWS reduced to their lowest score in the eight years in the competition, and then North Melbourne to theirs since joining the VFL in 1925. Essendon had kicked a goal within 19 seconds of their game starting, but at the 21-minute mark of the last quarter were 1.8. Melbourne had kicked 3.8 at the final change that afternoon. Carlton were 1.6 at half-time on Sunday.

Of course, Essendon kicked three arsey goals to let novelty scores and stats enthusiasts down and somehow, somehow, temper the loss with the last three goals. Teams like that will always find some angle, some cushioning. That deserved to be 1.8 at the end. . It’s often not mentioned that Port kicked the last 1.3 of the 2007 Grand Final – the margin had stretched out to 128 points. That does make a difference. The Bulldogs at one stage led 137 to 14. It was still their biggest loss to the Bulldogs ever, sure, but it just wasn’t the empirical freak occurrence it could have been, that belonged in the tired, very off-white pages of the copy of Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Australian Rules Football, But Couldn’t Be Bothered Asking that my Mum bought home for me when I was seven, and endlessly fascinated and partially terrified me with its odd font and strange tales about scorelines and happenstances that belonged to a time when freak occurrences maybe weren’t such freak occurrences, but were still of the same century.

The laboured point being is that this was the kind of game that might just well yield a only a couple of goals for each team on any weekend, let alone one that was already drenched in anomaly. Like those weekends where all the games are weirdly close, but usually the effects have worn off over the Saturday night. The close game aspect was one that felt likely, and to the point where I was more expectant of close piss-away of the type we saw in Round 3. We almost got something very similar – before Josh Bruce’s kick floated left we had kicked the same score as that shitty Sunday evening, and Freo were up by three points instead of five. Watching Ross Lyon’s Dockers in Round 4 of 2012 was like watching the same team play against each other on a video game, and watching the Saints over the past couple of years has been like watching a not-as-good, then briefly better, then worse version of Ross Lyon’s Dockers of the late 2010s. Perhaps fairly, both games this year were decided either way by less than a kick, and that is a very St Kilda and Fremantle thing to say when usually that sentence is applied to the Swans and West Coast and the 2005 and 2006 Grand Finals.

 ***

Anonymity is the lot of a team who is watching their season and another heavy-hearted decade quietly move to a close. The crescendo of 2019, really, was reached a few weeks ago, and opened the epilogue pages in Adelaide last week. No one has cause to mention the Saints for any good reason. All Australian squads, Brownlow tips, under 22 all Australian squads, a smattering of media awards, let alone anything relevant to finals or a premiership. No one has cause to mentioned the Saints for any bad reason. We just sacked our second-longest serving coach in an event no one really wanted to happen, but was inevitable, and is now in the past. The most we could hope for came via Channel 9 Adelaide this week in a piece about crowds being down throughout the year: Port Adelaide crowds by more than 3,000, Adelaide’s by around 1,270, “Torrential rain, bad time slots and match-ups <cut to footage of Adelaide vs St Kilda> all blamed”. Last week was the third-lowest Crows home crowd at Adelaide Oval.

No, high scoring doesn’t necessitate quality football, but the scoring of zeitgeist of 1919 had returned a century later, through snow or Concrete Dome conditions, and the latest edition of the Bizarro Rivalry had suitably been scheduled for two teams known for not being overly keen on kicking goals this year, or for much of the past decade, by design, by incompetence, and seemingly in some cases, both. Another look the board, please:
13.7 (85)
10.16 (76)
9.12 (66)
10.14 (74)
15.5 (95)
10.8 (68)
10.10 (70)
10.10 (70)
10.11 (71)
9.14 (68)
9.15 (69)
11.14 (80)
8.11 (59)
10.10 (70)
11.7 (73)
8.9 (57)
17.14 (116)
15.14 (104)
10.10 (70)
10.12 (72)

***

Jade Gresham was the latest edition to the 2019 Surprise, Unusual and Bad Injuries List, and we’d brought in two midfielders that are probably our best players but have played about 30 seconds of footy this year. The Best Player in the AFL Since Round 11, Rowan Marshall nearly joined the group after a collision with two Dockers coming from different directions that actually looked like a computer glitch from our view on the opposite wing. Matt and Dad and I had said less than a minute earlier that we’d had all the play for not much return on the scoreboard. Very quickly, Marshall had come off and 2020 was ruined. The game quite obviously shifted in that moment. Marshall is clearly our most important player. Welcome to the next rebuild.

