“Ross the Boss!”, they chanted on Saturday night, “Ross the Boss!”. As always, the Boss seemed a bit bewildered by all the fuss. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be a slog. Ross Lyon had spent the best part of summer tempering expectations, and watching his best players go down, one by one. What the hell is going on? Half his list is on crutches or in a sling, yet here here is, undefeated, and in danger of becoming a cult figure.
To understand what this means for St Kilda, the pre-match sesquicentennial is a good place to start. It was so different to Essendon’s celebration last year. Essendon’s focus was on the glorious past. Carrying a Sherrin and dressed for the boardroom, James Hird emerged through a wall of smoke. The current players and the old legends linked arms and formed a circle in the goal-square. “Spine tingling,” Jono Brown growled from the Fox Footy studio. “A crock of shit,” Patrick Cripps probably said to himself at the top of the Carlton race. He had a chuckle, licked his palms, helped himself to about a dozen contested possessions in the first term, and blew the anniversary boys back to Tullamarine.
St Kilda’s celebration was more low key. It was slammed by the usual chuckle-merchants online. But it worked. It focussed on their unfailingly loyal fans, and some extraordinary former players. What stood out was how many of them ended up playing elsewhere. Two of the better ones, and two that stayed, were in Lyon’s coaching box. Crucially, the players responded. They slammed on five goals before the Bombers woke up. They later withstood an Essendon fightback, the sort of run-on where every St Kilda side of the last decade would have folded up.
When Lyon was announced as coach, he said he was apprehensive, even nervous. To the rest of us, he walked back in like he owned the place. Usually at these press conferences, the CEO and president do a lot of the talking. Lyon plonked himself down and spoke for nearly half an hour. He laid out his vision for how he wanted the team to play, and how he wanted the club to be run. He was disarming, and he was blunt. He gave us all the old aphorisms. Football has changed, he said, and he would change with it.
He said the quality, depth and potential of the playing list were secondary considerations. He said he barely looked at the list before taking on the job at Fremantle. But he had Matthew Pavlich and he had a young Nathan Fyfe. This time around, he’d inherited a list that looked plain, clogged and poorly constructed.
It was a tough gig. But it beat selling houses. And it sure beat being a panellist on Footy Classified. It was excruciating watching him on that show. He was constantly being talked over. He was unable to bring the same discipline and non-negotiation to the panel as what he brought to his teams. Full time coaching, you could hear him saying to himself, had to be less stressful than this. He needed it, and the club needed him.
But what he really needed was a bit of luck. Of all the players he and the club could ill afford to lose, it was Max King. Because it was St Kilda, and because he was Ross Lyon, King wrecked his shoulder early on a Monday morning, and was ruled out for half a year. He was one of the few St Kilda players to get excited about, one of the few points of difference. The rub on Lyon has always been that his sides didn’t have enough firepower. A few weeks into the job and his most potent forward had busted his shoulder. In the past, Lyon would have blown a gasket. But he’d seen it all in football. He’d had every bit of bad luck there is to have. He shrugged his shoulders and got on with it.
Even now, his players keep being felled. He’s had to plug holes. He’s had to be creative. He’s had to rely on kids, on discards, on suburban footballers. They are limited but they have phenomenal aerobic capacity. In all three games, they’ve run the opposition off their feet. “Run and work” is his creed. They move the ball quickly and they apply enormous pressure. It’s typical Ross Lyon football, but with a twist. It’s faster. It’s better to watch. It’s working.
These have been fallow years for St Kilda. They’ve been years of drift. It’s been a long time since a St Kilda game has been a big occasion, since they’ve drawn a bumper crowd at the MCG. There’s no-one in the history of the game less likely to get ahead of himself than Ross Lyon. But St Kilda people have every right to get excited about this side. The Boss is back. He’s made a silk purse of a sow’s ear, and he’s made St Kilda relevant again.
