We could drag it out

Round 20, 2022
St Kilda 2.2, 5.7, 9.10, 10.15 (75)
Hawthorn 1.2, 1.5, 4.6, 9.9 (63)
Crowd: 25,348 at Docklands, Saturday, July 30th at 4.35pm

Bizarrely, ridiculously, possibly a little perversely, St Kilda is in the eight with three weeks of the home and away season remaining.

St Kilda has been toggling between irrelevancy and moody doom vignette territory on On the Couch and AFL 360. The team that Ross Lyon had earlier this year told Saints fans to “get excited” about was then “bordering on putrid” (BT), an “all-talk footy club” (Garry Lyon), and “sub-AFL standard” and “fraudulent” (Kingy). That team has now scraped together two unconvincing wins against lowly-ranked teams and, somehow, sits clear in the top eight by half a game.

The club felt a little more comfortable putting together a more in-depth episode of Uncut last week (although the shortest one this year has been the most impactful). Seb said he’d copped it from Max during the game. I asked the question last week (many people have) if Max was too nice, or, at least doesn’t have enough campaigner about him yet. So, that was some development we’re hoping for from Max generally, and also from a team perspective given what Ratts had asked of the players following the Bulldogs calamity. But why is this a talking point at the end of July and not a quick check-in in January?

I was absolutely resigned to Saturday evening being the beginning of the end of the season. Our form doesn’t warrant wins against Geelong, nor Brisbane, nor Sydney. Still, 25,000 found their way into the Concrete Dome from the glorious late July sunshine for the beginning of the melancholic indifference tour. Some people on Twitter would have you believe Gresham heading in for surgery was a sign of the club throwing in the towel for the season. Gresham out for the season, Hannebery in. It must be close to August. 

***

The first quarter was a lot of free-flowing circle work, another week for Saints fans being treated to two teams who had no particular September plans. The tank was on with Sicily dropping an easy mark over the half-back boundary line. Matt said this was the kind of game you’d like to play in – bruise-free, a bit of a runaround, a good work-out for everyone involved. Some great athletic leisure activity on a Saturday.

Marshall was everywhere from the start on the way to perhaps his best career game, appearing at half-back on one side of the ground and then setting up the first on the opposite wing by blocking McEvoy’s rushed kick and delivering to Wood in the attack. He was up forward too; although the only muted groan for his scrubbed kick into the 50 showed the crowd’s investment in this game wasn’t as great as hisl.

Max King kicked off another big day of missing shots at goal after Ben Long spread hard on the half-forward line in a rare moment of initiative for positive ball movement and hit him up with a nice banana kick. Max put it out on the full. Membrey missed a relatively simple set shot. There was comedy on the goal line for Hawks’ first as they went from half-back after Butler missed long with a handball that should have been a kick; Webster spoiled the other J. Koschitzke in the one-on-one in the goal square and Wilkie cruised past to handball over the line only to be tackled by Koschitzke, and the ball spilled out and Gunston kicked it off the ground.

Dan Hannebery, playing an AFL match for the St Kilda Football Club, cut through the low-quality Australian Rules on display. He put on a big tackle in defence, and then put his body on the line in the middle for a squaring ball and got crunched by a Hawk, and then did some bustling work from Mitchito and Windhager justice with an early goal (courtesy of a lucky bounce). “Watch them come from everywhere Jase”, said Garry Lyon in the Fox Footy box, but I thought the big celebration could have been bigger. They didn’t quite come from everywhere.

A two-year deal for Butler was announced as soon as he’d kicked five against the Eagles; this week he was offering at least three clangers heading forward. There was soft cheering for Paton and for-some-reason-now-a-defender Cooper Sharman also signing two-year deals during the week. Hopefully, Sharman’s stint is consigned to history in the same way Malcolm Blight’s 2001 “Barry Hall Experiment” was, although special mention to Sharman’s several excellently-timed thumping spoils as he endeavours to become a regular feature of the Golden Fist.

Membrey, in another low-key 150^th for this team, got on board with Butler’s clangers and missed another set shot – he’d got it because Hannebery instinctively knew where to put it – and then outright kicked it to a Hawks player inboard as we tried pushing forward on the members’ side. I was starting to get that feeling that Hannebery was one of the few guys who actually knew what might be on the line or what it might take, and then there was the now traditional panic of seeing the number 10 above the interchange bench and only three Saints players visibly sitting on the pine – none of them Lethlean’s mate’s son. Ah, fuck, I thought. He’s in the rooms. But he was just getting rubbed down on the boundary. He’s a minute-by-minute proposition.

Ball movement was again an issue; long kicks down the line were favoured over of the fast, cutting ball movement off half-back that we displayed against Carlton in the We’re Briefly Good Again match a few weeks ago. The next goal had to come from brute force; most of the players were around the ball-up directly in front of our goal, Ben Long laid one of his nine tackles and Crouch caught Sicily, with ball the falling out Sicily’s grasp just before it went over the line for a rushed behind.