Being the St Kilda Football Club meant the door was open and delicious food laid out for the opposition, and Walters was brought into the game within moments to kick Freo’s first. The Coff’s shoulder fell out a few minutes later and Fyfe (in clash arm sleeve) kicked a goal around the corner. There are clear differences in talent and careers built here, but Freo’s best players were now making an impact as some of the few highlights we had left in 2019 were quickly dropping off. Freo supporters continued ensuring their club remains an aesthetic 1990s bad novelty with the “Olé, olé, olé, olé” chant after goals. Cool.

The difference in leaders and star quality was slowly looking like it would take hold. That isn’t actually that much across the two teams right now, but that’s all it might take when you’ve got two teams that aren’t overly keen on scoring. Hannebery’s two goals were forgotten, and Stuv’s smart body work one-on-one that had contributed to a Membrey mark and goal then set off an excellent chain which ended with a long kick to Josh Bruce out the back tripping over himself. Freo took it up the other end for a goal, and Bruce – one of the few guys who has actually been playing like a captain – rewarded the neat work from Dunstan to open up the ground, and then some rare clean ball movement through Hannebery, Stuv and Lonie, with a missed set shot. Freo went up the other end again for a Fyfe goal. The Ross Effect had taken hold, Freo had unassumingly hit the front and Fyfe at that point had 17 touches and two goals.

Decent looks at goal were rare, which made Hannebery’s snaps in the first quarter that much more valuable. He wasn’t quite pacing Fyfe but two goals and 14 touches might have been in the classier of halves played by a Saint this year. No fuss, no worry, no problem. He clearly wasn’t developed at this club. Uncompromising usually is a byword to toughness, and he has that, but he doesn’t need to think too hard about his disposal and intent. He knows what needs to be done, and he does it.

Marshall had been reduced to the Freo-style set-and-forget ruck, which only works heading into the 2020s if you literally, literally, literally are the tallest player to have ever played. Stuv’s goal and the celebration was an excellent moment that was brashly interrupted by the recorded Jack Steven chant over the PA. I don’t know if the club knows this, but that ascending tone that played at the MCG was one of the last in-game ground announcements and that kind of thing really is going to make the crowd stop and listen. The ground announcer and the club (I know we’re not the only ones doing this) can’t help themselves and are still running with the soccer-style individual player announcements before the game. They really built this one up after zero responses for any players number 1 to 26 and went for JOSH *vague “ooooooo” crow noise for “Bruce”* which just ended up as JOSH SILENCE. And they did the captain last, like it’s fucking Craig Willis after the fucking Grand Final.

When music was played after a late, meaningless goal in Round 3 of 2018 that visibly pissed off people who were only just coming to terms with the rebuild failing, I really wondered in that moment if the club would care or think about this kind of stuff. After the game and the crappy version of the song was played a few times they tried something different and went for the replay of Bruce’s winner with BONUS GROUND ANNOUNCER EXCITED VOICE and built up the crowd but they just still don’t understand the disconnect and went to that “you’re the best” song instead of the club song and people started leaving immediately. Yes, it did matter and it did make a difference in that moment.

***

That second quarter featured a string of Acres, Long, Battle and Paton that may have been the saddest handball chain of the professional era, and was immediately followed on the turnover into Freo’s forward line by a scuffed kick to Walters who was good enough to handball over his head to Fyfe. The skied kick meant an awkward dance shared by Carlisle and Sean Darcy, a dribbling ball towards goal and a weird attempted spoil by Battle with his boot via an awkward lunge. We talk about all the highlights of a season, but what is it that makes a season? It’s all the shit in between that builds up bit-by-bit.

