A different view

Round 16, 2022
Carlton 2.4, 6.7, 7.13, 10.18 (78)
St Kilda 3.6, 7.6, 10.7, 14.9 (93)
Crowd: 43,194 at Docklands, Friday, July 1st at 7.50pm
By Tom Briglia

The best case you could mount for St Kilda coming into this one was “we probably can’t be that bad four weeks in row”. Since the bye, the template had been guys getting knocked out and running out of players or bad, boring footy. Mostly the latter.

We were hoping this was just a Melbourne-style three-week lapse (albeit without the 10-game head start, and sevens win from the previous season that included a Grand Final). You could make some sort of case that the Lions game wasn’t that bad and if only Max and Snags had taken those shots on half-time and in the last quarter it might have been different, but the same would have to apply to Brisbane kicking 7.12 in the second half. The last two weeks, however, had been genuinely poor.

We’d had two goals on the board 11 seconds before time-on in the last quarter against Sydney. We were “comprehensively out of form”, according to Gerard. “Predictable, bland and boring”, according to Joey. Our form elicited Robbo’s elevated voice on 360. Grant Thomas was on a roll. The six losses in a row as discussed by Crunch Time the morning after the Essendon loss were in play. We thought after GWS we’d cleared the hurdle of the The Age’s “story of the year” headline three years ago that preceded unfortunate events, but now we looked like we could be heading towards another 2019. The president had erred in not quite announcing a new deal for the coach but borderline locking the club into one. How the hell do you get out of that? Never mind, apparently; Jon Ralph said that a deal would be concluded within a week and that it would be until at least 2024. The club put out a tweet of emojis in anticipation and glee of a signing, but it ended up being Rowan Marshall, and the club put out a feel-good video of Ratts and Ro announcing it to the playing group to try and lift the mood, and remind us that there is some sort of future (good, bad or Tasmania) beyond our 2022 fortunes, even if it is just turning up to play (something we can’t take for granted after the last couple of years).

I said the other week we all thought it was funny (and slightly outrageous) that lowly Essendon were gifted three Friday night games in a row after the AFL and US major league sport fetishist journos repeatedly telling us the floating fixture was a good thing. Now it was us feeling a sense of guilt, of letting the competition down, that we’re the ones sucking up the spotlight on a Friday night against the “it” team of the competition. A few weeks ago this had blockbuster (of sorts) written all over it, perhaps the rumblings of a new rivalry. Now it was set to be a victory lap for Carlton going past us.

The results didn’t matter so much suddenly. For some, they’d be thankful if the players just looked like they were trying, and trying to play a vaguely effective brand of footy. That’s how far we’d sunk. My anticipation for this one was reduced solely to seeing the delightful contrast between Carlton’s navy and our new mostly red and white clash uniform (For those of you playing at home, I do believe it needs a white number panel with black numbers to make it if not more effective then wearable to begin with against Brisbane, Essendon, GWS, and Melbourne).

***

Remember when the returns of Billings and Clark were built up as massive ins? (Billings kicked the ground while having a shot at goal in the warm up; he did think it was funny but was torn between wanting to know if anyone saw it or not.) The Unpluggered guys talked in their live Thursday night podcast about Clark and Billings’s returns – two guys whose best positions we haven’t quite figured out – messing with the team’s cohesion. The ins this week – Hill, Ryder, Higgins and Wood – should have been a bit more exciting than they really were. That was the indifference to our season’s fortunes created by the last few weeks (Zak Jones getting suspended or not for his shoulder-hit on Parker the previous weekend didn’t really seem to matter). This week, the changes in personnel, as well as a psychological change, were instantly notable to the positive. This was a different team with their heads in a different place. Hill and Sinclair’s impacts were immediate; Hill back in the team after a week out and Sinclair a different player after being tagged out of the game in Sydney. Ball movement was obviously made a focus. Daring kicks and good movement ahead of the play made for a fast start. Both played a huge part in that; Sinclair had 13 touches at quarter time and Hill had nine (there’s some good analysis of their roles on The Shinboner).

