Can the Dees inspire the Saints

[saynta]

From the age.com.au

"After half a lifetime on the waiting list, the Demons join the club
Greg Baum
Greg Baum
Sports columnist
September 27, 2021 — 5.00am
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When Garry Lyon said on Saturday night that he had never seen a happier football club than Melbourne, you can be sure it wasn’t just a platitude. You can also be sure he woke on Sunday morning even happier still.

Part of the experience of being a footy fan is to wonder how it feels for your team to win a premiership. It has a mystical dimension. People can try to tell you, but until and unless you’ve bodily lived it, you can’t know. It’s like an initiation into a sect or club.
Luke Jackson and Clayton Oliver celebrate with the premiership cup.

Luke Jackson and Clayton Oliver celebrate with the premiership cup.Credit:Getty Images

Matthew Richardson once told of how when he was in a circle of former players and the talk turned to premierships, he would quietly remove himself. It wasn’t his club.

Some discover it young. Some wait a lifetime. Some go to their graves not knowing. It all makes for a certain in-house humour. A couple of years after Hawthorn’s trio of premierships, satirist Titus O’Reily tweeted something to the effect that there were two-year-old Hawthorn fans in this town who had never known a premiership.

O’Reily is a Melbourne fan. On Sunday morning, he woke up for the first time glowing in awareness that his team were premiers. So did Patrick and David and Elise and Greg and dozens of others I could name, and the thousands more you could. So did the president of the MCC. So did Lyon. They’re all in the club at last.

Though Australia’s population is ageing, still nearly 80 per cent of it are younger than 60, which means that a lot of Melbourne people who reasonably must have begun to wonder if it would come to pass in their lifetimes are now in the know. Welcome, welcome.

The drought-breaking premiership is different to others. The mood is looser, madder, more full of wonder. This is true of players and fans. This century has been a study in the phenomenon.
The Sydney Swans after their breakthrough flag in 2005.

The Sydney Swans after their breakthrough flag in 2005.Credit:Vince Caligiuri

In 2005, the Swans won their first for 72 years. Two years later, Geelong broke through after 44 years. In 2016, it was the Bulldogs after 62 years, as if anyone could forget. The next year, it was Richmond, 37 years overdue. Now Melbourne are in after 57 years out in the cold. The club is being democratised.
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You might even add Brisbane in 2001. They were only a partial continuation of the Fitzroy team that had last won a premiership 57 years earlier, but Jonathan Brown did declare to the crowd at Brunswick Street the next morning: “I’m proud to be a Lion today - a Fitzroy Lion.”

The Dogs came from the clouds. My favourite memory of that day is of former player Neil Cordy in a corner of an MCG bar many hours later, still shaking his head. At the Whitten Oval the next day, players and fans alike still looked more stunned than anything else. It is still the most miraculous premiership of all.

The Swans were swaying all over the place in Albert Park the morning after their triumph. Geelong celebrated long and riotously, Richmond people overran Swan Street. The face of that flag was the tear-streaked Matthew Richardson’s.
Easton Wood and Robert Murphy celebrate in 2016.

Easton Wood and Robert Murphy celebrate in 2016.Credit:Scott Barbour

Going back to last century, when Collingwood broke a 32-year drought in 1990, I don’t think coach Leigh Matthews quite realised what he had done until he was sitting on a bus taking the players to Victoria Park and inching through a crowd as deep as the eye could see on Johnston Street. The bus was rocking as delirious fans beat their hands on its sides.

The club grew by hundreds of thousands that night.

Repeats have a different tenor. After their third flag, Geelong presented as innocently as choir boys, dry of eye and liver. They were on a higher plane, with mark of greatness upon them, and it was enough. That’s an exclusive club-within-a-club. No one really ever becomes smug about premierships, but they do become knowing.

When Hawthorn paraded their cups at Glenferrie in 2015, coach Alastair Clarkson and captain Luke Hodge could hold only three between them, so they had to pretend the 2008 trophy belonged to a different era. It’s an even rarer club that has a premiership cup in reserve.
Richmond supporters on Swan Street celebrating their team’s win over Adelaide during the 2017 grand final.

