I’m not sure there is a St Kilda fan on the planet who, watching on as the Saints’ lead was slowly but inexorably reduced from 41 points to single digits by Geelong in the final quarter, didn’t resign themselves to the familiar feeling of heartbreak.
No team in the AFL puts their fans through torment quite like the Saints; be it grand finals ripped from their grasp by the bounce of a ball, agonising defeats in slam-dunk games, or, as it has been in recent years, a neverending stream of mediocrity, with the occasional bright light of hope at the end of this 59-year tunnel swiftly turning out to be another train coming in the other direction.
None of that is going to immediately erode with a single night; but the beauty of this game of ours is that the unexpected can occur at the most unexpected of times.
And so it was that the Saints, having sprung one of 2025’s biggest surprises by ripping the Cats to shreds in two and a half quarters of sustained brutal pressure, elite ball skills and lethal finishing, did something even more shocking: they held their nerve just when it seemed all their good work would come to nought, and emerged with a win that might just be Ross Lyon’s best in his second stint at the club.
They held firm against 12 of the last 14 inside 50s and eight of the last ten clearances as Geelong threw everything including the kitchen sink at them; they tackled desperately, marked immensely, and in the end held the Cats at bay for long enough to receive the salvation of the siren.
Every dog has his day, and sometimes, even Saints fans get to be happy for a night.
How did they do it? Well, I can boil it all down to eight key moments in the final five and a half minutes at Marvel Stadium; five massive Saints wins, and three critical Geelong errors, that decided this contest, of which the flipping of any of them could and likely would have resulted in exactly the red, white and black heartbreak that seemed so inevitable.
St Kilda players celebrate Isaac Keeler’s first AFL goal. (Photo by Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)
The clock reads 5:40 left, the scoreboard a nine-point Saints lead, when Mark O’Connor receives in an acre of space on the wing to drive the Cats forward.
He has a swathe of options; Gryan Miers and Brad Close are leading to half-forward, drawing their men away from the hot spot inside 50, while further afield, Shannon Neale has a one-on-one at the top of the goalsquare. With Cats storming towards goal from everywhere, even a long kick to that hot spot is a legitimate option.
O’Connor, though, picks the lowest-percentage, lowest-benefit option of them all: he attempts to lace out Ollie Henry, deep in the pocket, in an area where the Saints have representation.
It’s a mistake, but one which results in the first of those five big St Kilda wins: with danger still present at ground level, and a forward 50 stoppage bringing further chances for the Cats, a strong contested mark from Anthony Caminiti, swung into defence out of desperation by Lyon, is the only way to ensure the Saints remain safe, for now at least.
It’s a symbolic moment, too: having leaked four goals with regularity in the final quarter, this is just about the first time the Saints have managed to stem the tide.
But the danger is far from past: with four minutes 40 on the clock, as Tyson Stengle marks 75 metres from goal and immediately bangs the footy long, you can feel every Saints fan’s heart sink. Because somehow, deep inside 50, two Cats – Close and Henry – are all by themselves, with Rowan Marshall, jostling with Sam De Koning, the only Saint there to stop them.
De Koning’s inexperience tells: where Tom Hawkins might have engaged with Marshall to legally keep him at bay and allow Henry to float in for an uncontested mark, here he allows the Saint to jostle them both right to the drop zone, denying Henry a chance to get hands to the ball and enabling him to spoil the ball away from the Cats ruckman.
Still, there is danger in a ground level three-on-two, Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera’s arrival on the scene only marginally improving the odds. With hamstring muscles screaming, he makes a decision that could easily have cost the Saints a game: he decides to try and rush a behind.
It’s good fortune, as much as his own desperation, that gets him out of jail: Wanganeen-Milera’s tap into the goalsquare puts the ball right into Close’s path, and with just metres to spare it seems the Cat’s foot is slightly ahead in the race. Certainly it seems so when the ball ricochets off a boot and over the line with Close claiming the goal and the umpire awarding it despite the Saints’ protestations.
A score review soon puts the matter to rest: the wobbling ball has veered ever so slightly to the left, and Wanganeen-Milera bodied Close every so slightly to the right, so that it’s off the Saint’s boot that the footy has come.
It’s a behind, and another St Kilda jailbreak. Their lead remains eight points.
You probably haven’t even heard of the next Saints hero; I certainly had to scramble on the AFL website to know who it was that had pulled it off.
But every career starts somewhere: and as Tyson Stengle gathers in the forward pocket, the time left ticking under three minutes and 40 seconds, and snaps the ball to an ultra-dangerous position 15 metres from goal, Irishman Liam O’Connell, with three disposals to his name, owns the moment.
