Round 21, 2022
Geelong Cats 6.4, 8.5, 12.7, 17.8 (110)
St Kilda 3.0, 7.1, 7.4, 10.5 (65)
Crowd: 20,583 at Kardinia Park, Saturday, August 6th at 7.25pm
Just as Gerard declared on 360 that it’s time for urgency, we strung together two indifferent wins in a row against lowly opposition. The West Coast win was important, because we got the job done. The Hawthorn win was almost a 1999-echo calamity – we settled for a 2021 Collingwood escape – but according to some it was important, because we got the job done.
Brett Ratten cracked the shits after the game saying there was a lot of negativity towards the Saints. “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.” I mean, sure. It’s great to have someone aggressively taking a stand for the club. Do we take the first two and a half quarters of the Hawthorn game as representative of the St Kilda fighting to keep 2022 alive or the last 15 minutes when we almost pissed it away? The answer is both; just like last year, they both co-exist, and what “getting the job done” looks like to us simply wasn’t going to get the job done against a decent team.
The club wheeled out highlights of the last time we won at the Cattery – all the way back in 1999, in a stirring comeback led by Ben Walton that took us to 7-3 after Round 10. It looked like the team of 1997 and the first 16 weeks of 1998 had returned, but that would be the peak of the Tim Watson era. Just a couple of weeks later was that Hawthorn debacle before a loss to bottom-placed Collingwood, and we finished the season with just three more wins. This year has been very similar.
Geelong had won 10 in a row and hadn’t lost a game since…well, the last time we played them, when Ben Long and Marcus Windhager had massive days across half forward and the wing; Paddy Ryder – who was at the time wearing a St Kilda jumper – kicked three goals, and we turned the game with a third-quarter blitz. But now, 11 weeks later, we were trading entirely on “maybe the Cats are due to lose one” (especially after we avoided the absurdly large banana peel scenario of Geelong having the loss they had to have last week against one of our rivals for eighth spot). Our footy has regressed, matches featuring St Kilda have become forgettable. Collingwood and Melbourne reminded us all on Friday what a genuinely good game of footy looks like.
***
As it got closer to game time it looked like Geelong might actually be wondering if they should take it easy this week after the Joel Selwood 350 celebrations, and get in a rest for some guys before the finals. A scramble over the Thursday night selection that went right up to the opening bounce saw Joel Selwood rested, Blicavs a late out (but also managed), 2009 Grand Final Sprint winner Rhys Stanley rushed back in, Jon Ceglar relegated to sub, Dangerfield twinge his calf in the warm-up, and all of Menegola, Tuohy and Dahlhaus brought in late.
So maybe they were due for a loss after all, and from our perspective something a result we’d been inching towards since getting pantsed in 2013 and 2014. “I’m feeling the Saints tonight”, Matt said. I have to admit, part of me thought we might be competitive, or rather, didn’t want to give up on the season just yet, just as we had to at the Cattery late last year. Our selection moves didn’t quite feature the blue-chip names that the Cats’ did – Owens was kept, Jones was the sub, Sharman stayed in even with Dougal back. The St Kilda site sprang a feature on Cooper Sharman’s switch into defence on game day, but he was spotted in the opening minutes deep in the forward line working with Hill to set up Sinclair for the first at the construction end. (I went to Kardinia Park for the first time ever early this year for an AFLW game and even with a quarter of it missing I could not believe Geelong has a whole stadium like that to themselves).
The well-worn notion of “Geelong’s bigger bodies” came into play early. Steele only found the footy three times in the first quarter and Hannebery four. Atkins, De Koning, and Menegola all worked through traffic to drive the ball forward to Hawkins and Dougal, and there was nothing Dougal could do to get around Hawkins’ strength. We weren’t doing ourselves any favours when we actually had the ball. Max King at half-forward kicked it straight to Parfitt, and the Cats cut a path through the middle (and some mild resistance) for another.
Six goals were kicked in the last seven minutes of play of the first quarter, including four in the last three minutes. Rhys drove went out of the middle and Matt Stevic resumed St Kilda duties after the Fremantle debacle with a touchy free kick against Dougal to Hawkins, who was already eyeing off a re-entry into the Coleman Medal race. The Cats got another one from a 50-metre penalty and it took Mason Wood to show some real attack on the footy at half-forward and draw a high free kick from Duncan (despite the new interpretations) and be good enough to finish with a long goal for a breakthrough. But Duncan got one back on the siren, and there was a hill to climb.
We came out of the first change looking much more awake. We caught the Cats napping with short passes from Mitchito in the forward pocket to Butler and to Membrey to improve the angle. It was seven minutes of play before Skunk kicked the goal, but we were up 6-0 in the inside 50s count. Long smothered a Cameron kick on the wing and ran the footy up with Seb and Snags, who accidentally found Max in the pocket. Max ignored a couple of options to improve the angle as he did last week – although he was a bit closer to goal this time and probably wouldn’t have attracted the same type of feedback from Mason Wood – and kicked the goal around the left.
