It has taken Essendon a decade to fully recover from the impact of the investigation of the club’s injection regime by what was then known as the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority.
Carlton’s recuperation from the AFL’s 2002 draft penalties for salary cap cheating arguably lingered for nearly as long. Or maybe longer.
When the Blues partially recovered in 2009-11, on the back of Richard Pratt’s intervention, the arrival of Chris Judd and a few No.1 draft picks, they weren’t yet robust or united enough to be restored to their former grandeur.
Today, they’ve gone a decade without finals, but have considerable talent, money and facilities. No ghosts from their past should impede progress.
Adelaide, meanwhile, appear to have been fully cleansed of the fallout that followed that disastrous pre-season camp five-and-a-half years ago. The camp was itself a response to the grand final defeat, and it is easily forgotten that, in the post-season of 2017, Charlie Cameron and Jake Lever both walked out, then aged 21 and 23 respectively.
The Crows, in effect, have got their mojo back by finding new talent, especially Jordan Dawson and Izak Rankine – the equivalent to Lever and Cameron – along with Josh Rachele, Riley Thilthorpe and others.
Conversely, Collingwood’s firesale of 2020 has been revealed, in hindsight, to be much less of a disaster than it appeared. The Pies wouldn’t be back up in contention for the flag under Craig McRae if not for that unpleasant list surgery.
AFL clubs can suffer from a version of post-traumatic stress for years after the event. Typically, as in the cases of Carlton, Essendon and the Crows, the trauma involves a scandal of some kind in which key individuals are hurt, players leave (or never arrive, as with Brendon Goddard and Daniel Wells at Carlton) while the club loses stability and cohesion.
It becomes less appealing to players and coaches. It has to pay a premium to players. Decisions are compromised by political considerations and/or to appease players and fans, a pathology most evident at Essendon in the saga aftermath.
It has been more than a dozen years since the St Kilda Football Club packed up their belongings and moved from their ramshackle spiritual home at Moorabbin – where they were engaged in a dispute with the local (Kingston) council – and took up a new home in what became the wasteland of Seaford.
The Seaford move wasn’t a scandal and had no connection to any St Kilda shenanigans of that time.
St Kilda’s former training base and headquarters at Seaford, south of Melbourne.Credit: The Age
But one could argue that the relocation to an unloved and soulless venue inflicted just as much damage on the Saints as Carlton’s draft penalties or the Essendon drug saga did to those more powerful clubs.
Seaford was a hard sell. Players were not keen on the location, nor were many staff. Commercially, the Saints found themselves in quicksand.
They entered a quasi-rebuild of their playing list that saw some favourites, such as Goddard and Nick Dal Santo, depart. The draft return wasn’t enough to cover them.
They traded Ben McEvoy to Hawthorn, losing a prospective leader who might have supported Nick Riewoldt, Leigh Montagna and the surviving remnants of Ross Lyon’s grand final sides of 2009-10.
Brendon Goddard in action for the Saints in 2012.Credit: Sebastian Costanzo
Their debt grew, peaking at a worrisome $13 million around the time they headed back to Moorabbin, at considerable cost to club donors, the state government and ultimately the AFL. They became entrenched as the most financially propped-up Victorian club.
Seaford made the Saints the antithesis of destination club. It is noteworthy that they played finals only in their first season at Seaford (and lost an elimination final to Sydney), missing in the next six seasons. Jack Steele was a rare success in terms of luring a player of quality from another club (Greater Western Sydney).
“As with any property, location matters enormously. Seaford was too far to travel for many players and staff. It did not draw media, either, on those occasions when the Saints had a message to spruik.”
A sleek pool, fancy bar bells and Alt-G training machines don’t necessarily improve players. But as with any property, location matters enormously. Seaford was too far to travel for many players and staff. It did not draw media, either, on those occasions when the Saints had a message to spruik.
When the Saints finally abandoned their Seaford folly in 2018 and went back to Moorabbin, Riewoldt, who had just retired, explained how the seven-year exile had depleted morale.
“It wasn’t a world-class facility and geographically it was tough for the players,” Riewoldt said.
“For the group at the time, on the back of a grand final in 2009 and 2010, arguably the best list that we’d accumulated in the club’s history, and then to go down to Seaford, away from the spiritual home — yeah, it crushed the group at the time.”
And like the bruised Bombers and Blues, St Kilda didn’t heal the instant they left their folly behind.
Lyon’s return represents a kind of closure for the failed Seaford sojourn. Lyon was coach when the Saints were within inches of premierships in 2009 and 2010, in what were the proverbial last days of disco for old Moorabbin.
Lyon might have coached his opponents this Sunday, Carlton, had the Carlton hierarchy not developed cold feet in September 2021, when some of Luke Sayers’ board expressed concern about the coach’s history at Fremantle, where there was a confidential settlement with a woman following a club function.
Ross Lyon, unveiled by the Saints last October.Credit: Getty Images
But whereas the Blues were flummoxed by what might be termed undue diligence on Lyon (who’d been an assistant coach at Carlton under David Parkin and Wayne Brittain), the Saints really knew Lyon, who had a coterie of past players, headed by Riewoldt, board member Jason Blake, Goddard, Lenny Hayes and Dal Santo, in his corner; the latter trio, plus Robert Harvey, are in Lyon’s coaching panel or working nearby (Dal Santo coaching the AFLW side and heading the Next Generation academy).
Asked to jump through hoops by Carlton, Lyon bailed from a suddenly fraught process.
The Blues eventually found their experienced coach in Michael Voss. One reading of Lyon’s landing back at Moorabbin is that the Saints offered him, ironically, a culturally safe space, where he was backed, supported and surrounded by his own people.
Who knows where the Saints – and Lyon – would be had the club been unable to extricate themselves from Seaford and an ill-advised relocation that cost the Saints much more than the seven years they spent in the wrong address.
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