By Tom Briglia
“Love takes miles,
Love takes years.
You’d better start a-walkin’, babe.
Love takes miles.”
– Cameron Winter, “Love Takes Miles”
Getting truly attached to this club again has been dreary fuckin’ going.
Fourteen years long, three failed coaches wide (including one who at the time had coached the second-most games in the club’s history) – now onto a fourth – and just two very also-ran finals series to show for it. After “A Year of Exploration” in 2023, and an unofficial year of exploration in 2024, in 2025 we were set for…another year of exploration. (“And his…chamber pot.”).
“Rebuild”. It’s called a “rebuild”. After all of that.
Expectations for St Kilda in 2025 were – how to put this? – low. Everyone talked about Richmond, North Melbourne and West Coast as the clear bottom three. And according to everyone’s ladder predictors, going into 2025, we were the next thing. Richmond, North Melbourne and West Coast – and then us. The next thing was us.
Pre-season wasn’t kind. Max, Sincs, and Mason all went down in the same early February training session, but scans came back clear enough to have them each in the frame for round one and our 2025 outlook was upgraded from “bottom four” to “bottom six”. I’ve been paranoid about Max doing his knee since he did it after kicking 8.5 in the first game of his Under 18 year, and in the time since there’s been a whole lot of other body parts (and, uh, knee parts) to have worried about. And he ended up missing the whole god damn thing in 2025. God damn it, man. God damn it.
No sooner had SEN published its absurd off-season power rankings (St Kilda 12th because why the fuck not/they fucking nailed it), more training reports emerged that Pou was on crutches, Dougal’s shoulder had exploded and Caminiti and Nas had left the track, which led to an injury list the next day featuring a Pou stress fracture (12 to 14 weeks), Dougal (longish-term, probably) and a Marshall pelvis (what?). Hunter Clark appeared on the injury list because that’s his address. So we were set to start the season without arguably our best (or perhaps most important) player and then arguably our…next best player? Pou was for all intents and purposes meant to be Guy of the Year in 2025 but he was now set to spend the rest of his life battling shin splints or something. It was around this time that I accidentally posted a work social media post to the RWBFooty account. There were…things on my mind (i.e. Pou missing from the team photo).
The one thing going for us in the pre-season was the confirmation of a big, beautiful set of jumpers which, really, you could potentially never change (this probably won’t happen for retail dollars reasons) and it would always functionally work. There is a red-based one, there is a white-based one, and there is a black-based one, which means all potential clashes against every team are covered at least once over, and each of them have strong historical ties. (Save some room for more glorious 1915-1918-inspired red/yellow/black jumpers for Sir Doug Nicholls Round and the set is complete/St Kilda wear a replica of the 1919-1922 red/yellow/black jumper challenge: Impossible.) Since I stopped doing the weekly match reports on this blog (for the time being I will only be doing finals and these too-long season reviews), the RWBFooty Twitter account has descended into mostly a footy jumpers and The Fable Singers account and I was ready for another massive year of the club not engaging with me on either. “Is it because I don’t do enough memes? Not enough pieces to camera?” I have asked previously and am once again asking. Maybe the club’s Twitter account just doesn’t function that way anymore. The next time the 2018 horror cover version of the club song is used I’ll just email the club directly again (Editor: This, in fact, ended up happening in November.). I will one day post my 2019 dissertation that I sent through to Matt Finnis (who indeed responded, and took action) for public consumption on this blog: my legacy, if there is anything at all in this, lol (Editor: The club actually sent me back a really positive response to my November correspondence. I can’t believe it.).
***
Pre-season came and went way too fast. It all goes too fast, always. I completely forgot about Jack Macrae. The Saints played the Blues in the unsponsored practice match at Princes Park, just a convenient short drive from RWB’s Brunswick West headquarters. There was that panicky mid-February feeling: I just can’t be fucked with another season, but possibly I was just too hot and I couldn’t fucking see anything from where Matt and I were sitting. I looked around at the players and thought, “Who the fuck are these guys?” but after an 11-point win I left the ground feeling way too optimistic after what was really just some February Saturday morning runaround in 36-degree heat and training jumpers. Hugh Boxshall, Max Hall, Hugo Garcia, Harry Boyd, Travaglia’s last quarter running goal from 50, Liam O’Connell’s proof of existence. “Maybe we have…something?” my February mind pondered. Lol.
That lasted all of a week. There’s something egregious about allowing Port Adelaide to come play at Moorabbin. Or maybe we just needed something ceremonial to cast rid of the weird demons when it comes to all things Port Adelaide and St Kilda (and all things St Kilda, really). The whole exercise could only be described as “not good” – smacked 6.3 to 0.1 in the first, one solitary goal in the first half, Mitchito hurt his shoulder. There were no Red Rooster red shorts this year, consigning them to the novelty bin alongside the Pura Lightstart yellow clash (I was fond of the 2003 version with the red piping; the rumour of the BigFooty Footy Jumpers and Graphic Design board is that we’ll be wearing a version of it in Gather Round next year). Kane Cornes effectively suggested we were just prepping everyone for a horrow show and tipped us for bottom four (he decided to shirk taking on SaintsTV face-to-face on this). Tobie’s goal a week earlier in front of 50 people was going to be the highlight of the year.
***
Sometimes, your worst fears come true. You’re running late for the for the first game of the season, racing across town from Brunswick West to Elsternwick in sheeting rain and wind on a hot and steamy day and by the time you find a park in Ripon Grove Matt’s texted you “We are toast.”, and a few moments later you walk through his front door and it’s 12 minutes into the first quarter and you’re four goals down and the game, and the season, are gone. We should have worn the candy stripe (but no, seriously, we should have worn the candy stripe instead of the red hot cross bun for a more effective clash). Adelaide Oval is the best place to begin a St Kilda season if you’re a fan of slow starts and soul-sapping losses.
