St Kilda among multiple clubs stuck in AFL's no-mans land and needing to embrace youth

Australia Broadcast Center

5 hours ago

Ross Lyon was at his combative best when addressing the media after St Kilda's 72-point loss to the Western Bulldogs last week.
Lyon ducked and weaved like prime Muhammad Ali before eventually latching onto a question regarding the poor turnout for the game before turning it into a back-and-forth with the journalist involved.
The veteran coach was successful in ensuring that was the talking point from the press conference, but his post-match gymnastics shouldn't distract anyone from the fact that the Saints have now gone backwards in two straight years under his leadership.
St Kilda's brains trust saw enough in Lyon's first two seasons at the helm to extend him for another two seasons at the start of the year, but the 58-year-old's last decade of coaching doesn't make for pretty reading.
Since leading Fremantle to a preliminary final in 2015, Lyon has a 58-88 home and away record in seven seasons as coach. He has recorded one winning season and has coached in one final, an elimination final loss to GWS in 2023, in that time.
The Saints are never going to have the pulling power of their bigger Victorian rivals, but the fact that they play a style of football that is not aesthetically pleasing under Lyon doesn't help the case.
Scoring remains an almighty battle for the Saints. They rank fifth-last in both inside 50s per game (48.4) and shots on goal (23.6). You can chop up stats and analyse the game in whatever way you want, but if you can't put points on the board, people aren't going to come and watch.
St Kilda fielded 10 players aged 29 or over against the Bulldogs. Only Collingwood (11) has fielded more players in the same age bracket in its most recent game.
Unlike Collingwood, St Kilda doesn't actually have an old list. The Saints' average age of 25.3 means it boasts the seventh-youngest list in terms of age. St Kilda also has the sixth-youngest list in terms of games played (95.3).
With the veterans not performing as you'd hope, Lyon doesn't appear to have a lot to lose by turning to his youth.
The 22-year-old Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera headlines a good crop of under-25 talent on the Saints list, a group that includes teen duo Tobie Travaglia and Alix Tauru, who were both taken with first-round picks in last year's draft.
Tauru, Travaglia, Mattaes Phillipou and Liam Henry have played a combined 13 games so far this season. Getting games into that quartet has to be the priority to set up this club moving forward.
It must be said the Saints' scoring woes have not been helped by Max King's inability to get on the park so far in 2025. The St Kilda forward line makes a lot more sense when King is commanding the attention from the opponent's best defender, allowing the likes of Cooper Sharman and Mitch Owens to settle in behind him as Jack Higgins buzzes around at his feet.
The Saints, currently 14th on the ladder, are one of a number of teams stuck in the awkward middle ground — not good enough to truly contend for the premiership, but not bad enough to properly build through the draft.
Timing your run ahead of an expansion team's entry is crucial. This year's draft is already set to be incredibly compromised, with as many as four projected players to be selected in the top 10 already tied to clubs through academies.
It will not get better in the coming years as Tasmania makes its entry. The Devils will be in the 2027 draft and will be handed picks one, three, five, seven, nine, 11 and 13, although four of those picks — five, seven, nine and 13, must be traded, as per the AFL's rules.
In addition to Tasmania's arrival, the 2027 draft crop is also poised to be diluted by a couple of top prospects being tied to clubs through the father-son rule.
Richmond, the AFL's most recent dynasty, bottomed out perfectly before the Suns and Giants entered in the early 2010s, and should be the blueprint for clubs currently mired in mediocrity.
In the four drafts leading up to the 2010 draft, Gold Coast's first, the Tigers added Jack Riewoldt, Shane Edwards, Trent Cotchin, Alex Rance and Dustin Martin, the quartet which formed the core of a team that would go on to win three premierships in four years.
Although the premierships did not come until 2017, 11 years after the Tigers added Riewoldt in the 2006 draft, embracing the youth movement allowed Richmond to go from 15th in 2010 to fifth at the end of the 2013 home and away season.
There was a sense of déjà vu last summer as Richmond loaded up on youngsters, taking six players inside the first 24 picks of a stacked draft class. That decision should provide massive dividends at the turn of the decade. The Tigers will have two top 10 picks this year again after grabbing the Kangaroos' 2025 first-rounder in a draft night deal last year.
Like St Kilda, Melbourne too can benefit by taking a few steps towards youth before Tasmania's arrival.
The Demons have the fourth-most experienced list in terms of games played (112.3). The three teams above them — Collingwood, Brisbane and Geelong — are all premiership contenders, Melbourne is 15th and without its own first-round pick this year.
Melbourne continues to operate like its 2021 premiership was 12 months ago, and it has resulted in its cupboard looking bare. This self-belief in an aging core was likely behind what now appears to be a head-scratching decision to trade this year's first-rounder to Essendon.
The Demons continue to stubbornly insist Christian Petracca and Clayton Oliver aren't available for trades, but would be wise to properly put both on the table this summer.
Outside of skipper Max Gawn, who still remains an elite big man at 34, Kysaiah Pickett is Melbourne's most valuable player, and has now jumped ahead of Oliver and Petracca in the pecking order.
Having signed Pickett to a monster extension, the Demons need to properly hand him the keys by building a side around him.
These decisions are hard, and they almost always involve short-term pain. The results are never immediate and coaches require those above them to have patience, as Richmond did with Damien Hardwick before its premiership run.
But fully commit to the youth movement, and you could be building your next premiership side.
If a couple of bottom-four finishes is the pay-off for a premiership for long-suffering Saints fans, that is a deal they will gladly make every single time.