2025 AFL Season Previews: St Kilda
Is that all there is?
Preview number 15 sees me kicking the tyres down at Moorabbin.
2024 ladder position: 12th (11 wins, 12 losses)
2024 best-and-fairest: Callum Wilkie
Senior coach: Ross Lyon
Story of the season
The second season of the Ross reboot at Moorabbin didn’t live up the promise of the first. The Saints never had a winning record at any stage of 2024, at one stage falling to a 3-8 record. A 4-6 record in games decided by two goals or fewer, and injuries to important players like Max King, Dougal Howard and Mattaes Phillipou certainly didn’t help, but in truth the Saints never generated anywhere near the momentum required to make a serious push for the top eight. It ought to be said, though – winning eight out of their final 12 games, including highly impressive results against Sydney, Geelong, and an Essendon side which at that stage was still pushing for finals, showed that the writers still had a twist or two up their sleeves. It didn’t end there. After the footy finished, Josh Battle pretended to weigh up his future before eventually jumping ship to Hawthorn, and the Saints took the compensation pick to the draft. I suspect Season Three of the Rossnaissance will have some more surprises in store.
Summary of game style
There weren’t many significant substantial changes in St Kilda’s style from 2023 to 2024 beyond a moderate deterioration in their ability to implement it.
Probably the most notable thing to say is that, in 2024, the Saints went faster when they had the ball. They became a league-average side for the speed of their ball movement while remaining elaborate in their build-up (they were third for number of possessions in their average possession chains). What looks like a choice to become even more controlled with the ball is probably best understood as a decline in their ability to win ground balls. Going a little faster enabled them to improve their ability to generate scoring shots when inside 50 while maintaining their near-best-in-class expected score per shot. Expected score per shot is a great example of an ambivalent statistic. After all, it probably also demonstrates that the Saints, in their quest to generate great looks, weren’t generating enough looks in general. To that point: I had the St Kilda vs. Port Adelaide pre-season game on in the background while drafting this preview. In his interview with David King before the first bounce, Lyon mentioned that he was urging his side to “trust in the contest”, i.e. to move the ball quickly, even though it won’t be perfect. Not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good seems a prudent strategy.
Defensively, the Saints are doing what Ross Lyon sides have always done: choking the corridor to force a slowdown in how the opposition used the ball (they conceded the second-most marks in the AFL, but partly by choice), often going +1 on the defensive side of stoppages, and using superior numbers and an effective structure to force turnovers in their defensive half. St Kilda’s problems don’t have much to do with how they defend.
A quick word on the uplift in the Saints’ form late in the season: in the last 10 games of 2024, the Saints ranked fourth in scores from turnover differential, fifth in scores from front half differential (a traditional area of weakness) and seventh for expected score differential. I suspect their early-season injuries will mean it’s a while before we discover if that was coincidence, or the beginning of something real.
List changes
In:
Jack Macrae (trade – Western Bulldogs)
Tobie Travaglia (2024 National Draft, Pick #8)
Alix Tauru (2024 National Draft, Pick #10)
James Barrat (2024 National Draft, Pick #32)
Hugh Boxshall (2024 National Draft, Pick #45)
Alex Dodson (2024 National Draft, Pick #53)
Patrick Said (2024 National Draft, Pick #60)
Jack Carroll (Delisted Free Agent)
Harry Boyd (Supplementary Selection Period)
Eamonn Armstrong (Category B Rookie)
Out:
Josh Battle (free agent – Hawthorn)
Tom Campbell (free agent – Melbourne)
Riley Bonner (delisted)
Jack Hayes (delisted)
Olli Hotton (delisted)
Matthew Allison (delisted)
Tim Membrey (delisted)
Ben Paton (delisted)
Seb Ross (delisted)
James Van Es (delisted)
Brad Crouch (retired)
List profile
Number of top-10 draft picks: eight (T-5th)
Average age at Opening Round: 24.1 (14th)
Average number of games played: 66.6 (15th)
The Saints’ list management team is doing the right things. First and foremost, they’ve replenished the club’s mandated quota of guys named Jack. And secondly, they cleared the decks and went hard at what was widely regarded as a deep draft. I wrote in my Geelong season preview that one of the things that’s helped the Cats stay at the top for so long is their understanding of the basic mathematical fact that the best way to find pearls is to flip lots of shells. St Kilda’s choice to take six players in the draft – assisted by the pick they received as compensation for Josh Battle’s defection to Hawthorn – reflects a recognition that they were carrying too many guys who weren’t realistically going to make significant contributions. That’s tough on injury-prone players like Jack Hayes and James Van Es, but ultimately it reflects a commitment to move on from mediocrity. The Saints have drafted quite well since 2021. By my count, they’ve added around 10-11 best-22 players to their list since then, with Mattaes Phillipou and Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera (and Mitch Owens, for the optimistic) the obvious candidates to become true stars of the game.