Jack Macrae instantly became our best player, Nas picked up from his 2024 form, Max Hall kicked 2.2 on debut and gave one away, but otherwise, who were our…players? A step-slower-than-everyone Harry Boyd played a one-and-only game for St Kilda, joining a modern-day pantheon that includes Will Johnson, Jackson Ferguson, Daniel Archer, Fergus Watts, Colm Begley, and Jack Peris. Evidently, we also should have avoided all contact drills during the pre-season so we could field a forward line that wasn’t just Anthony Caminiti and a 25% fit Rowan Marshall. Jack Steele looked fucked, emerging briefly out of the shadow of his best-on-ground opposite number Jordan Dawson to engage in some ho-hum push and shove with Tex. The showing from the team, on the whole, was meek; players swept aside by an opposition starting out on a journey to bigger things. After the 63-point loss I got back to my car on Ripon Grove and was greeted with a $109 parking ticket (I didn’t see the 2P sign). This had all happened on the back of an exhaustive and very kind feature piece about the Saints by Josh Gabelich on the eve of the season, but we instantly became so irrelevant that the 63-point loss didn’t even qualify for AFL360’s Round 1 Horrors segment. I spent more than four-and-a-half hours on the Monday night on the toilet in my dim lamp-lit bathroom (both our downlights were blown) prepping for a colonoscopy and a gastroscopy the next morning, watching that night’s editions of 360, On the Couch, new hour-filler The Agenda Setters and Footy Classified back-to-back-to-back-to-back on my phone. The future was here, it was dark, it was shit.
We could surely not pull off four years in a row of defeating Geelong on a Saturday at the Concrete Dome. The Cats had spent their previous weekend demolishing Fremantle and we’d spent ours apparently grounded at Tullamarine. We would have needed a combined 141-point swing to break even with them.
Anyway, St Kilda won.
St Kilda hung on more than St Kilda won, but St Kilda won. St Kilda’s primary activity in the final quarter was hanging on, by the class of Jack Macrae and the guts of Liam O’Connell and the lunging fluoro orange boot of Nas. A 41-point lead first-half had been created from the most scintillating Saints footy since the early running of Ross 2.0, attacking the footy at the source with manic Ross-esque pressure and feeding the ball forwards – and good finishing in front of goal, something never associated with the Saints, and certainly not against the Cats. Zak Jones and Darcy Wilson on the wings, Windhager scragging and tagging and kicking goals, Caminiti taking 13 marks in defence, and doing those confident short field kicks usually only really self-assured defensive generals do. It didn’t look anything like what was attempted in the pre-season matches but something had clicked.
But just before half-time we gave up two goals. Over a drink at the main break in the ground’s New Hospitality Experience behind level two (which was much better than the cold winds and portaloos and smell of faecal matter of the previous year) I said to Dad that I didn’t trust this team to hold on. Not yet. I hadn’t seen enough from this group. This young team would surely tire, while perhaps not knowing how to defend against the bigger bodies and class of Dangerfield, Atkins, Holmes, Cameron, et al. Two early third-quarter St Kilda goals pushed the margin back out to 41 again but there was the inevitable run-on, a gauntlet thrown down from the Cats. The wall of Geelong supporters at the Coventry end reached what for all intents and purposes was a penultimate crescendo with Brad Close’s goal out of mid air to bring the margin within a kick with just a few minutes left – only for the ball to be taken from the centre bounce set-up back to the goal square as the replay on the screen showed Nas’s boot had got there first and last. (It wasn’t the last time in 2025 that Nas was the protagonist of a dramatic late-game centre bounce happenstance.) St Kilda had just enough resolve to hold out from there.
During the final quarter, in our new Row C seats on level two just in front of Rory, I thought about how chained we were to Geelong fucking us over. Sort of. There is something about the Cats and the Saints in the 21st century. Yes, I understand we won the 2004 NAB Cup (hehe) and Round 14 of 2009 and the 2010 Qualifying Final and had a fun win in 2016 and now four entertaining wins in a row at Marvel, but they have the 2009 Grand Final, for good measure, Round 1 of 2011 (the beginning of a nightmare comedown), and a win streak at their own home ground that now extends to 26 years. But ultimately, they have the 2009 Grand Final. That’s where it starts and ends. You’d trade it all. (RWB piece not mentioning 2009 or 2010 Grand Finals challenge: Also impossible.) As Ollie Dempsey and Max Holmes got to work in that final quarter I genuinely had the thought: will we literally just never have another day or night where you can excitedly catch the Route 58 tram home taking in everything on Twitter, and the Ross press conference and the highlights, and then get home, and you simply can’t wait to put on the Kayo Mini, or maybe you start with the whole second half, or go straight through the whole game, depending on the time? Do we just never have that again? Are we condemned to the peak of our St Kilda supporting lives being the period from February 2004 to early on the Saturday of October 2nd, 2010, and then just nothing really ever happens again?
What did that win do for your expectations for 2025? Last year we lost Round 1 and then defeated the reigning premier at the MCG by 15 points on a Thursday night in Round 2 – also featuring a Marcus Windhager PB – which had David King saying our premiership window wasn’t far off. He was much more measured in his short-term outlook for the Saints following this year’s edition, although went as far to saw it was “one of the great coaching performances for a long time” from Ross, who had just extended to 2027. Before the game, over schnitzels and dunkels at The Hof, we’d caught up with long-time-sufferers Jim and Sonia. As if the season were starting this night proper, Sonia said she had “so much hope” but didn’t know where it was all going to go. Dad reminded Sonia that she’d said the exact same thing to us all just a few hours before the 2010 Grand Final. I admired her optimism as we were about to face a team that promised to pants us. A hell of win it was. The standard had been set.