Barging through the idea of Dunstan going for a checkside goal instead of a drop punt because he didn’t learn from the first time because he actually kicked the goal was Stuv. The one-on-one mark in front of goal lifted the crowd in a game that had become all about which side could reduce the other to the lowest score. By the time Acres, Lonie and Long had all shat directly into their pants in front of goal late in the game it was then about to which side could reduce themselves to the lowest score.  For all intents and purposes we were done before Stuv’s third goal. It might have just been too good to be true if he’d wheeled around for his fourth to put us in front shortly after, but it would have made sense in that moment, in the way the game was being played and the way that he appeared to break through the gravity of the dour game itself. Was he this good the whole time? Maybe we didn’t use him properly, if that’s possible. Maybe he should have played in the forward line more often. He outbodied his opponent and turned to look for a teammate, or indeed the goals, that made him our best small forward. He did start his career  off in that role – for many our first introduction to him may have been kicking the winner in the second round of the 2008 NAB Cup against the Cats, but more loudly the three goals against Geelong in Round 13 of 2010 as the search for redemption really got going. In the way that these stints in attack were out of necessity, so might the last few years have been. Too much class in the midfield to break into initially, and then in a slow and one-paced team crashing down the ladder, how do you take out your best midfielder? We might not have a choice pretty soon, but I think we’re going to be more than ok with that if that’s best for him.

Bruce eventually had his captain’s moment. He’d burned a few options earlier to take a set shot from outside 50 and didn’t score, but this is someone who has wanted to take responsibility whatever the game situation has been. Right to the end, when Josh Battle made the kind of play that really endears supporters to a young player.

***

There was just over 17,000 at the Concrete Disney Store for the last home game of the year. Secretly, yay. This was branded as “Saints Say Thanks” round, after we’d been “called upon” at the start of year as if we were still owing favours after decades of memberships and shitty winter trips to and from shitty games at shitty home grounds. I tweeted that I’d trade the free chips offered for having turned up to every home game for The Fable Singers version of the club song being returned (Rory: “I’ll have the chips … and the song returned too”, which was a more appropriate and reasonable response to be honest). There was no real response from the club, which brought us to 514 days since the new songs were “revealed” and St Kilda has not publicly referenced the change, nor publicly nor privately given any reason as to why, nor why they didn’t actually ask anyone about the change, nor why they didn’t say anything at all about it, now why it’s been so long that they didn’t. Thank you, Saints. I didn’t even get the fucking chips.

Another weird, shitty season under the YEAR 2000 lights of Incubating Disneyland Melbourne, where the seasons are forgotten. The changing in the angle of the sun is forgotten. Part of the journey of a footy season is that it tracks the path of our day-to-day lives from the tail of summer, as we reacquaint ourselves with reality, through the depths of winter, and then, if you’re lucky enough, spring springs for you in September as the weather warms and the sun shines heading to the final stretch of the year, which has soon enough become the year that was. Every game played at Docklands is an aesthetic duplicate now; no real record of a time or place other than a link between Disney and a Western Bulldogs board member, and the idiocy or fuckwittery of people who had every number of resources and dollar amounts available to them when designing and constructing a new stadium. So many games are played in this concrete dome – including most of ours – and it means so many games across the competition look and sound the same. The crappy echo of the unnecessary roof, the shitty grey, the same artificial lighting forever.

