The experience of watching Nick Dal Santo play football makes more sense if you imagine that he uses the AFL as a mere warm-up for his true love of tap-dancing.
Now 32, in his 15th season, Dal Santo is still one of the game’s lightest players on his feet. While those around him dig into the ground with powerful strides, Dal Santo dances on top of the surface, gliding around the field, in a stance that is always improbably upright.
That upright pose, combined with the cleanskin look – Dal Santo with tattoos or a beard seems as unlikely as Dane Swan without them – and the sumptuous poise and skills, gives the impression that he’s a finesse player. But Dal Santo’s flash is the most honest in the league – he’s the human version of Scott Pendlebury.
For the past six seasons he’s ranked in the top four at his club for contested possessions. While most damaging with his skills on the outside, his ability to extract the hard ball with a soft touch has been almost as valuable.
Dal Santo’s consistency over the years has been eerie. For the past five seasons he’s averaged between 23.3 and 24.8 disposals per game. Before a significant hamstring strain last season, he’d missed three games in 11 seasons. Smoothness has an impressive longevity.
Dal Santo has never been thought of as one of the great players of his generation. Arguments over the best midfielders of the 21st century will always be short his name. At St Kilda he was overshadowed by the majestic presence of Nick Riewoldt, the lion force of Lenny Hayes, and the dynamism and potential of Brendon Goddard. He never had Goddard’s transcendent grand final, Hayes’s iconic goal, or Riewoldt’s breathtaking mark. He eased into the background, a cool, unassuming hand amid the fury.
But Dal Santo is a player with three All-Australian selections to his name and 28 votes in a Brownlow Medal poll. He’s finished second and third in that award, six years apart. In 2011, he was the best-performed player on a team that finished sixth.
And yet, at the same time, he’s also a player who was dropped in his prime, banished to the seconds in 2008 for poor form. After his first game in blue and white in 2014, Dermott Brereton was calling for the axe again.
Usually, the way this works, is that lesser skilled players are the ones that are underrated. They compensate for deficiencies in flash and gracefulness with relentless. Dal Santo is the rare case of a player with all the skills, and the output to match, who has never been properly appreciated.
Over the course of his career he has more Brownlow votes than Riewoldt, Hayes and Leigh Montagna, and almost twice as many as Goddard. He has more votes than anyone at North Melbourne who isn’t six years older than him, and even then, he averages more votes per game than Brent Harvey. At 32, he is tied atop the leader board with Jack Ziebell for most disposals on the ladder’s top team.
In a way, Dal Santo is the perfect Kangaroo player. On a team filled with stars who aren’t quite superstars, he’s perhaps his generation’s most shining example of that mould. In any other year, a team built on such players would mean that the ceiling, as it has been for North, is a preliminary final shellacking. But this season reliability and poise in a storm might be all you need to separate yourselves from the rest.
Last Friday night, Dal Santo was at his best. He no longer takes over games (he never really did), but he still has the steady hand to guide them in his direction. In the early stages he was instrumental, hitting targets lace out with his crème brulée left foot, calmly drawing players towards him before dishing a handball into space, and doing it all as a preface to his upright, purposeful saunters down the ground.
By the end of the night Dal Santo had 33 disposals, eight tackles, four clearances, four inside 50s and a goal, doing it all with 82 per cent disposal efficiency.
Richmond’s season ended not in an impressive, blazing fire but rather in a cold display of apathy on an icy Friday night in Tasmania. It’s only fitting that the architect of their demise was the coolest customer at the ice rink.
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