***
Early-season media is particularly fickle. It was one of those weeks where everyone was on the Saints. Macrae, Snags, and Sinclair were all in the SEN team of the week, and Ross was the coach. Kane loved it. So did Nathan Buckley, who even mentioned Ryan Byrnes and his role as a defensive winger, of all the things Bucks could have said directly into the SEN studio microphone and broadcast across Melbourne. Josh Gabelich talked about Jack Macrae being the bargain recruit of the year. Caminiti was in the Unheralded column. Zak Jones got a vote in 360’s GVP, putting him closer to a $93,000 Ford Mustang GTV than everyone on the St Kilda list and 99% of the competition. Corn suggested St Kilda would be the ideal environment for Jamarra. (However, we still couldn’t win without giving away a record-extending Rising Star nomination.)
Conversely, everything else wasn’t in top shape, and footy season again gave us something else – whatever that might be or might look like for you – while the world burned. We were living in the time of Nero, some were saying, or possibly Romulus Augustus. Does a 2029 premiership still mean as much if the world has descended into a hellfire of autocracies? I will raise this question every year until 2029, or whenever the second St Kilda premiership arrives, if ever. However, watching Mason Wood announce that Tobie would be debuting during the next week, I felt just the faintest nanosecond, maybe millisecond of…optimism? (March indeed.) Nothing puts a big, dumb, goofy smile on my face like feel-good Saints videos. So much of clubs’ identities are wrapped up in their social media content (or am I just stuck in a bubble?) and those kinds of moments are necessary, all told. It was a big few weeks for haters of social media generally: the new TV rights deal kicked off a somehow circle-jerkier coverage of the game, Harry McKay being out for personal reasons dredged up some dog shit from way too many accounts, and there was the general elevation in nastiness that comes with a federal election being called.
If Round 14 of 1998 against the Bulldogs was dubbed the Grand Final in June then the (sadly) last-ever Maddie’s Match against the Tigers was supposed to be at least a Preliminary Final for the number one draft pick, Seth Campbell’s somersault-backflip and the Saints clinging on against the Cats be damned. As far as the jumpers go, Maddie’s Match would have peaked in 2020 with the purple hot cross bun, if not for COVID shipping delays. We never did get that purple hot cross bun in the end, nor a purple candy stripe. Sigh.
So, just like in 2024, a more winnable game to follow Round 2 heroics and get a 2-1 start on the season. Richmond presented as the perfect St Kilda Football Club Banana Peel Game. An eight-point lead at half-time wasn’t convincing but a 14-goal second half was. Mitchito kicked four, picked off a couple of fun snaps close to the boundary line forward pockets on both his right and left and bowed to the crowd, and could have had a fifth in the final moments but gave off to a lively Collard instead. Steele was a late out with a mystery knee but Jack Macrae took himself to the top of the competition for disposals, Hugo Garcia was busy in the middle in his just two-thirds of game time and Tobie looked physically ready. Sinclair and Nas had 19 score involvements. No team had scored more from turnover in the previous 10 games. Changing the angles going forward (basic footy stuff!). Great movement from those ahead of the ball. Everyone was dangerous. That old kickers and catchers connection was being made. The average age and games-played difference between the sides wasn’t actually too far apart, but St Kilda carved up the very green Tigers. Collard nearly brought the house down with a winding solo effort through 50. Sharman and his low, piercing set shots were back, Mason Wood kicked three. Max Hall was busy again and kicked a nice set shot from outside 50. When was the last time a Saint did that? (It was actually Mason Wood earlier in the game. Before then? Probably Mason Wood some time also recently, but you get the idea.) The biggest St Kilda winning margin in 10 years. “Eh, dunno,” Ross said afterwards. The win against Geelong was “one of those games”, and this was also “one of those games”, but a different type of “one of those games”. Fun to have the margin is at its highest at the end of the match, too.
Dad and Matt and I sat at Platform 28 afterwards taking in the song again, and again (and again), with a “Mason Wood” chant thrown in. We giddily talked about Max to come back. Butler. Pou. Liam Henry. Tauru was set to play VFL the following week. The kind of optimistic chat you can only get between father and sons when it’s this early in the season and maybe anything could happen. “I’ve never seen a premiership won in March,” Matt then exclaimed as we watched over the Hawthorn-GWS and Brisbane-Geelong games. We caught ourselves rewinding the conversation. There was a silence between us amid the Platform 28 buzz.
“It’s still March,” I said, as if the point needed driving home.
Footy’s a pretty tough caper, though, and sometimes you just have to give yourself moments to believe in something.
The light won’t shine forever, but it is now
The club and its supporter base felt like it was having a good moment. Gerard acknowledged as much to Andrew Bassat on the club’s SEN supporter day on the following Tuesday.
“We’re moving forward as a football club,” Bassat said.
“Enjoy the journey. And I promise you it will be an enjoyable journey.” It wasn’t quite Malcolm Blight’s “get set for the ride of your life” but it was an encouraging vibe all the same.
Ross was at The Agenda Setters’ desk. Kane said the next night he was “compelling”. Ross was pressed on culture. “It’s just a common set of observable behaviours you see on a daily basis.” Done. Next. Cheers Ross. The Richmond performance earned the attention of One Percenters and an in-depth piece about our ball movement (it sits among the absolute best analysis of how St Kilda actually plays Australian rules football).
And so we ran into Port Adelaide. In Adelaide.
We had a comical history to confront. These moments of rebuilds are about meeting those challenges and changing the narrative. Creating new stories. St Kilda had beaten the Power once in 14 years, and had a 6-26 record since 2001, alternating between close losses and rightful smashings (even when we were good, in the GT and Ross years, they gave us grief). From the 2004 Preliminary Final epic, through to that horrific night in 2017 – which may be the club’s high-water mark of everything awful about the post-Grand Final Draw era – through to giving Ken and Port their signature moment in 2024. The last five losses to the Power had been by 13, one, seven, 10 and two points.
