Alan Richardson took an unusual approach at Etihad Stadium on Sunday. The St Kilda coach sat on the interchange bench from the first siren until the last, without a headset on and without retreating back to the coach’s box, despite wanting to at times.

While the Saints are very unlikely to play in September this season, given they must beat Richmond and rely on several dominoes to fall in their favour, Sunday’s 49-point win over North Melbourne means St Kilda can match the 12 wins they registered last year if they beat the Tigers next weekend.

Richardson said communication from the box to the players had broken down at times recently so he decided to return to a bygone era and station himself on the bench so he could speak directly to the players when they came off the ground.

“I’ve never done it before for the whole game; I’ve gone down for bits and pieces. We had a real focus as a group to make sure that we were much better with our communication to each other,” Richardson said in his post-match press conference on Sunday night.

“There had been parts particularly of our defence that we hadn’t been able to get right and the communication was the underpinning factor that we were a bit inconsistent in.

“My pledge to the players was that I’m going to be really consistent with my communication.

“At times it can get lost from the box to the bench; it’s not as clear as you’d like it to be all the time. So we took the middle man out if you like, took the runner out, took the headset out and just spoke face to face with the players.”

Richardson, who is nearly at the end of his fourth season at the helm of St Kilda after arriving at Linen House Centre at the end of 2013, admits he is unlikely to coach from the bench in the short term future given the frustrating nature of not being able to see the ground from above.

“(I won’t do it again in the short term) because it was incredibly frustrating to not be able to have a handle on what was happening with respect to space,” he said.

“The times that they did get through – they are really aggressive the Kangas, they’ve been a pretty heavy scoring team and I found that really frustrating.

“It was a good check though, it means you’ve got to trust the blokes up there. When you’ve got people like [Danny] Sexton, [Adam] Kingsley, [Aaron] Hamill and [Rohan] Welsh – really experienced coaches – they were able to feed down some good stuff that I was able to pass on.

“It did remind me that have strong communication with your players is as important as anything. I doubt whether I’ll do it again in the short term, but it was good to be able to make sure that facet of my coaching I was really clear on.”