Backing back with the flight, with Cats converging all around him, he ventures into the drop zone, clutches the chest mark, and is collected by an oncoming Jhye Clark for his trouble.
It’s a magnificent mark, an exemplary act of bravery, and a moment that will, if I know Lyon, guarantee his spot for the next month at least. From a second-gamer, it’s positively Herculean.
The Saints are saved again; and for the first time since the Cats began their charge, it genuinely feels like they might just hold on.
Helping their cause is a quite alarming lack of clutch from the Cats, a team whose composure in tight situations has rarely been questioned.
But even the most experienced are wobbly: after Mark Blicavs takes an intercept mark just outside 50, with a little over three minutes remaining, his decision is almost as wonky as O’Connor’s – he hits a veritable swarm of Saints right in the goalsquare, where Caminiti takes a saving mark that he could just as easily have punched through to make sure of it.
It’s another Geelong inside 50, and while the Saints, out on their legs, seem just about done with scoring, it’s getting hard to see how the Cats can conjure the eight points they need to at least earn themselves a draw.
And all the while the clock is ticking, ticking, ticking.
Fast forward another minute; from a ball-up again inside the Cats’ 50, an wild whack of a loose ball by Brad Close lands in Gryan Miers’ hands in the pocket, leading to a sight footy fans have learned to dread for the past decade and a half: Patrick Dangerfield, no opponents near him, streaming past for a handball receive, the goals in his eyes and death in his heart.
Prime Dangerfield would have shelled the snap, from 30 out on a tight but by no means impossible angle, as easily as brushing his teeth at night, or annoying rival supporters by being moderately articulate and keen to speak his mind.
But this is not prime Dangerfield: the kick hangs in the air, on target but losing altitude fast without sufficient power behind it; on the last line, Caminiti, the Saints’ saviour twice already, can get fingers to the ball to knock it safely through.
A behind. With an eight-point lead, the Saints could safely concede one of them; but another would leave the Cats a single score away from a level ball game. The match hangs in the balance still.
And it looks like the Saints’ staying power has been all but exhausted: after marking on the half-back flank, Mason Wood’s decision to try and spot up a teammate inboard, surrounded by three Cats all converging with speed, spoke of a man frazzled by fatigue.
The kick is a shocker, too, hanging in the air and clearing Lance Collard’s desperate lunge: in his wake, three Cats, one of them young gun Connor O’Sullivan, converge, unmanned, on the suddenly loose footy.
With pockets of space everywhere ahead of him, O’Sullivan has leading Cats galore to try and hit up; alternatively, he can draw the oncoming Saint and dish a handpass to the nearby Max Holmes, riding in his slipstream.
Instead, with all the nervous energy of a youngster in the highest-stakes game of his life so far, he does what many young footballers have done before and will continue to do for as long as our game is played: he panics.
O’Sullivan blazes from outside 50, aiming for goal, and it becomes clear from the reaction behind the goal that it’s nowhere near. Worse still, he has thumped it out of bounds on the full, the worst of all options, for a behind would have at least brought the margin to an even six points, while a boundary throw-in would have afforded another chance at a disputed ball against a tiring opponent.
It would, as it transpires, be their final throw at the stumps.
From one last chance inside 50, with a minute and 25 seconds on the clock, luck finally decides to throw in its lot with the Saints. As the ball bobbles around inside 50, it eventually falls in the hands of Ryan Byrnes, who does what he must: throws the footy onto his boot, and kicks it with all his might.
It’s an absolute shocker, slewing right off the side of his foot; with the Fox Footy camera zoomed in, it seems inevitable that it will trickle out of bounds, giving the Cats a free kick for insufficient intent and yet another chance to go deep inside 50.
Except, with an accuracy so pinpoint it simply couldn’t have been deliberate, there’s a Saint right where Byrnes’ shank lands. It’s Jack Macrae – little wonder, considering the ball has followed him for much of the night as if it too wants to rub it in Luke Beveridge’s face for trading him.
There’s a minute and ten seconds left, and from here, the Saints can wind down the clock. Especially with a pair of strong grabs right on the boundary from first Wood, atoning from his earlier howler, and then young gun Isaac Keeler, who paid for his grab with an instant cramp that sent him hobbling from the ground.
But they have done enough. The clock has run out. The Cats have been unable to take it from them.
The siren sounds.
And the most tortured group of supporters in the nation can at last have their moment to rejoice.