The pressure was up, too. Membrey got the first from marking a rushed Ploughman kick out of a forward line stoppage, and he took the absolute most of the space around the man on the mark and kicked a goal from 50 that he very rarely kicks. Hill and Sinclair provided the outlet out on the defensive side of a centre-wing throw in and from the work of Steele and Billings the switch was on; a perfect Sinclair kick across the ground hit Higgins and he found Paddy Ryder, wearing a St Kilda jumper. The next – after seven behinds between the two teams – came from NWM pressure in the middle creating a turnover, and Sinclair coming through again to find Butler and then Membrey in the goal square. It was 3.5 to 0.3.

This was a chance for Max King to take advantage of a severely undermanned defence (footy media had teased Jacob Weitering perhaps coming back in early for this one), but that might be the kind of thinking reserved for the way we were playing for the past three weeks, i.e. “Max will kick all the goals if we just keep bombing it to him”. While he had the unfancied Lewis Young for company, the forward line did look much better for the movement of the half-forwards and use of multiple targets. Nine scoring shots through multiple avenues that weren’t Max King in the first quarter caught the Blues off guard, brought undone only by poor accuracy. A talking point out of this game would be Carlton’s missed opportunities in front of goal, but the 3.6 we ended up with at quarter-time could easily have been 6.3 given the types of shots we had. Marshall, Butler, Ryder (St Kilda FC) and Higgins were all guilty parties. That was a little bit OK until the final few minutes when fifth-gamer Motlop put through Carlton’s first from a high Cerra ball that no Saint could read, and then the Sinclair, in the quest to keep the ball moving, attempted a 45-degree kick in-board that went straight to Saad who hit up Curnow. The turnover was very much like Sinclair’s against the Bombers across goal a fortnight earlier, and I did hope that this turnover wouldn’t discourage him or his teammates out of moving the ball quickly and being daring. That was why we’d had all those shots at goal in the first place.

***

Those missed opportunities looked like they might be costly early on in the second quarter. The game reverted to what we probably thought it would be from the start – Carlton winning the contested ball, and our movement reverting to unsure and anxious. The Blues went coast-to-coast from Marshall trying to keep it alive on our goal line through Docherty, McKay provided the link – although I didn’t mind Dougal forcing him to get touches high up the ground – and then Cripps and Silvagni on the spread and Cottrell was at the fall. McKay finally made his impact deep in a one-on-one in the pocket, fighting off Dougal to get to a dribbling ball in the pocket (McKay’s aggression is something that we don’t have in our own big key forward just yet). He kept it alive and despite a strong Sinclair smother Kennedy found the footy and his high snap went through. Carlton was in front, and for the first time, the Carlton crowd was starting to come into the game. In the third row of the St Kilda end, it felt the stadium was bearing down on us.

It was all on the Blues’ terms. Crouch rushed a kick out of defence after Silvagni was fortunately not paid a mark, and the kick came straight back to Fisher. It was 11 points; Carlton had kicked five goals in about nine minutes of play either side of the quarter-time break. Brad Johnson in the post-match pointed out we’re not as talented as Carlton’s midfield. He’s right; Patrick Cripps together with Sam Walsh and Adam Cerra and George Hewett and Matthew Kennedy is a better midfield than ours. How do you halt Cripps? He’s bigger and faster than any of our guys. Can you stop Walsh from getting the footy? We needed to be the unrelenting team that Ross Lyon had told St Kilda fans to get excited about on Footy Classified all those weeks ago. For the first of multiple times on Friday, this team would have to again prove it was made of sterner stuff than the 2021 outfit.

We had to get something back against the flow. At our half-forward, Wood forced Newnes to retreat to O’Brien, Wood and Higgins smothered his attempted kick, and all the forwards were in right spot to spread and turn a defensive movement into attack. King gave off to Gresham, who danced around a little, enticing a couple of opponents, before Higgins provided the option and kicked the goal around the corner. Straight out of the middle, Steele was reprising his close-checking role on Cripps of previous years, Crouch put on a huge tackle on Cerra, and the ball flung out our way and Butler barely had to break stride and kicked from 45 on the run, an echo of his best of 2020. The game had flipped, again, in 30 seconds of football.