This time, we were coming off two great wins and they were coming off a dirty night (albeit with a 10-day break) against the Bombers. Who better to inject some life back into their season than the St Kilda Football Club? But Dwayne decided to just jump to it on the Monday and declare that he thought the Saints would win. We were Gerard’s D-Day on Wednesday’s 360. “They come up against Port who have frankly terrorised them.”
St Kilda had had two weeks that suggest they are more than what they hinted at coming into the season, he said.
“There is no reason why St Kilda shouldn’t march into a ground where they have no happy memories at all and really put it to Port Adelaide.”
“And should they win, they will flip their narrative entirely”
Joey said on First Crack it was time for the team to flip the script. Scar was confident. Call it a vibe shift. In this cursed timeline, it was time for this team, in this rebuild, to take a step forward. Perhaps ahead of its time: a read of Jake Niall’s stocktake of the entire competition’s lists in The Age on match day morning was sobering reading. St Kilda were in “rebuilding” mode, it declared. Not yet even in “building” mode. We were coming up against “no man’s land” Port. By game day, Richie expected a five-goal loss. Rory said a belting or a small margin loss, in keeping with head-to-head form. I felt it was going to be the latter. We just needed to see how it would happen so we could have the footage archived and have the stats and numbers all recorded on AFL Tables.
What we got instead was a 6.4 first quarter – a club record for the ground – which built the foundation for a 31-point lead nearing half-time. Mitchito started hot with a couple. An unlikely midfield led by a Bulldogs discard was outworking and outmuscling its much higher-fancied opposite line. Liam Stocker wasn’t afraid to polaxe another opponent at the risk of concussing himself for the second time in three weeks, and his commitment ultimately ended up with Nasiah’s glorious give, get and goal from 45 metres out on an angle. Pay him what he wants.
Port inevitably pushed and pushed, carried upon the shoulders of an irrepressible Jason Horne-Francis, while Mitch Gieorgiades went about compiling the early parts of a season in which he’d finish in the top five in the Coleman Medal. Windhager had the tag on Rozee and did a decent job, although was a “clown show” with ball-in-hand, as Matt described it. Couldn’t Ross just fucking tell Windy to make sure JHF doesn’t do anything, and not worry about doing literally anything else?
But every time Port pushed, we shoved back. Hastie’s desperate smother late in the third turned into Higgins darting through defenders and curling through his third off his left. The Power rallied again in the last and Lord and Giorgiades sickeningly got them within five points with eight minutes left. They’d kicked five of the last six. They were kicking to the Robbie Gray end. We were about to create a new method of losing a close game to Port Adelaide. I was just scared. Usually I’m just resigned to a dumb close loss to Port, but I was just scrunched up in the corner of my couch being scared.
It actually didn’t feel like they’d had excellent days (the final numbers suggested otherwise/what would I know) but it was Nas and Sinclair who combined for the first of two game-winning moments. With the stadium and the weight of history bearing down, Nas from the boundary at high half-forward directed a slightly-too-cute kick inboard to Sinclair, just outside 50, who took it in his stride and blasted from just inside the arc.
“SIN-CLAIR,” James Brayshaw boomed from the 7 box.
“A FLYING HIT.”
Never mind an Isaac Heeney swing to the right – the ball sailed through for a goal. A celebration to the stunned Port Adelaide crowd. Macrae stood up in the last 10 minutes. He was leading the midfield anyway, but stood up like someone who had been there, done that. He forced the ball forward and Collard – who had had a few really good deft-touch assists – then took his own big moment, plucking an overhead mark close to goal, and, after some wise words from Hill, Wood and Garcia, converted from around the corner. Ross was smiling in the box in the last minute of the game, and he clapped the players as they came off the ground.
It was a good night to be a St Kilda supporter. A win you’re proud of. The homemade burritos were just that much more delicious (the El Pato jalapeño sauce really popped.). Shae said it felt like “the rollercoaster is heading in the right direction”. Ross was coach of SEN’s Team of the Week again. Snags was in the forward pocket, Sincs was on the back flank, and he’d moved to the top of the Coaches Votes. Gerard opened with St Kilda on the Monday show. Nathan Buckley ran the ruler over the whole thing with Gerard. “The breaking of these jinxes is the surest sign of growth and progression.” We were Dwayne’s best win of the weekend. Lance got his face on the front of the Herald Sun.
Caroline Wilson then broke the story on The Agenda Setters that the club had agreed to pay out the players – namely Barry Breen, Alex Jesaulenko and Bruce Duperouzel – and the families of coach Allan Jeans and Trevor Barker, who had accepted payment of 22c in the dollar in the early 1980s to help a club in crippling debt and on the brink of collapse. It was a painfully long time coming – both financially and as a gesture to those that went a way to saving the club. Ultimately pushed over the line by Bassat and Carl Dilena, it produced a rare moment in which St Kilda felt like it was in good shape on and off the field.
The Saints were 9-3 from its past 12 games, losing only to Adelaide and Brisbane since July 2024, and had beaten two of the previous year’s Preliminary Finalists in three matches. At this point of 2025 St Kilda was third in the competition for points for, first for scores per inside 50, fifth for points for turnover, third for points from stoppages, and sixth for marks inside 50. Ross was proving he indeed could coach an attacking, free-flowing, fast-paced team, and a young one at that. For three weeks, anyway. Ahead of Gather Round, Ross gave an upbeat and entertaining interview on Fireball Friday. Tom Morris said the Saints were “sexy”. News filtered out of Carlton that Tom De Koning had paused contract talks and was looking towards Moorabbin.
But Kane wasn’t swayed. He was a “hold” on his own pre-season prediction that St Kilda would be bottom four. He maintained on the Monday, simply, “They’re not good”.