Round 20, 2019
Adelaide Crows 4.1, 6.4, 10.7, 14.8 (92)
St Kilda 3.2, 5.5, 7.7, 10.10 (70)
Crowd: 39,984 at Adelaide Oval, Saturday, August 3rd at 7.10pm ACST

Got yourself a dysfunctional club? Issues that run beyond an ageing list (but that’s actually quite talented)? Did you lose a Grand Final after dominating a season and the players have since looked exhausted and broken? Did you drop Eddie Betts, who needs to rediscover his ability to kick quality goals? Does Bryce Gibbs need a confidence boost after being bemusingly dropped several times this year? Does Tex need to feel like the captain he thinks he is (and almost sort of is)? Need a highly rated kid to lift a stadium when the game is on the line?

Have you ever considered, the St Kilda Football Club?

From Adelaide’s final quarter comeback to draw the game to 1994, to watching a wobbly performance early in 1995 in the strangely dark Football Park – in which Joshua Kitchen and Wayne Thornborrow kicked two of our three goals – to the Crows stopping our early season run on my birthday in 1996 as Ben Hart of all people took mark of the year, to the Crows bookending the 1997 run, with a trying, lonely Saturday loss in Round 15 on one side, and one of the darkest days in the club’s history on the other (the half-time scores of the games are unsettlingly similar). Then there was a humiliation at Football Club in our 1998 collapse, as the Crows went on their way to snatching a second premiership. Adelaide was chief villain in my formative years as a St Kilda supporter. In my head the Football Park crowd always seemed to have this reaction like a vigorous golf clap when the Crows kicked a goal. There was something unsettling about it.

St Kilda had always seemed small and vulnerable and wobbly and anxious interstate. Some performances in 1997 and in the better times of 1998 aside, the ability to win interstate relatively consistently throughout the GT-into-Ross Era was a welcome novelty that felt like the club had a generational armour. That is now well and truly been forgotten, as has the ability to win consistently anywhere.

That said, interstate games presented a specific problem in the Richo era. Slow starts, early blowouts, some big margins. That comes with the territory of being shithouse, but even as the team rose vaguely up the ladder, and then comically slid back down it, giving up games in the opening half hour or 45 minutes interstate have rendered so many invitations to houses deflated. There isn’t really any build up at home, if you’re watching solo (as I was on Saturday) you can from shoving your face with Joe’s fish and chips and fucking around the HDMI cable and picture settings straight to the opening bounce as glimpses on the screen of the team running out in the clash jumper to even less fanfare than usual stirred the match day butterflies that much more. No tram trip in, no scrolling through the Twitter feed for pre-match whatever, no meeting up with humans, no taking in the atmosphere of the office buildings around our Concrete Disney Store home ground. Watching at home with other humans usually means going from 0 to 100 and then the focus quickly deviating from the lost cause game to settle on the various potato chip products around us, or the M&Ms, or conversation with those we’re with related to things around the footy, occasionally punctuated by an “OH!” as in, “OH! THAT WAS SHIT, AGAIN.”

So maybe we cheekily thought that now that Richo was gone, that element of our game was gone, too. We’d decided to kick 100 points two weeks in a row for the first time this year, so why not? Adelaide Oval has given us smackings or heartbreak from both Adelaide teams. But this was different. Adelaide was on the ropes, resorting to pizza and Don Pyke showing human emotion, and we’re just happily charging along with Clark and Coffield and Marshall and Bruce on our way to unconvincing relatively high scores. Beat Adelaide and then the rest of the season just falls into place, right? Just like after Round 19 in 2009 when we were playing three not so great teams and we’d be on our way to an undefeated season. But as you near game day, logistics and machinations become a bit more real, particularly when you read the St Kilda club tweet saying Newnes and Paton are out due to puking or shitting, joining Hannebery in the puking and shitting rehab group. Those clouds that gathered over Shanghai and dumped a storm of diarrhoea and that watery vomit had come south and were poised to bring another shitty interstate game that’s done at quarter time, where everyone’s gonna be diarrhoeaing all over the place.

