6:18 pm
Before any new player lands at the club, the list management team dedicates a mountain of work analysing everything from their football exploits, to their character, to forecasting the impact that player can have for the club.
Tony Elshaug and Ameet Bains are the architects behind St Kilda’s list build over the last handful of years. The pair have overseen a major overhaul of the list as the Saints plot a path back towards September.
“It takes a lot of time, a lot of work and a lot of people to bring these sorts of things together and it involves a whole range of people,” Elshaug told saints.com.au hours before the new faces he brought to St Kilda make their first appearance for the club.
“It involves everyone from the list management team including Ameet and our pro scout ‘Hughesy’ [Wayne Hughes] to the coach, head of football and the executive team. So to see things come to life is exciting. There’s obviously still some way to go but there’s been some good progress to this point.”
6:45 pm
After a four-year stint at the Western Bulldogs, following three years at West Coast, new Saints midfielder Koby Stevens paces up and down the rooms at the Docklands end of Etihad Stadium. While this isn’t the real stuff, just yet, this is the fresh start he craved at the end of last season. He looks calm and composed, ready to begin the next chapter of his football life.
7:39 pm
Before a single ball is even bounced, St Kilda’s new defensive guard walk deep into the backline. Jake Carlisle heads to Jackson Trengove. Nathan Brown mans the imposing Charlie Dixon. No longer undersized and undermanned in defence, this is a new guard who won’t be outsized by many in this competition.
7.51 pm
Minutes after Brown makes his first involvement felt with a timely spoil, Carlisle plucks his first intercept mark after judging the ball in flight better than everyone else around him. Less than a minute later, Carlisle does the same thing, quickly reminding the AFL how potent he can be in this facet of the game. Before the first quarter draws to a close, Brown gets in on the act, plucking a ball on the boundary line over the top of Power midfielder Ollie Wines.
8.22 pm
Jack Steele runs straight back onto the ground and to the far wing where he stands at a stoppage, metres away from Koby Stevens. Luke Dunstan, David Armitage and Jack Steven surround the stoppage. This is the new-look engine room. One that now bats deeper than in 2016. By half-time, Steele, who arrived at the Saints after two opportunity starved seasons in western Sydney, has laid seven tackles – the equal most on the ground with Wines. Not a bad start by the Canberra product.
9.09 pm
Brown tracks Dixon up the ground on an 80 metre lead and just when the big powerhouse forward thinks he’s finally got some space, the new St Kilda full-back reaches over the top with a timely fist. Five minutes later, former Gold Coast Suns spearhead Dixon appears to have found space inside 50 only for Brown to turf him to the ground. While Sam Fisher more than held his own against the monsters of the competition, he was always playing outside his weight division. Now St Kilda has a defensive monster of their own to stand the opposition’s biggest threat.
10:11 pm
Having not played a structured game since the final round of 2015, and after coming off a modified pre-season program following hip surgery midway through last year, Carlisle has a set program over the JLT Community Series.
Saints High Performance Manager, Matt Hornsby, revealed the former Bomber played just over an hour of game-time on Thursday night and will continue to increase his minutes ahead of Round 1, after following a similar theme across his first full summer in Seaford.
“We had a plan of trying to get about 60 minutes into him today and that’s pretty much spot on to what he did. He felt physically good and certainly pulled up well, so we’ll just increase his minutes across the next couple of games,” Hornsby said minutes after the final siren from inside the medical room.
“We want him to play both games so he can spend as much time as possible with the defensive group and also to build his body up physically to the key position demands.
“Jake’s just been extremely professional across the whole pre-season, he’s been committed to primarily getting his strength right in the gym so that he was a lot stronger in his legs and that’s certainly helped with his resilience and ability to cope with what’s been a really solid workload over the last month. We’ll just build that up over the next few weeks ahead of Round 1.”
10.32 pm
Less than half an hour after his first game in control, Saints Assistant Coach, Adam Kingsley, is seated in the bowels of Etihad Stadium, facing the media. With premiership points not on offer, the focus of his post-match press conference centred on the new faces.
“Jack Steele was limited to the first half and I thought he was pretty good around the contest. He’s got a big body and he hit bodies, was able to get after it and Koby was a bit the same; they are similar type players and they’re both going to add terrific depth to our midfield,” he told a sparse media contingency.
“Both can play forward which they did tonight at times and are threats, which is important. Koby’s attack on the ball was good, I thought he defended really strongly at the contest and was able to find the ball a little bit.”
