At the risk of sounding like Ezra Klein after He died (RIP), for St Kilda this season there’s a right way and a wrong way to lose.
The wrong way to lose would be to have spent an offseason renovating the list, then deploying it using Ross Lyon’s dreary, old-school footy from yesteryear.
Doing that is like buying a $12,000 couch for your caravan.
In their Opening Round loss to Collingwood, on the other hand, the Saints showed genuine attacking intent and zeal when they had the ball and at least some level of urgency to try and keep the ball in their front half. That’s the right way to lose.
I’m not saying that the loss to Collingwood – missing Darcy Moore and Jeremy Howe – is proof that the rebuild will work.
It certainly isn’t.
The first reason to be optimistic is the dynamism of their ball movement. Last year, the Saints were second in the AFL in expected retention per kick at 59% and slightly below average in expected threat. Against Collingwood, the Saints bit off the most threatening kicks of anyone who played in Opening Round with a far lower expected retention.
They also just looked longer in general against Collingwood than they did all last year. Last year the Saints kicked it shorter than anyone in the AFL, trying to play a defensive game when they had the ball. I’m not telling you that they were the 2017 Tigers in terms of their kicking aggression, but Ross dialled it up a little bit as did most of the coaches in the AFL. Last year the Saints were the only team under 25m per kick. Yesterday they were over 26m.
Those little changes speak to a change in attitude. You could feel it.
They looked corridor at every chance they could and tried to run hard at and through Collingwood’s press, which is the way to beat them. Jack Sinclair especially had even more of a license to bite off really tough kicks to try and release their aggressive runners like Darcy Wilson and Brad Hill.
That aggression drove really strong transition numbers across the board, though didn’t necessarily lead to scoreboard impact. But we’re doing positives now, so we’ll get to that later.
The other cause for optimism is the way they played territory. Part of their absolutely dominant 58% time in forward half and +23 inside-50 differential was Collingwood’s salting the game away in the last quarter as the Saints tired, but another part of it was their aggression and liveliness forward of centre early in the game.
Their expected score off turnover alone was 63 points, which indicates that the turnovers they generated were both plentiful and high quality. That number would have been their best mark all season last year. That, partly, was driven by guys like Max Hall really starting to come into their own as elite pressure players.
But there’s been a lot of positives in this column for a team that lost the game. I’m at the point where I’m treating the game like Carmella treats AJ when he gets a job at Blockbuster. It’s actually a failure.
So, what were the problems?
The first ones were out of the Saints’ hands.
I’ve spent the entire column talking about how St Kilda has changed its points of emphasis, but this week they came up against the best system in the AFL. That’s without even mentioning that the Saints turned over a third of their top-18 players.
The game felt like that: Professor v Student.
The other was the way that Nick Daicos cut the Saints up with a lazy 41 and 11 score involvements. He’s also inventing new ways of kicking the ball. I’ve never seen a player have so much of his boot available to him when he’s trying to hit a target.
But even the fact that they had nobody running with him is something I didn’t mind as a statement of intent, even if it was misguided. It was Ross saying “I don’t do that negative stuff anymore. I’m going to fight fire with fire”. I might advise him to have the best tagger in footy Marcus Windhager do some tagging next time they come up against a champion, especially given the Pies don’t have much else in the away of game wreckers.
The biggest reason the Saints lost, though, was the lack of inside-50 connection. While the Saints were +23 in inside-50s, they retained just 30% of them. West Coast was the worst inside-50 retention team last year, and they were at about 40% for the year.
That’s a bad night. Against a Collingwood team missing its two best key defenders, it’s catastrophic.
Their mids either couldn’t hit targets, or Rowan Marshall, Cooper Sharman and Mitch Owens couldn’t take marks when they were there to be taken.
This was always going to be the problem. They spent so many resources on B+ players but they failed to address the biggest hole on their list which is at key forward. If Max King can come back and be a facsimile of what he was that would help, but believing in him at this point is as misguided as believing in world peace.
It’s not all doom and gloom for the Saints even in the loss. Even with just scoring 66 points, they looked far better than they did for last season. I’d still have faith in them making the wildcard. But even with the causes for optimism that are there, what concerned me heading into the season concerns me even more now.
And that’s before the bill comes due for all of those expensive players they brought in.