***
The rollercoaster was about to take a devilish turn. Platform 28 was in for some quieter nights.
On the Sunday of Gather Round, at Australia’s skinniest oval, St Kilda ran into a hardened, big-bodied, premiership-tilting GWS. We kicked the last four of the game to tease a funny hint of a comeback but the lead had blown out to an impossible 50 points early in the last. The Saints were made to look silly. Darcy Wilson and Mitchito kicks were turned over and punished hard on the transition. Jake Riccardi took a barely-contested mark close to goal from a floating Jake Stringer ball that had gone high enough to give everyone on the field time to make the fall. Toby Greene walked around opponents on multiple occasions. Jesse Hogan casually took a towering mark. There were some OK signs – Cooper Sharman kicked three, and Nas boosted his new contract by $250,000, hitting targets and creating movement ahead of the ball (classic Australian rules football!), kicking three goals, adding “guy who kicks goals on the run from outside 50” and “lead-up forward” to his repertoire. He would have had an all-timer fourth from a dashing solo run, but the kick just faded to the left. We threatened to threaten in the last, and then faded out all over again. It wasn’t going to be four in a row, and we went 0-2 for Sunday games viewed from Matt’s place. (However, we were going to go down looking arguably the hottest a St Kilda team as ever looked – wearing the 1873-1876 jumper with a 20th century white collar in place of the handkerchief donned by the first-ever St Kilda teams, with a vibrant pairing with white shorts.)
Another step on the journey and another lesson (or few) learned. That was the level. We weren’t at that level. That was what we needed to evolve to and evolve beyond over the next few years. For the moment, we had to show what we’d learned on Easter Sunday night against the Bulldogs.
We got fucking pantsed.
We ended up copping (or, you could also say, “allowing”) the two highest-rated individual quarters of the season in back-to-back games, from Toby Greene and the returning Bont. It was the way Gerard said “You need your stars” when Pendlebury, N. Daicos and De Goey combined to steal back the lead late in the 2023 Grand Final. We just didn’t have any of that. Our star power had banged up shoulders, or had a dodgy knee, or had a stress fracture in their femur. Our leaders – never mind “stars” – were anonymous. On the rare occasion Jack Steele was sighted he was labouring like an injured captain past his peak, a man who’s premiership window has closed. Since 2021 the Dogs had been consistently making a mess of us. Jon Pierik in The Age went as far as to say that we’d blown another marquee time slot, this time the Easter Sunday night (I’m still surprised that 35,000 turned out). He was right; the release of the 2026 fixture showed we’d been replaced by Essendon (who had also replaced us in the Pride Game this year). We were now zero from three for Sunday games watched at Matt’s place (fortunately, the food he’d put on had been sensational).
We gifted the Bulldogs moments and storylines. Liberatore’s rundown chase of Brad Hill (“That’s one of the highlights of the year” according to Garry). Bont’s return on Easter Sunday. A heroic win after Sam Darcy went off early with what looked like a serious knee injury. The Port Adelaide game had felt like a portal to a different world line; this felt like the portal back. We lost by 71 points and the Dogs had hit the post six times. Thirty-five to 11 inside-50s at half-time, 69 to 31 inside 50s at game’s end. The Concrete Dome didn’t play The Fable Singers version of the song when the Saints ran out. Just as quickly as St Kilda had become chic, red, white and black was out. Kane had kept his receipts, and pointed us out as a reason for the Blues having a soft opening draw for the first 15 games. Max King now had the worst contract in football.
***
Max was headed for more surgery. Another six weeks, we were told. The Sandringham alignment, on the record, was cooked. Ross was “practical” about things, and potential next coach Corey Enright espoused the virtues of the club having its own VFL side. And you realise that this is all part a very long-term play. This, 2025, is absolutely not our time. No massive let down there, no massive secret busted open, but it’s still something heavy to tread through day-to-day as a supporter. To prep us for (i.e. soften the blow of) the mighty Lions up next, Ross talked about Max being here for six years and about Pou’s fitness and availability being about the next six to 10. We fell heavily from 3-1 to 3-4, closer to our natural habitat of irrelevance in the post-GT and Ross eras world. Melbourne’s weather began to turn.
Under the heat of the Lions, Nas was missing kicks and dropping marks and went on with it in the second quarter to give up an easy 50 to Neale. Mason dropped a mark standing by himself in the forward 50. Three goals were met with three immediate replies from the visitors, and then some more coming back. Caminiti in defence was looking like a floundering experiment (Hipwood had three early in the second). We’d given up 13 scoring shots in 40 minutes. Inside 50s was running at 29 to seven. Wood missed an easy shot from close range. Logan Morris slotted one from a tough angle 40 out. What were our leaders doing? What was our $1.2 million man (at the time, lol) doing? (Note: he actually had a good second half, kicked a nice goal on the run and added spark when moved into the midfield. Interesting stuff.) There was a shift in momentum back our way, but, suffering the second-year blues, new whipping boy Darcy Wilson missed a shot on the run to make it three in three minutes and bring it back to 16 points. Umpires might have had a hand in a few for the visitors but let’s get real – Brisbane were bigger, harder, faster and just fucking better. They were Kane’s “good”. Pushing our kids around (Hugo – publicly sprayed and subbed off in the second), slicing and dicing their way through the Concrete Dome. No silly skill errors, as opposed to the Saints. This was the St Kilda that everyone assumed at the start of the year would be rolled out week-to-week, the one that had us next in line to the unholy trinity of Richmond, North Melbourne and West Coast. In each of the four losses, at some point during the match we had let the margin get out to 73, 50, 75 and 57 points respectively. Ross Lyon gave “an all-time Ross Lyon spray”. We were now fodder for banter around AFL fixturing mis-steps. Three weeks in a row of scores of 110-plus against. Dwayne’s World asked who of us, Essendon, North Melbourne, West Coast and Richmond would win a final first. How does the team react to that with back-to-back Friday night games coming up?