Despite my endorsement of the ambition of the overall approach, it’s obviously far too early to conclude anything about the quality of the Saints’ 2024 crop. The Saints’ list management team, seemingly aware that the players regarded as the best pure midfielders in the draft would most likely be taken before their pick, have probably made a bet that Tobie Travaglia will have the same kind of trajectory as Freo star Hayden Young – serving an apprenticeship before moving into the midfield when physically ready. Alix Tauru, capable of playing in defence or up forward (but, because of injury, he won’t be playing anywhere for a while), shot up the draft order late last season.
The backline hasn’t been the Saints’ problem area – but losing the battle for Josh Battle might turn it into one. His departure calls the depth and quality of the key defensive stocks into question. Callum Wilkie’s journey from being undrafted to donning an All-Australian jacket and winning the club’s best-and-fairest award is one of the best in footy. Dougal Howard is best described as both “workmanlike” and also “recovering from a dislocated shoulder”. With new draftee Alix Tauru’s pre-season also derailed by injury, expect Isaac Keeler and Pick 32 from the 2024 draft, James Barrat, to both potentially play senior footy early in the season. Lyon can usually make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but the early part of the season will challenge him. Elsewhere in the backline, Wanganeen-Milera and Jack Sinclair provide excellent rebound and carry through the middle, even though some questions remain about whether their skills would be better utilised higher up the ground.
The midfield remains a work in progress. Jack Steele, who hasn’t quite recaptured the heights of his excellent 2020 and 2021 seasons, and Rowan Marshall have been virtually the only ever-presents. A dozen non-rucks attended 20 or more centre bounces for the Saints in 2024. That’s partly a function of Lyon’s taste for experimentation, and partly a function of a lack of outstanding talent. Jack Macrae will take the midfield minutes that Brad Crouch wasn’t able to. Marcus Windhager, Hugo Garcia and new draftee Hugh Boxshall all look like solid contributors in the making, but it’s Phillipou who looms as the obvious game-changer on the inside. He only attended 84 centre bounces for the season but, excitingly, many of them came in his breakout game against Sydney in Round 17. It was a tantalising taste of the future – and his absence for the early part of the season due to stress fractures is a cruel blow. On the wings, Mason Wood and Brad Hill provide marking prowess and run and carry (respectively).
One of the downstream effects of St Kilda’s rather vanilla midfield is that Marshall ends up shouldering too much of the responsibility for winning clearances. Although his athleticism is to be admired, his tendency to grab the ball out of the ruck and slam it indiscriminately on the boot is one of the main reasons the Saints were 17th for scores from stoppages last season.
Unfortunately for Saints fans, the same description – a work in progress – can also be applied to the forward line. Despite many people having hopped off the bandwagon, I remain a Max King believer. His ceiling is still a star key forward and important reference point (I also don’t care about farming his contract status for engagement). Next to him, Cooper Sharman and Anthony Caminiti need to become more multi-dimensional threats and, after a difficult second year, Mitch Owens is in some danger of becoming a talented player without a defined role. At their feet, Jack Higgins is a good traditional small. Just as the volume and quality of St Kilda’s inside 50s are an issue, so is the craft and creativity when it’s in there.
Line rankings
Defence: Above Average
Midfield: Average
Forward: Average
Ruck: Above Average
The case for optimism
St Kilda have swallowed the bitter pill – they’ve acknowledged that the way they’d built their list prior to 2021 wasn’t going to lead to success, and they’ve committed to rejuvenating their list through the draft (and not just the national draft). St Kilda have made clever use of the different drafts and various player recruitment mechanisms. One of the most interesting bits of trivia I’ve learnt in the course of writing these 18 season previews is that St Kilda’s most recent Irish recruit, Eamonn Armstrong, will stay in Ireland to finish his secondary education before moving to Australia later in the year. Patty O’Dangerfield? The lesson seems clear: if your levers aren’t as large as those of some other clubs – find more levers. Get smart.
That willingness to go the long way has led to an important fact: the Saints have one of the youngest groups of top 25-rated players in the league. According to this graphic (link) by writer and analyst Sean Lawson, it’s the sixth-youngest, and of the five teams below St Kilda, only Fremantle are the clearly stronger side (small caveat: the chart seems to slightly exaggerate the age of every player – but the point still stands). They have drafted well, and are getting significant contributions from the likes of Wanganeen-Milera, Phillipou, Wilson, Owens and Windhager. As those young players improve, so should the Saints.
