Suffocating the spark

Round 5, 2021
St Kilda 3.4, 4.5, 6.6, 7.6 (48)
Richmond 3.3, 8.6, 15.12, 20.14 (134)
Crowd: 32,056 at Marvel Stadium, Thursday, April 15th at 7.30pm

It’s my girlfriend’s birthday this weekend. She’s having people over at my place on Saturday, and then we’re doing a whole bunch of stuff on the Sunday, which is her actual birthday. A lack of sleep discipline over the past couple of weeks, sprinkled with some pocked general life anxieties, had driven me to the state of “very rundown”; that feeling that you’re a mediocre sleep away from a full-blown cold. I needed the earliest night possible. I couldn’t be sick for this. Something had to give.

I sent out the warning to our Messenger group with Matt and Dad and Richie and Evan that I was probably going to be a late withdrawal. I was about to miss my first St Kilda game in Melbourne since the season opener of 2015.

In a last-ditch effort I turbocharged my tuna salad with chilli and garlic and jalapenos and stuffed some Nurofen into my face, but I just wasn’t feeling it. Defeated, I put on the Fox Footy pre-match and lodged the paperwork at 6.30pm.

But something started writhing around in me. No. This can’t be. A Thursday (???) night home game against the reigning premiers, coming off a win that we’d hope to look back on as a turning point for this era. What if something incredible happened?

Thursday night TV is made for neutrals. It’s made for MAJOR LEAGUE SPORTS fetishists and the executives and the journos who feel they’re owed the PRIME TIME experience by their association with the game; even just the ability to say “prime time”. The concept has no understanding, let alone care, for the rhythm of the week and the weekend that footy offers us, not the rhythm of the season that frames the year.

Television coverage be damned, the Fox Footy theme music be damned, the bass-heavy Channel 7 sponsor announcements (are they still narrated by Craig Willis?) be damned, my twitching eye be damned. It didn’t feel right. I had to be there. Sure, we got used to watching it all on TV last year, but this was different. Our tickets were for the second row on level two. I put my better elastic cuff chinos on. I changed my jumper. I grabbed my Maddie’s Match scarf. How did this feel? It felt like yes, I can do this. I watched via the Tramtracker app as the next Route 58 tram into the city was held up. That’s ok, I’ll only miss the first few minutes. Something had happened up on Melville Road and the tram was crawling. That’s ok, this headache isn’t too bad. Time to dump some more Nurofen into the system. Tram’s really crawling here. That’s ok, I’ll only miss the first 10 or 15 minutes. That’s ok, the pains in my legs were from my run yesterday. I’m about to fall asleep but the adrenaline and atmosphere will keep me going.

Once the tram did turn up I got the SEN app going and listened to Dwayne and Huddo and Dal Santo – Skilful call the Tigers out to the first couple of goals. It already sounded ominous. I got off the tram and hurriedly stomped down Bourke Street. Past the Gresham Street sign. Higgins opened our account, and the game seemed to have turned a little. Crossed King Street. I nervously calmed myself down; after all that, wasn’t going to be facing a five goals to zip opening once I got to my seat.

***

I left at three-quarter time.

I hate leaving games early. I very, very, very rarely do. The caveat here is that I had an external reason to, otherwise, yes I would have stayed for that last quarter of added humiliation. There was a solemn duty in staying to the end of the Essendon game; that it needed to be seen and experienced and understood. This wasn’t quite the CBF Showcase that Round 3 was, although it was uglier in some ways. This left St Kilda all on its own, as it has historically been – beaten up a supposed bottom-four team, completely dismantled (and then beaten up) by a top four team on a night that showed it up for being completely lost for intentions, never mind answers. Losses of 75 points and 86 points in the space of 12 days.

Footy moves fast. By the time I’d made it to the ground Rioli had made it three goals to one, but I got inside to see Paul Hunter’s goal and Max King’s set shot. His high mark soon after drew a roar that reminded us of a what playing for something at the Concrete Disney Store was like. The miss was forgivable, but Lonie’s skewed shot on the eve of quarter-time left a bitter feeling. We could have been up five goals to three. There was a vitality to the members’ wing; the relatively full (certainly by COVID standards) stadium had the competitive air of a game between two teams who are worth something to this season. Because for five days that’s what we were.

