Little things

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.