The tempo had lifted. This looked more like a game between the premiership favourite and a finals contender. Webster got caught deep in defence by Parfitt in a scramble and the ball immediately ended up with Isaac Smith in the square, while Steele made his impact catching Menegola up the other end and bending a goal through. We then pulled off one of the better passages of play of the night – Paton off half-back, out wide to Sinclair, to Hill, who cut inside to Windhager; Sinclair kept running the length of the slim wing and passed to Snags at half-forward who almost ruined the whole thing with a chopped-off kick to
Mitchito, but redeemed himself by cutting off a Geelong handball, and King squeezed it out to Butler. Somehow, it was just four points.
We finished the quarter with 16 to five inside 50s, but with their fifth the Cats, again, managed a late one on the siren, this time through Stengle. They’d kicked two goals in the final seconds of both quarters and held a 10-point lead. It wasn’t the end of the world, although it might be the end of the season.
***
All of this was happening in a manic few hours that featured all of 6th, 8th, 9th, and 10th on the ladder. Over the week we were calculating the good and the (much more probable) bad outcomes. Fremantle beating the Dogs was good for the here and now, but also it might mean Sydney are playing fourth spot when we face them in the final game of the year, rather than having top four locked up and coasting like when we played the Dockers in the last game of 2013, although if results go our way it might be a little closer to the Round 24, 2011 scenario when we faced the Blues at the MCG on a Saturday night. But really, 2022 is shaping as a “choose your own adventure” of how to miss the finals. While we were trying to get into the game at the Cattery, Richmond had kicked a goal after the quarter-time siren themselves over in Adelaide to get some breathing space.
So much for all the permutations Saturday; while the Bulldogs did us a favour (they’re still every chance to finish above us anyway) we didn’t bother kicking a goal in the third quarter. There’s been some real letdown games over the years with our season on the line, or real stakes up for grabs, against fellow finals aspirants. A thumping in 1998 at the hands of reigning and eventual premiers Adelaide (backed up by a smacking by bottom-of-the-ladder Hawthorn) as the season spiralled out of control, a smashing in Perth against Fremantle late in 2006 to decide a top four spot, a meek effort in a play-off for top spot against Collingwood at the MCG in 2010 in front of more than 81,000, and barely moving the footy against North in 2016 in a game that helped decide our ninth positioning.
Jeremy Cameron got back into the game. He kicked the first of the second half and then found Hawkins for the next as errors crept back into our game; Cameron had got the ball because Sharman had tried coaxing Long to run onto the footy at centre half-forward, which was a neat idea to things moving, but the kick went straight to Kolodjashnij and the Cats were away.
Even without Selwood, Blicavs and Dangerfield we were getting thrown off the ball in close and around the ground, and their lesser lights were having big nights anyway. Dahlhaus, Parfitt and Atkins at a centre bounce? No worries. Parfitt had 10 clearances, Menegola joined him at the top of their possession count with 25, and the guy that Geelong strangely (at the time) traded a future first round pick for, Max Holmes, was right there with them. Atkins and Guthrie outworked Crouch and Paton at a ball up on the wing and within a flash Smith was running into goal and all of a sudden it was 27 points. Holmes took it out 33 points at the 15-minute mark after Paton found a bouncing ball in the back pocket and under inferred pressure kicked straight to Holmes, who slotted it from 50. We’d only lost the inside-50 count 11 to 15, but Geelong kicked 4.2 to 0.3. The presence and leadership of Dan Hannebery wasn’t going to help this one.
Our forward line was back to dysfunctional. Three years after leaving Kardinia Park losers in a game that sealed the fate of the Richo era, we leave the Cattery yet again wondering if it was the “kickers” or the “catchers”. Score from turnovers was 7.4 to 2.3, Ratts said after the game, which meant we weren’t using the ball well. He called our ball use “hard to watch”. “Sometimes under no pressure, medium pressure or high pressure,” Ratts said. I think that’s code for “all the time”. That said, De Koning was all over Max. The last we met they were compared to Jakovich and Carey. Jakovich won a few of those battles. This was another game in which you wished Max had a little more campaigner about him, and perhaps could rise above the state of play further up the ground to make some sort of impact (granted, that can be hard when they’re scrubbing the ball to the opposition). Battle and Sharman and Membrey flipping between half-forward and half-back didn’t really work, although Sharman had a lot of almost moments in the front half.