The game was there if either side decided to turn up. We looked not very good, Hawthorn looked quite bad. Sam Mitchell had obviously given everyone a licence to go the torp and it never quite came off – one went straight to Wood and came back, Mitchito competed in the air and Butler was in the perfect spot – they fucked up the 6-6-6 rule twice and gave away a free, and they gave away 50-metre penalties. 

This game had few genuine highlights but we were treated to the funniest goal of the year. Steele found Long again on the spread at half-forward, and his kick to near the top of the goal square should have been marked by Membrey but was dropped. Mitchito kicked off the ground directly towards goal but the ball cannoned straight into Max and then he fresh-aired the follow-up; Snags and Blanck rummaged around for it for a bit, Mitchito got low and Wood had a half-hearted attempt off the ground that looked more like he was tripping over it, Mitchito got low again and tried another shot himself but his kick went straight up and then backwards and was thumped away. Seb was sick of it all and finished it off with a classy kick around the corner.

After multiple times walking back into the rooms at the main change with just two goals to our name, this week the novelty half-time score belonged to the opposition. Hawthorn sat at just 1.5, although we sat at just 5.7. Another week, another showcase of a dysfunctional forward line. Or dysfunctional structure, or lack of connection between the kickers and the catchers, as Richo used to describe it. Richo’s gone and won another premiership at another club but we’re still dealing with the issue. Any serious team would have been up by 50.

***

Skunk finally got his moment in his milestone game. The first-half-of-2022-version of Seb Ross connected with Windhager, on the wing, on to King and back to Ross, his kick hit Mitchito and Sicily, Mitchito competed with Sicily on the ground and got the handball to Snags and gave off to Membrey, who kicked the goal from an angle just inside 50 off a step and across his body. It wasn’t a typical Tim Membrey moment, but it was one of the better ones.

We were making our move but there was still time for self-created calamity. Hannebery nearly put Sinclair in an ambulance twice in a few moments showing a rare lack of awareness, first diving into his legs from behind while they contested a wide kick all by themselves, and then popping out a handball to Sincs with a Hawthorn opponent bearing down on him (somehow, the passage ended with Mitchito getting reward for his efforts up forward). A few moments later Hannebery and Sincs combined on the other side of the ground; Sinclair had “only” 24 touches but was making every quick handball and deft kick count. He found the footy and propped it up to Hannebery; as soon as he got it Matt next to me uttered “he’ll hit someone up here”, and immediately pinpointed a pass to Max, who went back and finally kicked straight. Hannebery (Sincs moments aside) has the reflexive, unflinching nous of someone from a genuinely good football team. I remember that’s what he looked like when he arrived (on the field) in the second half of 2019, and perhaps as an indictment on the rest of the team he still stands out in the exact same way three years, one coach and a pandemic later.

“Well now they’ve got to be ruthless, the Saints,” Jason Dunstall said in special comments. The score was quickly 55 to 11. We had an excellent chance to take it out further but Clark waited a moment too long to give back to Butler on the charge off half-back. The Hawks had reached that “nothing to lose” state and decided to go for it; they cut through the middle and the ball ended up with Butler’s brother. His connection was awful but it went straight and long enough, and then Scrimshaw kicked another directly out of the middle.

***

Snags took a mark tight in the pocket and pushed the margin back out a little further, and then Max missed an easy chance to do the same dose from a throw-in free-kick. Snags burned another one. The Hawks began taking on the corridor more often and with more speed. Another bullet off half-back after Snags’ miss from Moore hit Ward, and then Gunston competed in the air and O’Meara was at fall for the pass to Newcombe who went back and kicked the goal. We’d have to settle for a 34-point lead at the final change.

Going over the replay on Kayo, at half-time Fox Footy played a package of the 1999 Hawthorn and St Kilda game that at the time was the biggest comeback ever – the day St Kilda gave up a 63-point lead while sitting a game off top spot, which was the beginning of the end of 1999 (and the Tim Watson era). This season has had a whiff of both the 1998 and 1999 late-season fade-outs; some 2019, too, with a lot of 2019’s characters thrown in.

We didn’t quite get a repeat of that awful 1999 day. The Hawks had won three in a row coming into this and were no slouches, but we had the incumbency of two 69-point wins over them (nice, etc.). A boring comfortable win that no one would ever want to watch again was the most likely result, especially when first-half-of-2022-version Seb Ross turned over a Hawks rebound and Max got a very, very cheap 50 from Hardwick that took him to the goal line. Instead, we got a repeat of the Collingwood game last year in which the opposition had just two goals on the eve of three-quarter time and we had a 49-point lead at the 29-minute mark of the third quarter. This time, we had a 42-point lead early in the last when Max was gifted that second amongst missed bananas, squirted shots from closer range and low-percentage shots from out wide and at distance while ignoring other leads that drew the visible ire of Ben Long. Add the 2.5 to his 1.5 against the Cats last year and 1.7 against the Giants in Round 6.

(My match notes here simply say “Nuclear bomb 1958, Commonwealth Games???” I’ll owe that on my Twitter feed algorithm.)