We had just a couple of things to cling on to, to give us something to look towards. Alixzander Tauru was about to make his debut and Mattaes Phillipou was set to return. But The Flying Viking knocked out a VFL Lion on the Sunday and was whacked with a four-week suspension by the state league’s tribunal – to be served over six weeks to include Sandringham’s byes. Ross went close to his Uber Eats ad performance for the second time in a week and whacked the VFL and the AFL, and in the same press conference said Mattaes only needed to get through training to play and went on praising him for nearly two minutes. Mattaes did not get through training. Going by TheJackal’s BigFooty training report the players were angry and frustrated. The vibes were off. The Bizarro Rivalry would see the Saints elevate Freo on the Friday night stage, all in front of Gerard in the Fox Footy suite. Who was going to come in now and give us something new? Hunter Clark?
It was the week I signed up my yet-to-born daughter up to be a Saints member. I was born in a wooden spoon year, and my girl would also be born into hard times.
***
On federal election eve, The Age led with an inside look into St Kilda’s millionaire and billionaire backers and powerbrokers, for whatever that’s all amounted to over the past 59 years. That night, we got a response from the players – a Ross Lyon masterclass, consensus would tell you. A masterclass in coaching and planning, which really began with Hugo being subbed off and berated in the second quarter six days earlier. A final score of 94 to 33 – a masterclass in manic pressure, a masterclass in unwavering effort. It was on from the start, from Macrae’s opening bounce clearance. Mitchito went back with the flight at centre half forward and Brad Hill wheeled past and slotted the first. That set the tone. The visiting A-grade midfield was harassed and harrassed and harrassed out of the game. Brayshaw only found the ball 18 times, Serong just 15. Every time a white Freo clash jumper got near it there was someone bearing down. It was Garcia, who pulled off an excellent chasedown of Shai Bolton streaming towards goal. It was Jack Macrae setting a St Kilda record for contested possessions with 25. It was first-gamer Hugh Boxshall lunging that extra inch when the ball was on the ground. It was Jack Steele regaining his presence as captain of an AFL football club. St Kilda won the clearance count 50-22, and contested possessions 151-103. (Jeff White’s First Use did an excellent breakdown of the one-on-one set-up Ross went with on the night).
It was a time warp back to Ross v1.0. A score of 4.3 to 1.1 at half-time, although I was still scarred from the Daniel Wulf night against the Swans in 2002 (which actually happened under GT), and while the Dockers were anchored to all of a total score of 7 at the major break, the 20-point lead wasn’t enough. Remember holding a team to 2.6 at three-quarter time and not winning? This felt more like it would have to be more of an Ross special under the roof like Round 1 of 2008 against the Swans, or maybe we’d need to pull out a Round 6 of 2010 against the Dogs. Nothing of the sort. “St Kilda strangled Fremantle into submission with a performance which had primetime viewers reaching for the remote,” the Herald Sun said (which could have been written about a St Kilda-Fremantle game in early 2009 that finished 116-28. I was barracking just as hard as I was that night for a novelty score.). Like an old-fashioned Ross Lyon rope-a-dope, the game was blown out in the second half. Cooper Sharman had one of his Riewoldt games, echoing the second Essendon game of 2024. He covered the ground and launched high, taking nine marks, and kicked 4.2, including a snap with one duke from the boundary with Josh Draper hanging off him, and he was feeling good enough about himself to pull out the Akermanis celebration. Mitchito in the last quarter flew back and reeled in a mark with one hand, slotted the shot from the pocket and brought out again the bow to the crowd. Caminiti in the final seconds wheeled around on the 50-metre arc and barrelled it through to a celebratory Lockett End. It was one of Those Nights. A good night for trade at Platform 28.
Maybe we could start to see guys who were worthy of Ross. Worthy of the candy stripe. Macrae. Nas. Higgins. Mitchito. Boxshall earning it early. Cooper Sharman maybe? He needs to be that player every week, not just once or twice every 12 months. In the afterglow, Cooper was a guest on Crunch Time. He was at centre half-forward in the SEN Team of the Week (plus seven coaches votes), alongside Macrae (who got the 10 coaches votes) and Callum Wilkie. Players on each line. After being baked by Ross on the bench the weekend prior, Hugo Garcia, a St Kilda player, won the Rising Star nomination.
At a time of tension and division across Australia, there was one thing everyone could agree upon – Ross Lyon was the coach of the St Kilda Football Club. This was Ross. This was the DNA of a Ross Lyon team doing exactly what it intended to do. Gerard and Bucks ran the ruler across Ross’s entire week on The Art of Coaching on Whateley the following Wednesday. The opposition was strangled. We could have been watching a game from the late 2000s. A portal to another time, a better time, a good time. I so desperately hoped that this was the new standard. The Geelong game was one bar; Ross had elevated the team again, in his image. This was the new reference point.
***
It’s about this time of year that the burden of the new footy media landscape and social media and Grandmother Ham ads and SEN talkback callers begins to take its toll. I’m trying to keep up with everything on X but El*n was trying to get the r-word to make a comeback and his algorithm was making it more difficult to prise out nuggets from The Saint and TheSadSainter amongst bot posts of clearly set-up “humorous” happenstances between couples or cars and/or lives getting totalled, and racist accounts that keep asking me “What do you notice?” about selective and borderline pervy street footage from Russia, or trying to generate a conspiracy theory around anything at all because participants in the Creator Revenue Sharing program benefit from the conditions conducive to civil war. I’m trying to keep up with the legends at Chadstone Kia and Dwayne’s pals at Werribee Mazda (or, alternatively, visit your participating Hyundai dealer today), but the soundtrack to my morning walks with my Ralphies gradually went from Breakfast with Garry and Tim and Whateley to Floodlights and Panda Bear and Maria Somerville. I’m tired. I’m about to welcome a newborn into the world (exciting!) and fretting about losing access to functioning human levels of sleep (scary!) and I’m already fucking tired. It’s Round 8. There’s 21 weeks of this shit left.