A hallmark of the first half of the year that took us to fourth spot was that this was now a resilient team. The team of 2021 that gave up in the face of anything remotely difficult has returned since the bye (Grant Thomas arced up this week and amongst other things said we were poorly led). Things were about to reach the morbid curiosity stage and I was embarrassed we were doing this in front of Jason Bennett. Three-quarter time was time for the weekly Dan Hannebery injury update; normal programming has resumed and he was being subbed out with an ankle possibly linked to his calf. This was supposed to be season in which the ins and outs list were dominated “AFL Health and Safety Protocols” more than muscles made out of tissue paper. And just as Richmond were kicking away from Port Adelaide, the goals were getting softer. Smith got his third within the first 30 seconds from the goal square, Hawkins, Miers, and Smith linked up before finding Zack Guthrie coasting on his own on 50 and he found Cameron. Paton attempted to get something going through the middle but put the handball to Owens on the ground; he tried getting it out to Hill but they were immediately swarmed by O’Connor, Atkins, Parfitt, and Miers. The ball was worked out wide inside 50 to Cameron whose funny kick was run onto by Close, who strolled through the forward pocket around Wilkie and into goal. Menegola made it 58 points. How much could we lose by? We didn’t have our first of the second half until there was nine minutes of play left in the quarter. Paton found himself in another bad situation, getting rundown on the wing while waiting for something to appear ahead of the play, and then Zach Guthrie made things a little bit funny, going forward and taking a big mark in attack and kicking a goal.
We absolutely didn’t deserve to kick the last two to bring the margin back from 57 to 45 points. We were within four points until the final seconds of the second quarter, sure, but we were wiped off the park from then. This really should have been edging on 10 goals and 45 felt a little flattering. The club didn’t even bother putting a caption to the final score graphic tweet. A bad night for St Kilda, but a decent night for The Fable Singers enthusiasts as Geelong – at least for one night – ditched the weird cover version was offered to the clubs at the start of 2018 (and which the St Kilda board were silly enough to be baited by AFL into using until this year).
We came to Geelong armed with Dan Hannebery and our season in our hands. We left without both. Tim Watson’s reign continues.
***
Ratts said after the game that ineffective or clanger kicks have been high throughout the year “and we’re trying to address it”. He said “the big one will be caring about your possessions”, which was a bit like when Ross the ex-boss told Sean Dempster in The Bubble that he had to work on his football. All these kinds of conversations over the past few weeks, so late in the season – giving more, and more honest feedback to your teammates, “caring about your possessions” – really should just be a January check-in if that. Non-negotiables in an AFL team.
Amid all the fallout from the Crows’ 2018 camp it was this week that Rory and myself made the discovery that Collective Mind had worked with St Kilda in the mid-2010s. According to Collective Mind’s website, in a remarkable bit of spin, St Kilda “became competitive again moving up on the ladder from 18th to equal 8th”, which is referring to our meteoric rise in 2016 to…ninth, and no, that’s not finals. This club has proven more than capable to be perfectly poor-to-mediocre all on its own, with or without Collective Mind.
We’re a loss on Friday night and a Richmond win on Sunday away from the season being over. And let’s not get cute with making up the percentage on Carlton; if that’s our path, crystal balling that shows a circa 130-point win over the Swans would be required. (And yes, we did win by 108 points in the very last game of 2008 to get into the top four, but everything about that was entirely different.) There is a pang of jealousy as Collingwood gets the highlights package and effusive praise on SEN and 360, as Melbourne looks to go back-to-back, as Geelong sits on top – their era in which they knocked us off in a Grand Final never really ended – as the Swans storm back into premiership contention (already!), as the Blues vie for a finals spot a little more realistically than us, and with a big future ahead, and as Freo returns to September. At the halfway mark we looked like we could finally live up to the “story of the season” billing that The Age prematurely went with early in 2019. But it’s the same problems of kickers and catchers, and being too nice, and not being able to hit a target, and finding ourselves out of the eight with just two weeks left in the season.
Great write up Tom.
We were never winning. I’m happy it wasn’t a blow out.
Let’s hope we don’t shit the bed this week….again.
Thanks as always Cam.
Brisbane appeared to get back to their best for three quarters and have a little more on the line than we do. I’m not optimistic. Not thinking we’ll shit the bed, but as flakey as the Lions have been (in the last two weeks alone) I’m not sure if we can play enough good footy over four quarter to topple them.
Yeah they did however there’s something inherently flawed with that team. Having said that, they’ve played at consistent level for years which involves making PFs at home, having AA players and brownlow medallists etc. They’re miles ahead of us and really, should put us away.
I still cannot come to terms with the Essendon and WB debacles this year, so I figure it’s likely to happen again. I can’t find a sensible reason that convinces me that we’ll turn up and breathe fire from the bounce this week……
But I guess, you just never know!
Great review Tom. Just waiting for the action to start tonight, let’s hope that there is some action. Expectations have been totally dampened.