Max had chances enough to replicate last week’s three early goals that were a huge reason we were in touch in that game at all. The crowd was back on his side as he plucked a wildly casual one-handed mark early in the second, but the anticipation of the crowd was a short-circuited again by his miss. The Tigers were beginning to hunt together and those opportunities couldn’t keep being burned. While the stats at half-time last week suggested a more competitive than the scoreboard reflected, cracks were becoming fissures and they were about to become canyons.

There are all sorts of directions to point fingers at, but there are some moments that really stick in the thrashing. Brad Hill’s footsteps effort of dropping an easy chest mark was rightfully and immediately punished with a no-fuss goal from Marlion Pickett on the 50-metre arc. It became the singularity for what was about to transpire. Never mind that Higgins kicked his second soon after; we’d go nearly 36 minutes without scoring from that point, and in less than two-and-a-half quarters the Tigers would kick 15.11 to 3.1.

The yellow and blue opponent of Saturday was now a nastier and uncompromising yellow and black, and it wasn’t going to let anything past. The Saints crowd noticeably picked up when Butler and Lonie kicked quick goals in the middle of the third quarter to bring the margin back to that magic (???) 33 points – the inflexion point of the previous week – but Richmond immediately responded to add back those two goals through some brutal midfield work, and then some. By the final change the margin was an even 60 points.

This was clinical. It wasn’t vicious or messy. Saints players weren’t getting slammed into the turf or smacked around. The Richmond machine almost glides; it is always in contraction and expansion around the ball and across all parts of the ground. Constantly in motion. It is something to behold. It’s not soulless, however. Add to that the individual efforts: Dusty brushing off Lonie at will, and his piercing running goal in the third quarter, and the skills awareness required from Castagna, Edwards and Graham to make the most of the work that went into creating constant opportunities from in front of goal.

Richmond don’t usually destroy teams like this. In the way that West Coast were our unwitting victims after the club spent the whole week getting themselves up to make a statement, it was our turn to be in the way of Richmond making theirs. We looked clueless, sure. We also looked completely bewildered. When the ball was in motion, without the same team cohesion – at clearance or across the ground – any split-second thought of what to do with the ball was interrupted by the abrupt disappearance of time and space.

Even when the game was stationary and the ball in our hands did Richmond’s set-up expose a dark lack of answers, and perhaps a few other things.

Dunstan was thrown back into the team at arguably its most vulnerable moment (although we didn’t know it at the time). He played with the rust of someone who hadn’t made a senior appearance for nearly 13 months, poking it out on the full for no real reason, and on the other wing kicking to outnumbered teammates that had the ball coming back the other way. Hunter was the other inclusion and also struggled. He started OK but the undersized Nankervis spent most of the night doing as he please in the ruck and at contests around the ground. Even when he had a clear opportunity he couldn’t meet the moment, deciding to kick shallow into attack to a Richmond defender in the second quarter, ignoring a screaming and jumper Seb Ross by himself on the other side of the centre square.

Of course, the two late changes weren’t the reason for the margin, but if we’re relying on Rowan Marshall (and Paddy Ryder, and Zak Jones) then we have a lot of problems. Billings was blew a forward 50 entry from his own moment with the footy, spearing to Nathan Broad at a time when the game was still live (if you remember that fleeting sensation). This went all the way up to our top line. How many times in the third quarter did we look to come off half back and vaguely kick it to a contest? What were we expecting was going to happen? The game became embarrassingly predictable. Richmond’s midfield willed their way to a stretch of 21-1 clearances over a period spanning the second and third quarters.

***

There would have been a lot of St Kilda supporters that came into Thursday night believing there was some real substance to what transpired at the same ground five days earlier; just 72 hours earlier we remained heroes in the Monday wash-up.

The anticipation becomes all-consuming. Could the playing group replicate that after a whole week of tough talk about accountability and responsibility? Maybe we had Richmond at the right time. They’d just played a genuine finals-type game and had to travel back to Melbourne. The Saints players now had the hard evidence of what they needed to do, and that they could do it. They could face down a decent challenge even within the game. But Richmond had lost a couple in a row, surely they wouldn’t lose another? Perhaps their dynasty was over. All of those thoughts and permutations become dust over the course of two hours.