A long Webster entry saw King – who had so far had hardly anything to do with it – rip the ball out of the sky over Newman and Young in front of goal, made sure by a soft 50. The next was an opportunistic goal from Paddy Ryder of the St Kilda Football Club; the Blues were chipping it around the back and Cerra didn’t see Paddy closing in on Newman, and he grabbed the footy and casually placed it on his boot and dribbled it through. A 13-point lead had been opened up. Paddy had 2.1 in the first half. His game would be a key reason why we would win the clearances against a much more fancied midfield – 31 hit-outs, 10 to advantage – and he also had six score involvements. His week off proved handy.

But the invitation St Kilda rolls out for rising star nominations again was opened up again and Carlton hit up Motlop near goal; he spilled the pass but beat Battle at ground level, got up, slipped through Clark, and bananaed a goal that brought the crowd back into the game. Misses from Cottrell and Durdin from close by were fortunate.

***

It’s about time for my weekly “How can I bring up anything from the Ross and GT eras?” section, and this week is extra superfluous. On Friday, sitting with Matt and Lewis, I was secretly getting 2009 Grand Final echoes. We were sitting in an almost identical position on the ground in the forward pocket at the St Kilda end, it felt like we were surrounded by 40,000 opposition supporters (this time with only a few thousand of our own); the half-time score was 48-43 instead of 49-43 (and we’d burned a few early opportunities), and this had heartbreaking loss written all over it. This was supposed to be Carlton’s night. Kennedy’s goal was a mix of Paul Chapman’s second quarter and winning goals. I remember the people in front of me – a dad and his daughter, probably my age at the time (21) getting up and clapping and saying “yes” with relief on the three-quarter time siren, as if we’d broken the game open for our lead of seven behinds. (On Friday night we ended up kicking 14.9, the inverse of the 9.14 we kicked on that day in 2009, and probably what we should have kicked on that day. Also, the team we were playing was navy and white? I could go on.)

***

Howard had looked like he’d done something to his knee late in the second and was hardly able to move. McKay finally got some separation on him. Dougal looked like he was about to come off, then he didn’t, then it was so accepted he was about to come off for good while he was still on the ground that the sub Highmore was already getting in some camera time with his shirt off.

The Blues were racking up points but one was bound to go through. Just like Sinclair had in the first quarter, Brad Hill attempted a 45-degree kick off half-back that straight went straight to Docherty, Cripps cruised and past hit McKay. It was McKay’s first goal but we was starting to get the ball in dangerous spots and now had the mismatch on Battle with Dougal off. Carlton was in front, and we’d kicked one point in 16 and a half minutes of play.

Highmore (shirt on) had to plug himself into a system that had been mostly humming for 11 weeks and then fallen apart over three weeks, so it was going to be a difficult task for him either way, but he showed why he shouldn’t be out of the team for the rest of the season after stellar VFL form and now a quality AFL game (less than half of one, really, but he made his impact in the are). One of his better moments actually came in the centre circle. Traffic that saw the hot footy worked from a centre wing throw-in into the middle of the ground had in turns the Saints almost away, then the Blues almost away. Highmore had pushed up to put pressure on Honey in the centre circle; he won the ball at ground level and gave off quick neat hands to Clark, who worked through to Ross and again our players were already working the other way. A string of possessions through Gresham, Butler and then Higgins, with a lot of should-I-shoudn’t-I hesitation moments ultimately ended with Higgins goaling. More good linking up by the half forwards after weeks of a dysfunctional attack, more good turning defence into attack with movement and field positioning.

That would prove to be the exception for most of the quarter. The Blues had it locked in their half again but Curnow missed a couple, Hewett missed, and then a high Seb Ross kick out of full-back with 17 Saints in the defensive 50 ended up with De Koning taking on Walsh to claim it. De Koning missed the set shot. Scores level.

But again, this team hit back. O’Brien’s innocuous kick into the middle from a free kick was spoiled by Butler and the break was on. Again, the Saints players had already flipped defensive structure into forward running and there were numbers. Crouch’s tumbling kick wasn’t great – Membrey had to try to knock on to advantage from the high bounce against two opponents – but Paddy Ryder (of the Saints) forced De Koning off the ball and Max charged through. A feign to the left around Newman, a step to the right, and he wheeled around onto his left and snapped; it initially didn’t look like he’d got enough on it but the ball just kept carrying and carrying, and he’d finally kicked the type of snap goal he’s been threatening to throughout his short career to date.

