Patience of the Saints

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From page 12 'The Australian' - Grand Final Day - Last Saturday in September 2009

By Chip Le Grande

I blame myself. Plenty of Saints fans do. I mean, everyone could see the mismatch. Everyone but the coach. Playing Jamie Shanahan on Darren Jarman? It was like asking a wild beast to hunt the lion. Someone had to do something.

If only I had. If only I had got up from my seat and ran around to the other side of the MCG to shake St Kilda coach Stan Alves from his tactical slumber. Jarman might have kicked a couple of goals by the time I got there but the premiership could still have been saved.

But no. All I did was turn to my gobsmacked friend in the next seat. "Mate, what the hell is Shanahan doing on Jarman?"

Later that night, I cried for one of the few times in my adult life. Certainly the only time I've cried in a public bar. Jarman had finished with six goals, Adelaide had won its first premiership and St Kilda had blown its chance. "That will set us back 10 years," I told my friend Matty.

As usual, I sold St Kilda short. It has taken 12 years. Today, we are back where we were. Back at the MCG, where the only thing standing between the Saints and football heaven is one hell of a team from Geelong.

Jamie Shanahan was a hulking, earnest full-back. Darren Jarman was a nimble, brilliantly skilled foward. Yet despite Stan Alves's assistants imploring him to change the matchup, he steadfastly refused until the game was lost.

Every football supporter has a Shanahan-on-Jarman moment. A story of squandered opportunity or wasted talent or a single, brainachingly stupid decision in recruiting, coaching or financial management.

For most supporters, these trials serve a purpose; a humbling reminder that no season is Perfect, no team unbeatable, no club immune to football folly. Geelong supporters only need go back as far as one year ago, when a near-perfect season ended in crushing defeat to Hawthorn.

For St Kilda supporters, it was a point entirely laboured. With the exception of one September afternoon in 1966, and Barry Breen's wobbly, winning point that now flashes in endless YouTube repeats before my seven-year-old son's eyes, to barrack for St Kilda has been the passionate embrace of a lost cause.

Federal Labor MP Michael Danby - whose electoral office overlooks St Kilda's old Fitzroy Street training ground at the Junction Oval - likens following St Kilda to the title of Nadezhda Mandelstam's celebrated memoir of life in Stalinist Russia: Hope Against Hope.

"It is a deeply sad and mournful experience," says Dariby. "Historically it has been that way, anyhow. You always have a feeling that something might go wrong."

There is no football club in any code in Australia that has lost as many games as St Kilda. For that one premiership, we have run stone-cold motherless last 26 times. It took St Kilda four long winters in the first years of the Victorian Football League to win a single game and seven years to finish a season anywhere other than bottom of the ladder.

Between 1983 and 1988, my glory days of high school, we ran last in every season but one. Yet still we walk up the road to Moorabbin, Matty and 1, as stretch denim turned to 50's and pastel knits bloomed beneath duffel coats, to watch our Saints lose.

It is not as if we didn't have great players. There was Trevor Barker, whose ability to fly was matched only by his inability to safely land.

There was Greg Burns, a master of football's dark arts who knew just where to find the soft, exposed flesh of any opponent amid the stinking Moorabbin mud.

There was Geoff Cunningham, who played 224 games and not one final.

Later there came a brooding teenager with thighs the size of beer kegs and a mullet of peroxide tips who ended up the greatest goal-kicker the game has seen. As the VFL morphed into a national competition and St Kilda went through its darkest days, hope was Tony Lockett in one goal square and Danny "Spud" Frawley in the other. Later still, Stewart Loewe would wrap his pizza-sized palms around the ball, Nicky Winmar would float like Ali, Robert Harvey would run on and on and on and Moorabbin would feel its first blush of spring for nearly 20 years.

Lindsay Fox was not born a Saint.

He became one by dint of geography. Having grown up supporting Carlton, he lived near the Junction oval and was zoned to play for St Kilda in the U19s in the late 1950s. He played 20 senior games and later took over the board in 1979, when the club was deep in debt, unable to play its players and on the brink of collapse.

"Financially, they were completely finished," he recalls.

"They were a write-off. The football club thought it was $200 000 in the hole. They were $1.6 million in the hole. St Kilda were in debt to the banks, to hire purchase companies, they were in debt to everyone."

Armed with an independent financial audit, Fox addressed the board and made his fellow directors an offer. "I said: 'Look fellas, it is fairly simple. Each write out a cheque for $230,000 or resign.' Within 30 seconds they had all resigned." His next offer was to the players, many of whom hadn't been paid for the best part of two seasons. They were asked to accept 25c for every dollar the club owed them. Without exception, they agreed.

Fox is remembered as one of St Kilda's saviours. There have been many through the years. But he knows that for all he provided off the field, he couldn't deliver the one thing any football fan wants. "During my period I don't think we won any more than five games in a season. League football is all about winning. You have got to win premierships."

Fox has achieved much in business and will today be surrounded by about 20 children and grandchildren as he takes his seat at the MCG.

Yet he yearns to see what every St Kilda supporter craves; club captain Nick Riewoldt lifting the premiership cup as Darrel Baldock did 43 years ago. "We have never had a season like it," Fox says. "This is the year we have been waiting for. They have got one game to go to prove 2009 was the St Kilda year."

There has been no season quite like 2009. On this, all Saints supporters agree. To win 19 games straight, to finish two games clear atop the AFL ladder, to win through to a grand final; not even the fabled 1966 team had such a year.

TV presenter Tracy Grimshaw was born into St Kilda after her newly arrived parents, both £10 immigrants, decided the best place to start barracking was for the club at rock bottom. "They figured the only way they could go was up, although we didn't go too far for a long time," she says. Grimshaw has lived through the worst of the Saints, the barren 1980s and the 1997 heartbreak. "They have given us glimmers of hope but have always managed to choke." This year, though, she sees something else.

"It is going to take a lot to wrest it off us this year," Grimshaw says. 'We haven't shown any signs of flagging. We haven't shown any signs of a lack of belief in ourselves. There is no sense this year that we won't close the deal.

"This year we just look like we are on the march."

Music promoter Michael Gudinski was there in 1966 as a 14-year-old, when Breen kicked his point. He'll be there today, sitting next to his great Saints mate Molly Meldrum, who is flying back from London. He says the club has gone through some horrific periods but long jettisoned the scary party culture that once flourished on a Saturday night at Moorabbin at the notorious Saints disco.

"To see [coach] Ross Lyon's approach, it is a different feeling than I have ever felt at the club," Gudinski says. "If they play their best on the day they will win." Yet the declaration comes with an admission: "I'm shitting myself."

A win today won't erase the memory of 1997. Not for Michael Danby, who remembers watching the Saints lose on TV as he sat with his dying father in a ward of Melbourne's Cabrini hospital. Not for Michael Gudinski, who remembers walking out of the MCG that day and seeing a good friend of his, Mick Thomas from the Melbourne band Weddings, Parties Anything, openly weeping on a street corner. (Gudinski put an arm around his friend but had few words of comfort.) Not for Stan Alves, a good man remembered for one howler of a coaching decision. Not for Jamie Shanahan, remembered for failing a task he should have never been asked to do.

But a win today will be all the sweeter for it. For grand finals lost in 1971 and 1997. For the 2004 preliminary final lost by the width of Brent Guerra's boot. For a decade lost in the 80's. For a childhood of thinking that September was a month for supporters of other clubs. If being a St Kilda supporter is hope against hope, it is also hurt beyond hurt.

This Year, has been blessedly painfree. Don't let it start now.