The admission came 14 lines into St Kilda’s press release.
“We do not yet have the winning culture or ruthless commitment to football excellence that we need,” club president Andrew Bassat said.
“Our Club is hungry for success, and we believe a different type of leader and a new voice is needed to take us on the next stage of the journey.”
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The decision to part ways with Brett Ratten was horribly handled and communicated to the man himself.
Ultimately, however, the club feels it needs a more hardened edge, one that new coach Ross Lyon has been entrusted to provide.
Former Hawthorn star Ben Dixon believes while Lyon is an “incredible appointment”, he enters a club that was in dire straits long before Ratten’s arrival and eventual departure.
“Ross is going to take that club forward no matter what, but in Ratten’s defence, he inherited a lot of that dirty laundry,” Dixon told foxfooty.com.au.
“It’s very hard to wash your clothes with no detergent.
“He had an incredibly hard job to come in and straighten things up, but it’s been rotting for so long that sometimes you can’t stop it.”
In his press conference to announce Ratten’s sacking, Bassat said the club is committed to “getting the foundations right”.
“If that takes us backwards before it takes us forwards – we hope it does not – but if it does, we’ll cop it and we’ll maintain the courage of our convictions.”
For Dixon, “backwards” may be putting it nicely.
LISTLESS
“When you look at it, he‘s at blank canvas stage going into St Kilda. They’ve slaughtered the list. They’ve got no real guns,” he said.
“Jack Steele yes, Max King is a possible – he still hasn’t pushed to A-grade status yet because he hasn’t finished his work – if you can’t find more than two or three, it’s a blank canvass. He’s starting from scratch.
“Nothing is attractive about that list.”
The push in recent years to bring in experienced talent at the expense of draft capital was a fundamental miscalculation that perhaps is still to rear its head completely.
Kingy shreds the Saints! | 02:09
It was, as Dixon dubbed it, “a Hail Mary” and “a touchdown pass well short of the end zone”.
The result? A series of either categoric fails or ‘icing’ players that it was hoped would override the bitter taste of an under-baked cake.
Unquestionably the biggest miss was Dan Hannebery, who didn’t cost much from a draft point of view but was signed on a lucrative deal that, to his credit, in the final year (2022) Hannebery opted to take a significantly reduced wage given the lack of senior football he could play.
Ultimately, Hannebery played 18 games in four years. He was repeatedly lauded by Ratten for his work off the field and standard-setting at training but, as Dixon said: “The best place to help is on the field. Anyone can walk the corridors and show leadership, but if you’re not on the football park then you’re not helping.”
The year after Hannebery’s arrival, Paddy Ryder and Dougal Howard came to the Saints in a deal involving Picks 12, 18 and a future third-round selection go out the door.
Ryder was crucial to St Kilda’s line-up during his three-year tenure at the club, but ultimately played in just one final in a side that was never genuinely close to a premiership during his time there.
Part of that deal for Ryder and Howard saw the Saints acquire Pick 10, which they traded along with a future second-rounder and Blake Acres as part of a deal to bring in Brad Hill from Fremantle.
Hill has had moments of promise, but they have been a far cry from his best football that came at Hawthorn and Fremantle. Saints list manager James Gallagher admitted ahead of this year’s trade period (with the contracted Hill’s future up for debate) that “we need to find a way to get the absolute best out of Brad for 20 or 22 weeks of the year”.
Despite falling well short of premiership contention in recent years, the Saints have used just one top-10 draft pick since that trading spree in 2018, which was pick No. 4 used to select Max King.
It’s a mess of a list Lyon will inherit.
True, in both of Lyon’s senior coaching stints, he managed to build a side that got all the way up to the final week of the season.
The road to that path in his second stint at St Kilda, however, requires a significant detour first.
“They’re a back to the drawing board team like you’ve never seen,” he said.
“They need to strip that back.”
For those hoping Lyon will offer a quick fix to a side that just needs of a bit of tinkering, they are entering the Lyon 2.0 era on a false premise.
As Dixon puts it, bluntly: “He’s not Jesus Christ, he’s Ross Lyon.”
SUB-STANDARDS
Ratten may have tried to straighten up the Saints in his four-year tenure as senior coach, but when you consider how far back the side was coming from, according to Dixon, success was never going to be imminent or sustainable.
Dixon worked at the Saints on a part-time basis as goalkicking coach throughout 2017 and 2018 — one year before Ratten would become caretaker and eventually permanent senior coach.
“Coming from a club like Hawthorn, where the standards and the values were just so strong and followed by all, I was a bit disappointed to see what I did when I went there,” Dixon said.
“You just think to yourself, ‘this club is so far behind’.
“When you walk in – and it’s tongue-in-cheek in a way – you walk in and there’s one (premiership) cup. I’m coming from a club with 13 cups. They’ve got 13 cups for a reason.
President tells how Ratten lost his job | 01:06
“When you walk into St Kilda, there’s none of that going on. At that stage when I was there, it was very unprofessional, you had guys turning up late to training and there‘s no accountability.
“It‘s catch-up time and there’s one man that can help fix that and that’s Ross Lyon.”
Dixon’s words ring true for figures in and around the club.
Such figures believe the club has for too long been lacking both a bona fide direction and the wherewithal to see it through.
The seeds of discontent were sowed last month, when a who’s who of St Kilda powerbrokers discussed the Saints’ top job during player-turned-billionaire Lindsay Fox’s 85th birthday cruise from New York to Montreal.
While the sea breeze was blowing across the more than 3000km journey, so too were the winds of change beginning to blow through St Kilda.
OLD DOG, NEW TRICKS
Lyon, Dixon said, is as good a fit for St Kilda as any possible candidate, which makes it hard to believe he wasn’t earmarked as Ratten’s successor from some way out.
“It‘s an incredible appointment, because you think of Ross’ reputation of being a ridiculously hard worker as a coach and brings a team in that role their sleeves up, but he brings standards, he brings a system,” he said.
“That’s everything that‘s been lacking at the Saints over the last decade.”
“His history is he’s going to come in and shake things up. That might upset a lot of clubs but that’s exactly what St Kilda needs.”
Critics of Lyon will argue he brings an outmoded style of football to a game that moved beyond it some time before Lyon himself was moved on from Fremantle.
The silver lining for Saints fans, perhaps, is that Lyon may have new cards to play.
“He‘s a planner. He plans everything. He’s probably one of the most organised coaches from all reports. He knows exactly what’s going on and he knows where he’s going,” Dixon said.
“Back then, that style was winning games of footy. Now, that won’t win games of footy.
“I think he‘s got the capacity to change.”
In any case, Lyon is likely to have searched and continue to search far and wide for his latest masterplan.
“You go back to the case where he had a lacrosse book on his desk,” Dixon recalled.
“Everyone goes ‘Why would you have a lacrosse book on your desk?’ It’s because you have to defend on the outside, not on the inside in lacrosse.
“He had that system going and it was like ‘Hang on a minute, there’s something in this.’
“He’s had to two years to think about where the game is going.”
Two years – and likely several more – may be what is needed to add to that one cup.
