The returned coach has made great strides with his team unbeaten during the opening three rounds and top of the AFL ladder
oss 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.
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.
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.
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.
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