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.