***

The magic cloak of a new coach was stripped off. This team was mostly the same, the same team that managed to ride adversity so handsomely at the beginning of the year and was able to reprise in recent weeks. This was not quite a wolf in sheep’s clothing, maybe just a sheep inside a more efficient sheep’s clothing. An exercise in reinforcing the state of the list, putting it in all caps so boomers can overcome their inability to understand subtlety and facetiousness online. It certainly shouldn’t make us feel much different about Ratten.

The atrocious kicking forward, shanked shots at goal from guys who couldn’t miss over the last few weeks, Parker and Long and Langlands being mostly unsighted, but then we get guys like Clark and Marshall and Coffield whose trajectories in the past couple of months in particular have been impervious to the team’s form, which says a lot about them – let alone the way they play their footy – as much as it says about this lost and its development.

Carlisle’s been copping a lot of heat but you’d need to acknowledge he didn’t really have a pre-season and I would happily break into medical records cabinets/bugged conversations with medicos that reveal his back still isn’t 100%. Of course he can’t fucking bend down that quickly right now.

Really, zero interesting things happened in this one. No wild momentum shifts, no overly incredible moments. Matt had texted me during the day on Saturday, saying. “We were so bad last year that I can’t even remember any of the games”. Much of this year will end up falling into the same footy black hole. Like the Round 6 meeting with the Crows, this was the “every week” in the “We go to the footy every week”. The narrative of the season informs the way we feel about it, but nothing hides that this is a nondescript game of footy that neutrals would not know existed, nor would there be a pressing need to call up any footage from it. Round 6 raised questions over whether we’d moved beyond 2018 really, and whether we as supporters could or wanted to get through another slog of a season. Only Matthew Parker saved that from being entirely forgettable and useless outside of some guys getting 120ish minutes of AFL footy under their belt, and maintained the early season good vibes around recruiting. Round 20 raised questions over how much of 2018 we still need to shed. This was a revert to type, but with 25% Brett Ratten thrown in. Eleven deep entries yielded 5.2, suggesting better positioning up forward and we’re using it, but 10.10 and comedy capers otherwise would suggest our players, by and large are either young or just not that good. The scoring is back to it’s bizarre consistency – let’s take a look at the big board:
13.7 (85)
10.16 (76)
9.12 (66)
10.14 (74)
15.5 (95)
10.8 (68)
10.10 (70)
10.10 (70)
10.11 (71)
9.14 (68)
9.15 (69)
11.14 (80)
8.11 (59)
10.10 (70)
11.7 (73)
8.9 (57)
17.14 (116)
15.14 (104)
10.10 (70)

Which means 12 out of 19 scores between 66 and 76, and if you want to stretch it a little further, 15 out of 19 scores between 57 and 80, and whichever way you diced that up, you finish with a shithouse percentage that like 2016 and 2017 had us effectively another game behind in the scramble for also-ran status. It’s a game we played again in 2019, but with even less of a presence.

***

A little bit like 1997, but in a quite different and infinitely more forgettable way, the Crows were bookends, sort of not really. They defused our opening season run in Round 6, and just as soon as we’d opened up a new tab and started using the Ladder Predictor with the default 20-point margins just to be safe to see what could be what – the equivalent of St Kilda smut in the post-Grand Finals era – and the Crows have walked in the door and we’ve frantically quit Chrome altogether with flushed, guilty faces. Slam down the laptop screen, angry we got caught. Go do some washing or the dishes in shamed silence.

We’ve disappeared from the conversation altogether for now. The coach isn’t that new, the loss has levelled things out and development and youth is again the order of the day. All that pressure we felt around the coaching situation – which stayed at the forefront given the wins – has now evaporated, as has an unease around the general club direction. The absurd shift to anxiety over a potential finals spot is gone now also. All of this has brought a light breeze of relief.  Footy fans get a little more reflective at this time of year. Let’s just play some young guys and see what they can do. The future is a long way away. The sun is setting a little later now. The light is there for longer. The air isn’t as harsh. Not sure if it’s a bump in serotonin or just a reduction in general anxiety. Maybe it’s a bit of both. That’s ok, and it feels quietly ok.