St Kilda: Can this frustrating, vanilla team reach the promised land?

St Kilda had one of the more frustrating preseasons in recent memory.

Not because of how bad it has been (despite the results of the two games, it hasn’t been all doom and gloom) but because it has revealed nothing.

Has the club progressed at all from last year? Has it stagnated? Has it gone backwards? It’s impossible to tell.

In the two JLT games, the Saints played only two or three quarters of decent football, while for the rest of the time they simply looked uninterested and unskillful.

St Kilda’s membership ad this year includes the line, ‘We’re gonna make it back to the promised land’. The club’s aim is clearly to make the finals this year, so is this realistic?

It’s hard to believe the players’ skills would deteriorate so much over the summer and it’s basic errors that are making it hard to get a gauge on exactly where the Saints are.

Take the second half of the game against the Dees, where two simple errors by Rowan Marshall led directly to Melbourne goals. In the regular season, this would be unforgivable, but in preseason it’s simply frustrating.

Another example is Josh Bruce. In the first half against Melbourne, his skills were simply horrible – but then suddenly he could do no wrong in the third quarter, coming alive and kicking three goals.

Are simple, sloppy errors making St Kilda look bad, or is there a deeper issue at play? It’s difficult to tell based on only two preseason matches, especially in a preseason in which Gold Coast was one of the outstanding teams.

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A word which keeps being associated with St Kilda this preseason is ‘vanilla’. It’s true, there are now no outright stars at the Saints following the retirement of Nick Riewoldt, and Jack Sinclair is the only player in the list ranked ‘elite’ by Champion Data, which could be a hindrance this season.

There are no midfielders with the pace to break the game apart, there are many half-back flankers but no standouts in terms of skill or pace, the Riewoldt-less forward line is untested, and the backline has holes. But despite this, there are players now on the edge of becoming very good.

Jack Billings is on the cusp of becoming the most important player on the list, Blake Acres and Jade Gresham (despite being frustrating at times) keep showing just enough to suggest that they could be special players, and Luke Dunstan continues to develop as a solid, if slow, midfielder.

But the team’s fortunes will rely on Paddy McCartin. He has been so close to becoming the focal point in the forward line so many times throughout his short, frustrating career, but now he must begin acting as the key forward St Kilda needs.

McCartin will be the barometer of the team this year – if he performs, the Saints will be dangerous and competitive.

It’s an often repeated mantra that a champion team will beat a team of champions. St Kilda is neither. The challenge for 2018 is then to craft this standard, ‘vanilla’ team into a champion one.

This will take a lot of effort by every player on the list, but it is not an impossibility – it’s certainly a lot easier than turning some standard players on the list into outright stars.

This frustrating preseason has shed no light on whether the team has the potential to improve enough to challenge for finals, so for Saints fans, it will be a wait-and-see prospect for the first few rounds.