***
Our third year in a row lining up against a big four club at a home game at the MCG. Carlton’s loss to Adelaide probably shaved a few thousand off the game, which was our latest best chance to break the club’s home game attendance record of 72,669. Our fifth Spud’s Game. Tom Boyd, the man who made us choose Paddy McCartin over Christian Petracca, did the pre-match speech in the middle.
Caro’s piece about Carlton’s 2022 attempt at getting Ross was published on the Friday morning. The Age editors tempted fate and on the main page titled it, “The inside story of Carlton’s failed bid for Ross Lyon, and why St Kilda couldn’t be happier”. I guess TDK would have the final say on that. The build-up felt…big. I was terrified of a very close finish. We were due one. Shae was more nervy than usual. Squiggle had a four-point win to the Blues. On the tram there I had visions of 40,000 Carlton fans bearing down on us at the 29-minute mark of the last: Harry McKay’s on the lead, Charlie’s got a one-on-one, Jesse Motlop has a break on Jimmy Webster. It did fall that way a little bit in the end.
A packed MCG on a Friday night for a St Kilda home game, hey? And what a come down from the week before. We pissed it away. This was our prime-time, big-stage game and we blew it. If everything had gone our way the previous week against the Dockers, then on this night we let it all literally slip through our fingers. Every extra, more desperate hand that was around the contested footy the week before now belonged to a navy and white jumper. Or, when we did actually get the ball, we were stilted, hesitant, anxious. Brad Hill kicked the ball to weird spaces, both deliberately and accidentally. Cooper Sharman launched for mark of the night on the wing and then booted it directly into his opponent as we made something of a late charge. Anthony Caminiti missed a mark at a critical moment in the last quarter in the forward pocket and the ball hit him directly in the face. Or maybe we just didn’t go at all; Jack Steele, the captain of the football club, got the ball in his hands with four and a half minutes left and a nine-point deficit and just…didn’t do anything. “Is it part of the [Saints’] team mantra that there are a couple of players who can use the ball, and everyone else can’t?” Footy Classified asked. Pou on return, though. He wanted it. He wanted to stand up and take the responsibility and win it himself, and he celebrated like he fucking cared. When was the last St Kilda player to celebrate a goal like that (twice)? Nas was everywhere until he wasn’t. It felt embarrassing to lose to a team like that. Maybe humbling is a better word. Couldn’t handle the pressure of a Friday night game on the MCG, hey?
After a Ross Lyon masterclass we were outcoached by Michael Voss. Curnow and McKay kicked three each. Either of them on their own were the difference. Marshall (possibly injured) was battered by TDK but St Kilda Get a Genuine Elite Midfielder Challenge: Also Impossible. Jack Macrae had become the barometer and he and his teammates were borderline bullied at the contest. After shutting down an A-grade midfield last week, talk was of the match-ups coming down to Boxshall and Garcia against Cerra and Hewett. But this is the thing – for a period of time we’re going to have to just sit there and watch the senior guys have off days, and Boxshall and Garcia go up against Cripps and Walsh and Hewett and Cerra and get pushed around. They have to learn. It’s going to look different from week to week. It’s a tough part the of journey that we’re on. It just has to happen and be endured. Nights like these need to be endured. Nights on which you don’t play well and it’s a grind in front of 65,000 (still felt a little light) but you’re still in the game in the final minutes but you fumble and erratically kick and drop and Max-Hall-just-misses-to-the-right your way out of it. Things quickly felt a little desperate. Derm said Max King (still unsighted) should be a backman. Bicks said bring in TDK and explore Marshall’s worth on the market. Losses feel bigger at the MCG. The roar on the final siren and the Carlton song are louder from your St Kilda membership equivalent seats. The trip back to Brunswick West is longer, and you have more time to think about it all; more time to doomscroll St Kilda Twitter your way through it.
“Every time they lose, the Saints, you can just see the lack of quality,” Kane surmised on the Monday. It felt like the weekend deserved more, that it deserved to be a weekend on which your team won on the Friday night. The weather in Melbourne was on an extended golden run. A friend’s kid’s birthday in the park in beautiful autumn sunlight the following day, Mother’s Day festivities on the Sunday for those fortunate enough. After the weekend-long glow following the Docker demolition, St Kilda had fallen off the radar. The football world had moved onto other things (Dave Matthews wanted shorter quarters to attract new fans in Sydney). By the time the AFL released the fixture for Rounds 16 to 23 we were a footnote, getting a charity Friday night game against the Bombers that would go mostly head-to-head with the more highly fancied Freo-Lions game out west. St Kilda wasn’t sexy anymore. St Kilda was losing followers.
***
“We swim in deep water every week. And there are big sharks every week.”
If you’re St Kilda, a West Coast team that simply can not win a game is a big shark.
This was probably St Kilda’s worst day of the year (or until we saw a Tom Morris Tweet saying that Cal Wilkie actually did want to leave). This disaster should well have been the legacy game of 2025, if other certain things didn’t happen later on in the season. West Coast had won five quarters for the year. This was supposed to be stats and percentage padding, a walk-up start to get back to square on the ledger. Marshall was fumbling everything in the middle. The ball went through Cooper Sharman’s fingers, Mitchito took four bites of the cherry and didn’t complete it. Darcy Wilson got nervous sitting under a high kick. Nas was turning the footy over. There were broken tackles everywhere. Waterman and Flynn stretched the shortened defence. Jack Higgins should have been pushing his case for All-Australian but was down in the rooms possibly with diarrhea.
