Brett Ratten's sacking cements St Kilda's place as AFL oddballs
OPINION
I'm not mad, St Kilda. I'm actually laughing.
How fitting that, after new football boss Geoff Walsh publicly declared the club had been 'irrelevant' for a decade, the response appears to have been to get the club on the back page by sacking the coach.
Mission accomplished.
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Sacking Brett Ratten less than 100 days after backing him in for another two years smacks of searching for a quick fix, something president Andrew Bassat and new CEO Simon Lethlean haven't really answered for sufficiently.
Saints fans are fully aware that it can take more than a bit of luck to win a premiership, as the bounce of our sport's uniquely shaped ball so proved in the 2010 drawn grand final.
Luck can ruin the best laid plans, but luck can also only come into the equation when the plans have been laid in the first place.
The nearly 30 years I've been a Saints fan really haven't been that bad, despite the constant mockery.
Finals have come and gone often enough, and though grand final losses in 1997, 2009 and 2010 sting, hey, at least the team made it that far in the first place.
Fortunately I wasn't quite old enough to enjoy the hilarity that was the clearly miserable tenure of Tim Watson as coach in 1999 and 2000, instead delving deeper when the Saints launched their mid-2000s dominance of the then Wizard Cup pre-season competition.
For a club whose nigh on 150-year history could perhaps best be described as 'enigmatic' (others would potentially choose harsher, more accurate words), the news of Ratten's sacking somehow didn't come as a surprise.
Heard former Geelong president Colin Carter talking the other day about how you're not really competing with 17 clubs because four or five are blowing themselves up. Seems like a conservative estimate.
— Richard Hinds (@rdhinds) October 14, 2022
After all, we've been spinning our wheels ever since Ross Lyon turned tail for Fremantle in 2012.
The post-2010 grand final era should really be looked at much more closely. How is it that the likes of Geelong, Sydney, Hawthorn and even Collingwood to an extent, have all stayed largely at the peak of the competition while the Saints have been nowhere near it?
Stuffed if I know, and at this point it hardly matters.
St Kilda sack Brett Ratten in mystifying decision
It's just one more strange decision where all you can do is laugh, like when we traded for a clearly past his prime Dan Hannebery, only for him to predictably play less than 20 games in three years.
Or when we traded away highly rated ruckman Ben McEvoy for Shane Savage and a draft pick, only to have a gaping hole at that position that is still to be properly filled to this day.
McEvoy went on to win multiple premierships and retire as a champion of Hawthorn - probably could have used his services over the last 10 years.
Luke Ball left the club under acrimonious circumstances after the 2009 grand final, only to win it the next year - just without any of the colour red on his jumper, as he was playing for Collingwood.
The Saints got nothing for Ball after trade negotiations fell through and he was evidently fed up with the club to such a degree that he dropped into the pre-season draft in 2010.
A couple of years later and Brendan Goddard was off to Essendon as a free agent.
It's difficult to pinpoint where the rot set in - after all, the Saints managed to extricate themselves from the quagmire of the late 1990s by drafting the likes of Nick Riewoldt, Lenny Hayes, Nick Dal Santo, and Goddard.
Canny trades for the likes of Fraser Gehrig and Aaron Hamill saw the Saints come agonisingly close to a grand final in 2004, were it not for the moronic fans who flooded the Adelaide Oval after Gehrig's 100th goal in the preliminary final against Port Adelaide.
That tenure under Grant Thomas ended acrimoniously, as did the subsequent, more successful tenure of Ross Lyon.
I'm laughing at my beloved Saints but not at Ratten, who did an admirable job with a list widely regarded as reasonable, if far from spectacular.
His treatment can only be described as laughable. It was harsh when he was sacked as Carlton coach in 2012, and the Blues haven't made the finals since.
Coincidentally, Ratten is the only man to have coached St Kilda to the finals since 2012.
Hopefully another poor omen for Saints fans doesn't bear out that way.
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