Richmond supporters on Swan Street celebrating their team’s win over Adelaide during the 2017 grand final. Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui

Richmond would acknowledge that the consecration of last year’s premiership fell a little flat because it was far from their fans, and at night. But at least it was their third in quick succession. Melbourne’s fate is for its finest modern hour to be two hours behind their fans. It gave Sunday in this city a hollower feeling than might have been expected.

The median age of the Australian population is 37. The second-longest drought among clubs (excluding expansion clubs Fremantle, GWS and Gold Coast) belongs to Carlton, 26 years long. To anyone who grew up in the ’70s, that’s a hard-to-compute fact. But it does mean that nearly every footy fan either has had the thrill of a premiership, or can reasonably expect to before it’s too late. There is enough winning for all, after all.

That leaves one club, the outlier, the perennial non-winner. It’s 55 years now for St Kilda (and another 93 barren years before that in all competitions, but we won’t go there). It’s not just the dearth. The other clubs played in few, or no, grand finals during their droughts. The Saints have played in five, and had chances in all except one. It makes them feel not just robbed, but victimised.

It marks St Kilda out as ill-fated on an epic scale. Does it mean that they’re fundamentally and irredeemably flawed compared to, say, Melbourne? Not really. Melbourne are now great, but some of that greatness was predicated on a time of being so bad.


Does it mean the Saints have screwed up at the draft? Critics point to them passing up on Christian Petracca and Marcus Bontempelli, for instance. But that critique assumes perfect foreknowledge. It’s not the explanation.

Does it mean they’re forever doomed? You might have said the same of the Demons until this year. Their lows were as low as the Saints’, and they had fewer highs. Yet here they are, supreme. Instead of their despair, Melbourne should be St Kilda’s inspiration. It can be done.

So to Warwick and Paul and Donna and Dan and Billy, some of whom are now of an age when they regularly check their super balances, and thousands of others you surely can name who are still to be given the secret code to lifelong contentment, take heart. If even the Demons can be redeemed, so surely can the Saints."

[Wayne42]

A premiership at the St Kilda Football Club, i'll believe it when i see it, if i get to see it.

[Sanctorum]

The Dees certainly CAN inspire the Saints, and they WILL - just follow the Demon template by getting every player on the list, from new recruit to old hands, to commit to do the relentless hard work in the off-season to make themselves fitter, stronger (both physically and mentally) and improve their skills by hand and foot and it will happen!

It's not rocket science, just damn hard work - and most important, the will to win.....

[bigcarl]

Their fans are getting up my nose. All I get from them is "Go No.5". Saints missed a once-in-a-generation player etc etc.

[Beno88]

Their fans are getting up my nose. All I get from them is "Go No.5". Saints missed a once-in-a-generation player etc etc.

I have not encountered one Melbourne supporter who hasn't provided the "if we can do it, you can too" encouragement.

[Impatient Sainter]

I once asked Grant Lawrie (ex Saints & Fitzroy player) who had become a sucessful businessman, why the Saints had never won a flag? His answers were "they have always had a s*** administators and boards. They have had the players and coaches but need things to be solid behind them to get there".

[asiu]

the best thing we could do
is

forget about premierships 'n flags
and set sail at winning Prelims
year in year out

[saynta]

I once asked Grant Lawrie (ex Saints & Fitzroy player) who had become a sucessful businessman, why the Saints had never won a flag? His answers were "they have always had a s*** administators and boards. They have had the players and coaches but need things to be solid behind them to get there".

Never won a flag? What was 1966 ? But back then the saints had Huggins and Drake. Both fine administrators.

Our current ones are more than OK so there is hope.

[bigcarl]

Their fans are getting up my nose. All I get from them is "Go No.5". Saints missed a once-in-a-generation player etc etc.

I have not encountered one Melbourne supporter who hasn't provided the "if we can do it, you can too" encouragement.

How patronising

[saynta]

Well at least this year they didn't have to chose between the snow fields and the MCG.

[St Plugger]

the best thing we could do
is forget about premierships 'n flags
and set sail at winning Prelims
year in year out

I agree, the Prelims are the biggest hurdle. Consistently win them and the Premierships will come!

[asiu]

yep

not a new plan
but a smart plan none the less


us being who we are
could do with putting a little historical 'weight' down
and change the tempo
to serve ourselves

play like free men

we certainly can't pull out the old
'a flag in five years' marketing line again