It's hard to say goodbye, especially if you shouldn't

Damian Barrett wrote an interesting article last week discussing the positives of St Kilda not renewing Nick Riewoldt’s contract for 2018.

As with the North Melbourne purging last August, it’s a very untidy subject to discuss. Our hearts want to hang on to the good times, especially when the player is a Nick Riewoldt or a Brent Harvey, who seems to have at least one more really good year in him.

Our minds look to the future and realise that the spot that player holds down is preventing a good young player from playing on the senior side, a player who’s possibly going to be that superstar’s replacement for the next ten or fifteen years himself.

North botched the handling of the announcement of the release of its four star veterans (Harvey, Drew Petrie, Nick DalSanto, and Michael Firrito) after Round 22 last season, but their sentiments were in the right place.

Given the free-fall the Kangaroos were in at the time, and having barely scraped in to the finals in slot number eight and looking at an out-of-town end-of-season loss at Adelaide, the management folks at North rightly thought that these four champion players deserved a home send-off in their final home game – which was on Round 23 against the Giants in Etihad.

A warning of less than a week is less than ideal, but the realisation that if they waited, these Shinbone legends – especially the legend, Mister 427 himself – would simply be cast off into the sunset without an opportunity to be thanked by the loyal blue and white faithful.

And how has that decision worked out for North Melbourne?

Expected to be challenging for the wooden spoon (our meta-prediction for this team was 15th), and after five ‘warm-up’ losses while Brad Scott and company got all the new pieces figured out, the Kangaroos are 4-2 and the slim possibility of finals actually exists the very year after washing the grey out of their hair.

With eleven games left, there are only two games remaining on the schedule (the Bulldogs in R14 and Port in R17) where they will be decided underdogs.

(AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy)

They could make finals! The purge appear brilliant in retrospect, however awkwardly they botched its visuals. It’s not hard to think that these young players on the roster wouldn’t have excelled with those four spots still tied up with men in their thirties: Shaun Atley, Ben Brown, Trent Dumont, Taylor Garner, Nathan Hrovat, Luke McDonald, Aaron Mullett, Kayne Turner, Mason Wood, and many more young talents who have been regulars in 2017.

So, what does St Kilda look at that and think? The Saints are already on their way up, and they have two players who fit the description of veterans who still excel but have a shorter expected remaining career than getting to the championship window will take for their roster.

Leigh Montagna turns 34 this November, and if he continues to play full time will hit the 300-game mark next season. Nick Riewoldt is a few months short of 35, and is not only the second longest tenured Saints player (behind Robert Harvey) but the second most prolific goal kicker (behind Tony Lockett).

He is also the Saint with the most behinds. (Scores, that is. Don’t get scatological on us here.)

(AAP Image/Julian Smith)

So, if they’re looking at North’s situation for guidance, and then look at their own roster of young stars in the making – Blake Acres, Tim Membrey, Jack Steele, Jack Billings, Paddy McCartin, Jack Sinclair, Jimmy Webster, Luke Dunstan, Billy Longer, Josh Bruce, Jack Newnes and Seb Ross are all under 25 – it would be easy to show the two of them the door.

I hope they don’t.

And I’m going to defend Riewoldt in particular the way I would have defended Harvey in particular over his teammates, though Montagna has done more than enough to earn defending. But there is something to be said of what we often hear referred to as “the heart and soul of a team”.

Last year, the Western Bulldogs lost their heart and soul, Bob Murphy, to injury in Round 3 at the very end of a tortured loss to the then-defending Hawks. His story became the driving force for the Dogs as they ran through four favoured teams in September en route to a legendary premiership.

The first face we saw on television after the last two wins (Giants and Swans) was Murphy celebrating on the sideline, and the most memorable moment of the last Saturday in September was after the game, when Luke Beveridge gave his medal ‘to the heart and soul’ of the team.

Imagine a 2017 where the Kangaroos won, say, one or two of those three one-goal games they lost in March and April because Boomer Harvey scored a goal that his youthful teammates weren’t able to pull off in our reality.

Imagine a situation where, thanks to their heart and soul, the surprising Kangaroos were 5-6 or 6-5 right now, with that fixture I described earlier coming up in the second half of the season.

Imagine a 2017 where, as the Kangas got closer and closer to qualifying for September, the idea of winning a long-overdue title for the now-450-game ‘heart and soul of the team’ inspired the Shinboners to pull off a blue-and-white miracle this September and win one for the legend.

Wouldn’t that have been worth one more year? Just to see ‘if’?

Wouldn’t that have been worth letting him hang around – you wouldn’t have been dragging him back; he planned to return – just in case you could make such a story happen?

Were you expecting something to happen in 2017 under our current scenario that would have possibly been a better story than that? Than even the attempt to make one last run for Boomer? Are you going to tell me with a straight face that, from a PR perspective, you think you’re better off even in the long run this way?

If you want to compromise and let the other three go, but keep Harvey on the roster, are you fearful that people would’ve called you hypocritical for keeping a freak-of-nature who (I repeat myself) was best-on-ground for the Roos in Round 23 last year, and not the other three?

Do you really think that you would have had to justify keeping inarguably one of the two greatest Kangaroos in history on the roster for as long as he wanted, let alone for just one more year? Ninety percent of the new player playing time would have still been there – it’s not hard to imagine a slightly reduced workload for the now-39-year-old in season 22 – and the story line would have been unsurpassed with even their current record.

Now, imagine a 2018 with an improved St Kilda, the same roster a year improved from the 2017 team which (fill-in-the-blank: just missed/made the first or second round of finals). With one more spot available with Montagna’s retirement (conceivably), they add one more stud young player to work alongside the heart and soul, 35-year-old Nick Riewoldt, in his 18th season as a Saint.

Is there the possibility of a Chris Judd ending to his incredible career? Yes. Is there a possibility that the Saints lose a young gun forward to another club in part because there’s still no spot on the field available to him? Yes.

Is there a possibility that despite the potential, the Saints have a ‘Dockers 2016’ season and fall precipitously towards silverware, rather than rise towards drinking containers? Yes.

(AAP Image/Tony McDonough)

But aren’t the chances better for at least the kind of storyline during the season that we fantasised about with Harvey a moment ago, even if they land in traditional Richmond territory instead of making the finals?

And aren’t the odds better that they’ll have a team that could take a real crack at September, and a real shot to create a story for the ages: ‘The Saints Break The (new) Longest Title Drought in Footy and Win One for the Skipper – Riewoldt Retires A Champion’?

Put yourself in St Kilda’s management’s shoes. Riewoldt has fought his knees off for you for 17 years, through a few really good years and a lot more fairly hopeless years. There are very few men who have earned the right to control their own destiny to a certain extent, as long as they’re still earning their place in your top 22.

Harvey was one of those men. Riewoldt is one as well.

Don’t you think he deserves to go out on his terms?