At the centre bounce, Cripps was there for the hit-out from De Koning but Steele pounced on him and the ball fell out. Crouch tumbled another ball forward that was spilled by Ploughman. Windhager, whose frame belies his status as a first-year player, had been good almost every time he’d had been near the ball and in one motion picked the ball up through his legs and turned and handballed neatly to Membrey. Steele was running past and did what a captain had to do in that moment. We had two goals in the last 70 seconds of play.

***

How often do we see a team break open the game on the eve of three-quarter time before running away with the game? While Membrey’s celebration for King’s goal was a bit too “mission accomplished” for my liking, Lewis and Matt and I were a maybe a bit too up and about. (Like the dad and his daughter in front me of me in 2009, I think I bit too up and about on the three-quarter time siren.) I think we were all daring to believe the game had swung our way.

A lot of the supporter base had downgraded expectations to simply just putting in a good effort. But standing around at three-quarter time at the St Kilda end after cheering through Max and Steele’s goals you think, well, no. I want more than just effort. I want the win from here. You get a taste of it. Effort wasn’t going to be enough, really, after that.

***

Within three minutes of play in the final quarter the lead had turned into a deficit. Matt Kennedy raced into congestion for the first of the term and then McKay bananaed from the pocket. They were in front. I remember the penultimate round of 2019. A beautiful sunny Saturday afternoon at the MCG, our last game in Melbourne pre-COVID. Finals weren’t in the picture, but Carlton fans were on the Teague train and turned up to make a crowd of nearly 52,000. When Harry McKay bent through the sealer the roar was one of a big club waking up from a slumber. In hindsight, that was a premature – the Teague era was a false start – but this Blues team was pushing for a top-four spot and was about to become to latest team to pass us in real time.

Again, we’d have to find something well and truly against the flow. We went all out with the talls; Billings was getting involved and his long kick to the forward pocket literally went to all of King, Marshall and Ryder. The ball came off King’s hands and Butler was again in the perfect spot, snapped from the top of the square and the ball squeezed in. The lead had been wrestled back but this was the kind of game in which you felt the Blues would overwhelm us in front of their crowd. Marshall went up for a mark in defence, lost his way in the air and completed a Luke Ball 2008 Port Adelaide-style landing in the pocket, landing on his back and head while almost tearing both hamstrings. We were about to face at least 15 minutes without him. Carlton had the chance to go ahead again when Motlop squeezed out a pass to McKay who was ahead of Battle in the opposite pocket to his last kick, but his run-around snap went out on the full. We were again simply holding on.

Tim Membrey was the one who rose above the cacophony. A Docherty kick off half-back just missed Newnes and Mason Wood slammed the ball high on the boot, and Membrey drew the over-the-shoulder free-kick. He went back at kicked the goal at the Carlton end. A 10-point lead with 10 minutes left. The Blues had to take risks now. They cut through the middle and Clark charged in for the Newman kick to Kennedy and went the spoil instead of the mark – it was the ideal spot for a turnover – and at the fall Clark and Butler ran into each other, leaving Butler with blood all over his face and Clark with blood all over his face and neck and shoulders because his cartilage had opened up his nose. For a few minutes we would be down to one available change on the bench. While Butler and Clark were on the ground, the Blues had gone forward through Hewett and Cerra to the pocket and McKay threw his head back and took a blatant dive right in front of us in the pocket (“right in front of me” ) and the umpire got sucked completely in. The players all got together while trainers attended to Hunter’s new face and we had to sit and stew while McKay waited to take the kick close to where he’d goaled earlier in the quarter. It was a night of single-digit free kicks for us, as we retained second-last place in the league in the free-kick differential ladder, and Carlton retained second. This was at about the 26-minute mark and it was going to be a long quarter. Lewis said he still expected to lose. Matt said this game had heartbreaker written all over it. We were just waiting to see how it would physically play out; what the footage would look like when used in Blues highlights packages for the next week and maybe the next few years. Perhaps we would succumb 2009 Grand Final style, perhaps it would be Port Adelaide 2017 and/or 2022-style.