And, as the Saints’ talent base improves, they’ll be building from solid foundations. They really show up statistically. Here are some selected rankings from 2024:
Equal-first for back-half scores
Sixth for scores from turnover
Second for loose ball gets differential
Third for ground ball gets differential (the teams either side of them: Hawthorn, Brisbane, and Geelong)
Third for opposition scoring shots per inside-50 entry; and
Sixth for opposition expected score.
Clearly, there are questions about the ability of Ross Lyon’s system to reliably generate winning scores. But there shouldn’t be any about its ability to make the Saints difficult to play against.
The case for pessimism
For all of the virtues of Ross Lyon’s coaching and St Kilda’s recent drafting, a stubborn fact remains: the Saints remain in dire need of elite talent. Are any of their players in the top 50 of the AFL? How many would figure in the top 100? Is Rowan Marshall their best player? These are discomfiting questions. And they explain the club’s (apparent – I’m not here to litigate the truth of footy transfer reporting) pursuit of the likes of Luke Davies-Uniacke and Finn Callaghan. The Saints are clever and well-coached. But, weighed down by the accumulation of historical baggage which means that, today, they are a “small club”, they find it difficult to compete with their Victorian peers for attention and trade/free agency targets. That harms them in two ways. The first is that it means St Kilda’s margin for error when it comes to player acquisition is virtually nil. They have to nail basically every pick to compete. This is the point club president Andrew Bassat was making – that was wilfully missed by so many – in his speech at the best-and-fairest awards. The second point is that, even if the Saints do make the right choices in the draft, player retention is an issue. Josh Battle, after pretending to weigh up his decision for months, exercised his free agency rights and left for Hawthorn. Alix Tauru, the player the Saints drafted with the compensation pick, may turn out to be better than Battle. But it’s no certainty. And even if he is, he won’t be for years. And in the meantime, the Saints will have to repel ardent suitors for the likes of Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera and Mattaes Phillipou. It’s hard to move forward when you spend half your time trying not to go backwards.
The cost of the defensive solidity of Rossball is the offensive torpor of Rossball. The Saints are not a fearsome attacking force. They ranked 13th for expected score, and 13th for scoring shots per inside-50 entry – and gave up the fifth-highest rebound 50 rate. As good as some of their work in transition is, the (poor) quality of their work from stoppages imposes a significant cap on their scoring ability. But for a Petracca or Bontempelli bursting out of stoppages and kicking them from outside 50 (sorry, Sainters).
The final and most obvious cause for pessimism is the cluster of injuries suffered by key players in pre-season. Phillipou, King, Howard, Henry and Owens all look likely to miss some games early in the season (King is said to be “touch and go” for Round 1). Just as the Saints need everything to go right over several years to challenge for a Premiership, the current strength of their list combined with the evenness of the competition means they can ill-afford so many injuries. They could easily be 1-5, and therefore effectively be out of the running for finals, after the first six games.
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Breakout player
On the evidence of pre-season, Hugh Boxshall looks like a beauty and strong evidence for the claim that the 2024 draft would yield quality players well into the third round. But he’s not made his debut yet, so he’s not eligible for this particular honour. Sorry, Hugh – maybe next year. That leaves two clear candidates. The first is Mattaes Phillipou. The dynamic South Australian probably didn’t have the breakout season many were expecting in 2024, but his dazzling Round 17 performance against Sydney surely counts as a breakout game. If that disqualifies him (who am I arguing with here?), then I’ll go for Darcy Wilson. He looked ready for AFL from day one. The question is: how high is his ceiling?
Most important player
Rohan Marshall is the Saints’ number one ruck and also his side’s main clearance winner. As discussed above, that’s part testament to his quality and tenacity, and part problem. If the Saints are to improve how they move the ball from stoppages, they need to develop a more sustainable system than Marshall throwing it on his boot.
Biggest question to answer
How much progress are the Saints actually making? It feels as though, internally, they’re making the kinds of decisions clubs in their position need to in order to escape the mediocrity vortex. But I’m not quite sure if that’s translating to meaningful change. Sometimes the waves push you higher or lower. But you’re still ultimately just treading water.
What success looks like
Success is making the eight and having the promising young players that have joined the club in the last three years make meaningful forward steps. But, given the deficit of top-end talent I discussed above, I wonder if a more beneficial long-term move – despite the damage it would do in the short-term, including to Ross Lyon’s job security – mightn’t be finishing in a similar ladder position as 2024, and having another dip at a draft prospect who could end up moving the needle. (Note: this is not an endorsement of tanking. Don’t do that.)
In a nutshell
The Saints should consider themselves part of the group of approximately 15 sides legitimately vying for finals. But a rotten spate of pre-season injuries combined with a persistent lack of top-end talent has put them behind the top eight eight-ball before the season’s even started.
Agree? Think I’m a fool who’s biased against St Kilda? Share your thoughts in the comments.