Hawthorn went for it, although had to go around another one of Sharman’s several defensive thumps. This became a bit like the Essendon game – we had no answer to a young team putting pace on the ball and we couldn’t win it cleanly enough to control the tempo ourselves. Gunston went long and quick to McEvoy with a perfectly placed kick in between Marshall, Battle and Wood, to bring it to within five goals, and even when Scrimshaw marked and goaled from close range at the 16-minute mark the margin still felt like comfortable enough at all of four goals. But two goals soon after in the space of 81 seconds – that’s including the break in play for the players to go back to position for the centre bounce – brought the margin to 12 points with more than five minutes left and packed out plenty of dacks in the members’. Butler (the Sam one) took on Paton which broke open the run to Ward and the McGuinness; Marshall looked gassed and then Moore ran onto it from close range, and then Big Boy took it out of the middle, and efforts from O’Meara, Mitchell, Moore, and Scrimshaw to keep the ball alive and moving ended with Moore kicking high to a three on one that Membrey couldn’t hold on to and Breust ran onto it. By this time Hawthorn was up 35-17 in the contested footy in the quarter. The Hawks were playing chaos footy that they probably should have started playing 90 minutes earlier. From where we were exactly two months earlier, we’ve become far too used to our season facing its mortality.

It appeared that not even Dan Hannebery’s elite professionalism and on-field direction could halt this one. This was why Fox Footy had bothered sending a near-A team of Huddo, Garry Lyon and Jason Dunstall to call a game that usually would be right in Dwayne’s wheelhouse – a winter’s day under the roof at the Concrete Dome in a nothing timeslot, with two also-ran teams taking it down to the wire begging for Dwayne to proclaim “firestarters” and “That could be ball!” and call it a classic.

So who stands up in these moments? The Silk-Miller Memorial Medal doesn’t have the profile of other best-on-ground awards but Marshall was a worthy recipient in arguably his best-ever game (30 disposals, 35 hit-outs, seven tackles); immediately, at the centre bounce it was he and Crouch (30 touches, 11 tackles and a goal), who has strung together a couple of excellent weeks now, that combined in the middle. Crouch was good enough to drive it deep forward rather than scrub a shallow kick to a dangerous turnover spot. Snags got a good look at it from King but his snap didn’t make it to the line and Sicily took it one-handed. I remember an article in The Age following the 2010 Grand Finals – from memory by Rohan Connolly and written in the weeks or perhaps the year after, rather than the immediate aftermath – and he was talking about how after Goddard’s goal “they only needed score one more time”, or “they only needed to score once”. Or, to put it more simply, without bringing up the GT and Ross eras, a handy point would have been, well, handy. Marshall, effectively an extra midfielder, stood up with a crunching tackle as the Hawks repelled Steele’s entry through McEvoy and Day and Mitchell and Ward. Roma immediately dropped behind the ball and 30 metres from the stoppage that he created, and blocked off a Hawthorn hack kick forward. Hawthorn’s margin for error was tiny and Battle anticipated CJ’s kick into the middle, and Long was there too to give off to Crouch who was able to score that point.

Hawthorn worked the ball back up to their end but Steele and Butler stood up with tackles in defence; Sharman followed up a spillage from Breust, worked it forward in front of him, got down and spun out and away from Maginness and cleared it in a move that would have otherwise been fantastic, but no one was ahead of the ball. Fortunately, Blanck’s kick back into their 50 was a tumbler and Membrey and Steele helped clear it out, and Wood was there to take an important mark out wide. The Hawks weren’t quite done, but the game was. Breust had a chance to make it seven points with just over 30 seconds left but missed one you’d think he’d usually kick, and then Moore took a mark as the siren sounded, played on and bananaed the ball through for another goal that would have made it an even six points.

***

Heading into the wind that will blow 1st, 4th and 5th our way in the coming weeks, you’d hope the fade-out had more to do with a six-day turnaround off a trip to Perth than anything else. Our first consecutive wins since going fourth, sure, but much like the West Coast game, I don’t think we left the Concrete Dome feeling any better or worse about where this team is at.

As it did in 2021, the best and worst of this side again co-exists within games and within quarters. We thought we’d closed that gap in the first half of the year and decidedly found what this team was all about. The doom vignettes and the general pasting from the AFL commentariat over the previous several weeks had obviously weighed on Ratts. He went for it in the post-match: “Probably everyone who speaks about us speaks about half-empty, every time we speak to somebody, ‘we’re not going well, we don’t do this, we don’t do that’. We won the game of footy. Everyone can keep looking at how negative the Saints are and what the Saints are doing but we won a game of footy. So it would be nice for people to say yeah, ‘Well done’ for a change.” He suggested we’re an “easy target” too. That’s all well and good, and it’s great to have someone at the club standing up for the Saints with some aggression, but after Richmond storming home on Sunday, and given our respective fixtures our place in the eight is precarious. Right now it feels like a small tokenistic reward to say we’re good enough that you’re in the eight this late in the season. Use it as something to build on for next. Steele walked off with some silverware and the players with medallions, but that stuff’s not for right now.