St Kilda 5.4, 10.9, 14.11, 19.14 (128)
Hawthorn 0.0, 4.2, 6.3, 9.5 (59)
Crowd: 26,433 at Marvel Stadium, Saturday, May 1st at 4.35pm
The Saints seemed to disappear over the past few weeks. Memories of the faltering 2017 campaign, the 2018 cliff and then 2019 temporary revival and then, uh, cliff are still very fresh. For most supporters and members, the way we interact with the club and our relationship with the club on a weekly basis – that is, experiencing the journey of a season by going to the games, the car, tram and train trips to and from – was indeed that 2019 season. The 2020 season was an inflection point for the club’s (very) modern history, and we landed back with them just after it. We’re still getting our heads around a few things. Saturday was the first time we’d seen Paddy Ryder in a St Kilda jumper in person.
The loss to the Bombers in Round 3 bought back memories of the Good Friday red flag of 2018, and after the stirring West Coast win we’d lost games by 86 and 54 points. Between those, we’d been given a Friday night game against the Cats in Round 9 and a Round 10 Saturday night match against the Bulldogs, drawing the ire of the Prime Time/Major League Sports Fetishists in the footy media. We had become the Carlton of a few years ago, and the Sunday night Richo-era style interstate loss to Port confirmed it.
The anticipation of the footy was already gone, just as it disappeared in 2018 and then from the midway point of 2019. The question hovered around the periphery of my mind all week: are we bad again?
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The reintroduction of Paddy Ryder, who plays for St Kilda, helped almost immediately; his early high centre bounce leaps brought out the same involuntary gasps of excitement as Jason Holmes’ did one night late in winter of 2015 (fortunately the result was a little better). Said gasps were probably melodramatic, but I get it, we’ve been starved of a competent ruckman (and ruckmen) for a very long time.
Novelty Stats Enjoyers would have bene superbly pleased with the 0.0 score line against at quarter time. It really did end up being an afternoon of party tricks, so who were the guys who put us in that position in the first place? Straight away it was Crouch and Jones and Hill, all the high-profile recruits that suggested the club thought we might be in some sort of contention this year. Jones finished the first quarter with 15 touches, Crouch brought his fast hands and Hill was prominent across half-back.
The movement was fluid. For once, the balance between attack and defence seemed right, but for all of the work of Hill, Crouch and Jones et al. we weren’t quite getting any entries deep and central, in the manner that created so many of our goals in the better times of 2020 (which is a strange sentence at face value, but you know what I mean). Remember long goals from set shots? Marshall and Coffield aren’t any of Gehrig, Riewoldt or Koschitzke but they made the most of the early opportunities, while Sinclair curled a snap on the run from a tight angle.
Hawthorn weren’t at their best. They didn’t offer much. We have to take all of this into account before we make the post-West Coast win mistake of thinking we’re back (With the beauty of hindsight, i.e. lived trauma of supporting St Kilda, there is no way the team of 2017 should have claimed a bigger gulf over the Hawks than the respective teams of 2021). But you know you’re on when Nick Coffield is flushing long-range set shots.
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We were in the position in which a win is non-negotiable, which is kind of nice – you’re not so outright shit you can warrant that much on occasion – but really, wins are non-negotiable because this team should be ahead of where it is, not because we need one to entrench our hypothetical position in the top four. We’re far more concerned about watching helplessly from afar as Melbourne joins the Swans, Geelong, the Bulldogs and Richmond going past us in breaking generational droughts.
A pair of late Hawthorn goals in the second quarter dulled the applause poised for half-time. Some of the crowd seemed to still be stoked, but the quarter had only been won by nine points. Hawthorn supporters would have been very aware that their two wins this year had been comebacks from deficits of 39 and 31 points, and over the last few weeks this St Kilda team appeared to have all the confidence of a tub of butter. Those few moments feel trivial now. We had the luxury of kicking 19.14 without a care in the world.
Typically the quarters would start very well; we had four goals on the board in 16 minutes in each of the second and third quarters, first to take complete control of the game and then to quell any nerves we might have had employing default mechanisms to put those numbers together and think about how we could lose this. Either side of that, Butler had the quiet confidence to kick a banana goal from the flank, pairing with his former Richmond teammate and St Kilda supporter-turned-player Snags for the goal and celebration. Jones kicked a couple and was loud about it, and Hunter Clark kicked the first of his two Most Hunter Clark Goals of the Year, bringing his smooth moves to a smother, collect, feign, turn of direction and neat finish.
Hill was working his way into Robbo’s Monday Hero territory all the way through. The pace of stats being racked up across the team in the first quarter slowed down (Jones bodylined the ball constantly to “only” 37 touches) and Hill’s 27 isn’t wild, particularly in the back-to-full-length quarters era. After several weeks of being bashed from Robbo and On the Couch all the very long way down to Red, White and Black, his best moment might have been in the second quarter: the one-on-one win against Mitch Lewis on the defensive 50 and a quick clearance, and then when the ball returned moments later his diving smother across the boot of Finn Maginness. Of course, he provided all the run and carry and link-up and pace between the arcs we wanted him to. He set up Snags on multiple occasions with his running through the middle and inside 50s. It was his most complete game in a St Kilda jumper to date.
While any terrific team would expect that much, those things don’t always happen, let alone do they come from an outside player who’s been publicly smacked around. He wasn’t the only one adding parts to his bread and butter game; Sinclair competed in the air (and won) several times, Clark played through the middle and up forward and kicked two goals, Jones kicked two himself, Coffield nailed his set shot, Max King took big marks up on the wing, Howard played a great version of his usual game but got the crowd saying his name loudly as a replacement for “BrUuuce”.
On his way to kicking a frustrating 2.4, Max again threatened to blow off the roof again with a deft move out of traffic and a curling snap (unlike his third quarter effort against the Eagles, this one curled too much). He missed shots and dropped a couple of marks up forward that he should have taken, but as well as the contested grabs on the wing he was a threat at ground level even off his own contests. The combination of the running , weaving Clark to King to the running-back-into-play-and-squeezing-in-a-snap-from-next-to-the-post Clark for Hunter’s second in the final minutes of the game was the perfect finish.
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We all thought Saints Footy (how was that phrase stuck around?) was back for all of the five days we had to appreciate the West Coast win. I’m not sure if Saturday confirmed if we’re “very” or “far too” reliant on a) Paddy Ryder, who plays for St Kilda, or b) both Paddy Ryder (who plays for St Kilda) and Rowan Marshall being out there.
What a beautiful day to go the footy and soak up the last sunshine of-OH NO WAIT, we’re being ushered into the Concrete Disney Store to watch another game in artificial lighting. This game took place in the middle of a few days that certainly are the last of decent weather before we plunge into another Melbourne winter. Nearly every St Kilda game now takes place in artificial lighting (and that’s forever). Of course, it remains an incredible privilege to be able to go and see your team play live right now, let alone worry about if they’re any good, or why the ground insists on playing the shit new version of the song after The Fable Singers version post-match. Going to the footy really does still feel strange, like I’m doing something a little too luxurious, or self-indulgent.
I wasn’t really expecting the most comfortable experience at a Saints match for some time. None of Ryder, Hill, Jones, Crouch, Howard, King, Butler, Higgins, Bytel and Byrnes were playing for the Saints when Victorian fans left the MCG after a loss to Carlton on a beautiful August Saturday afternoon in 2019. It’s certainly an experience going to the footy and getting used to trusting these guys, and it was nice to have an evening to relax and get used to them run around in a St Kilda jumper.