Mitchito persisted with his weird ball drop. Three misses. Missed shots from in front, while Waterman saluted from range, and Reid was flushing them from 50. Liam Baker dived across Darcy Wilson’s boot. Caminiti dropped an uncontested 20-metre pass. Hoff (???) kicked a goal. It was party time for the…West Coast Eagles? Higgins returned from the porcelain throne in the last to keep us emotionally invested, to set up the emotionally abusive punchline.
Of course, Leo’s call that West Coast would win would prove to be his non-kibosh one. As you settled into your Sunday night dinner you could reasonably make the case it was the darkest day in the club’s modern history. This felt like that the rebuild – now into effectively its what, 14th year? – had been set back a few years. That things just might not be working out, between the St Kilda Football Club and itself, between yourself and the St Kilda Football Club. Irrelevant, incapable, incurable. Kane, who had a few weeks earlier said we were “not good”, said we were “sad”. It was a sad fucking state all round. Fundamental Australian rules football skill errors from senior players, supposed star players, all the way down the list. A lack of quality in the line-up. No dog in anyone, except maybe Pou. As a supporter base we were really just surviving on the fumes of his centreing kick to Higgins in the last quarter. We were never, ever playing finals in 2025. Sinclair and Macrae doesn’t hurt you, Cooper doesn’t hold them, Mitchito doesn’t kick straight, Howard, our height down back, isn’t playing. We were ranked “mega infinity ass” by Dan Gorringe. Macrae had a back injury and all of a sudden we might just have the worst midfield in the league, to go with the worst forward line, and possibly the worst defence. The bye a) couldn’t come quick enough and b) presented an excellent chance for a “message from the president”.
Getting shoved around by a winless team, losing to a winless team. St Kilda would prove to be only side that this winless team would, could beat in 2025.
Snags was second in the Coleman by just one goal for some reason – he was also number one in the competition for overall scoreboard impact, taking in goals, behinds and assists – and earned himself a small Josh Gabelich feature. “Is Jack Higgins the modern day Stephen Milne?” the AFL’s account asked, as Damo, Sarah, Josh and Nat Edwards discussed his “sizzling” form on Round Table. It was remarkable anything generous followed the loss, and what did just felt so incredibly, incredibly hollow. Everything else was a swipe. The Agenda Setters poked fun at the “Bayside Butchers”, pointing out that the Saints were ranked second in the competition for no-pressure errors, fifth for dropped marks, first for getting smothered and first for giveaway turnovers. We were now “easy run home” fodder for teams with their eyes on achieving something special in 2025. The club started posting its Red Rooster Date series with Ollie Geale for some feel-good content for the fans but our season was done and we hadn’t even reached winter.
***
We were the banana peel game, according to Josh Jenkins on the Sunday morning. Gold Coast owed us a few, and a few close ones at that. Dimma couldn’t have come up with a better opposition to face to improve his quaintly dismal Concrete Dome record of recent years. In the other box, Ross broke the phone as the Suns started hot. Going our way were a great running goal from Nas and then a crumbing goal from Sharman (we didn’t have any actual talls or actual smalls, it seemed?) but these were followed by Hunter Clark not taking a clean first possession of a relatively easy ball and the Suns getting the repeat forward entry and a goal. Despite playing a heavily congested game (not quite 2002 Daniel Wulf game levels) Gold Coast was finding openings and pressing ahead into space. A Travaglia 50-against at one end, a Travaglia miskick coming off turnover at the other, and ex-St Kilda pick 25 Ben Long kicked his third from range. Caminiti came up with the most obvious possible insufficient intent known to science. At one point in the second quarter there was 42 to 13 disposals inside 50. “Games of football just exist in our back half,” Matt said. Higgins was unsighted. Windy was on Anderson, who was cheerfully collecting easy centre bounce clearances. The game turned in the third, but the ghosts of kickers and catchers in Richo eras past were raised and the Saints couldn’t execute their simple kicking (and handballing) and catching. A great tackle from Travaglia had Darcy Wilson out and then he completely missed the handball to Hill. Cooper Sharman hit the post twice. Brad Hill ran into goal and shanked it. Nas missed, too. Phillipou hit the post also. Mitchito missed to the left from a free kick 20 out from goal. 1.6 to 0.2 in the quarter. Byrnes botched a handball in space on the break early in the last and then Ben King, who had done fuck-all all day, popped up and took his moment. (Come home, Ben.) We had gone from our worst loss of the year straight to threatening our lowest score of the year.
Before the game, Ross had called the Suns the “AFL’s nepo baby”. The blowback to Ross’s comments showed in part how easily hate for St Kilda could be stirred up. The reaction generally wasn’t very friendly: former St Kilda goal kicking coach Ben Dixon told the club not to “bitch and moan”; “Everyone is whingeing about everything”, Shannon Gill wrote about in The Roar, saying “it plays well for the St Kilda gallery yet trivialises one successful area of growth for the code”. Damian Hardwick, coach of the Gold Coast Suns who are based in Queensland, who had just had a crack at Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, said St Kilda should “make sure they focus on their own backyard instead of trying to bring everyone else down”, and then pointed out the crowd.
The crowd.
The crowd, of just 13,486, was St Kilda’s lowest-ever non-COVID Docklands home crowd. A team described as “sexy” in April and which should have been 6-4 now had its season over by May, and was playing to a ground with half of the top level closed off (we were one of those clubs now), to its lowest-ever home crowd at its home ground of a quarter of a century. That would probably tell you how St Kilda supporters were feeling about the club after fumbling the Carlton game and then losing the unloseable to West Coast. That would probably tell you how St Kilda supporters were feeling about this latest rebuild. About where this club had been and where this club was heading.
An entire winter stretched out ahead.
Brilliantly written! Superbly entertaining!