Marshall was off still, Howard was off, Butler was off, Hunter was out. Marshall was actually helped by the delay in terms of missing less game time, although he had no idea what the hell had just happened in the middle of the ground as he came out from the rooms and gave a small fist pump when he saw we were 10 points up.

McKay finally took his kick and missed to the narrow side. Steele had a rushed shot from just inside 50 that came close to icing the game, and then we had to weather a Durdin free from a Webster knock as the Blues’ rebounded. McKay – who had loomed as the villain all night – marked just outside 50 in front of Battle again; he went long and it was Mason Wood who came across the pack and punched the ball through. He had some underrated moments in a few different of parts of the ground on Friday.

Marshall was back out there, and we managed to work the ball from one end to half-forward. Gresham, to King, who had come up, to Higgins, back to Gresham, to Crouch, who spotted Windhager out wide on the 50-metre arc and hit him with a deft kick. Matt said this would be a boy becomes a man moment for him. His high kick dropped into the goal square.

I think of the almost-but-not-quite-Herculean performance Tim Membrey put in in that 2017 Port Adelaide game, seeming to ice it when he put us in front by 10 points late, only to be the one to have Robbie Gray’s winner go over his head on the goal line with seven seconds remaining. On Friday night, he earned the title of matchwinner. He got his hands to Windhager’s kick and was perhaps unlucky to not be paid the mark in the first place when he grabbed it on the second bite, but instead of stopping to claim it he wildly threw the ball on the boot to kick it over his shoulder. The ball avoided De Koning’s afterthought smother attempt and Paddy Ryder (St Kilda Football Club)’s pointed finger that was already claiming the mark, and the ball shot through for a goal. At the St Kilda end the whole passage looked like mayhem – the ball popping up in a mass of bodies, disappearing for a brief moment, and suddenly flying through the goals at an odd angle with a sudden celebration of bodies in mostly red and white with a black cross.

Steele was still all over Cripps; the ball fell out in his tackle at the centre bounce and went straight to Marshall. King had a shot from a tough angle that served mostly to chew up another 30 seconds. The cheer squad was singing the song as the quarter length dragged into the mid-30s. Membrey dropped into defence and marked in front of McKay. Motlop missed a shot, and the Blues had gone from 6.5 to 9.18. (The Herald Sun’s expected score offered a comfortable Carlton victory.) Marshall was the target from the kick out, Sinclair’s long kick came off hands to Billings and then Gresham kicked forward. A fortunate bounce and some good bodywork by Windhager on Docherty allowed for Higgins to come through and band the ball deep into attack. A Mason Wood falcon left the ball dancing in front of Max. He kicked it off the ground and it spun through.

The game was over.

***

The immediate return on what is probably our best win of the season is quite small: it only brought us up from 10^th on the ladder to ninth after the rest of the round was played out. But the win otherwise had much, much more riding on it. This may count for something big later on in 2022. If you viewed the rest of the season through the lens of the previous three weeks then we were absolutely done; Crunch Time’s six losses in a row was odds-on and Brett Ratten’s contract was either already signed and a mistake, or talks would be precariously on hold. Now we have a new reference point. If Friday night is indeed the default after the black hole we’ve hopefully just emerged from, then we will win more games than we lose. That’s opposition goal kicking permitting, perhaps, but we did miss shots of our own early; we also had more possessions, won the clearances and had more inside 50s. Kicking 45 points from forward half turnovers also showed Friday was much closer to the first half of the season iteration of this team.

The new clash jumper has been minted; its first appearance in free-to-air prime time and now worn in a great win. The pandemic-era clash jumper is dead, long live the new clash jumper. That kind of win is all the more pleasurable being the away team, but it’s a hell of a route to go through. There’s knee injuries, cut faces, compound fractures, missed goals, bad umpiring, a whole stadium bearing down on you, and a lot of thinking too hard about dark days past and pre-empting the absolute worst.

The last time we played a game like this with the stakes so high? Well, it was each of the last three weeks, with a grasp on a top-four spot ours to lose. This season does have a bit of scar tissue now, and I’m not sure if we’ll get back to playing for those kinds of stakes in 2022. But for a few days, this season has a future again.