Step by step

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.