Memo St Kilda: Give Sam Mitchell the top job

When Damien Hardwick stood upon the premiership dais last year, it was not just a triumph for Tiger fans everywhere.

It was a triumph for the incumbent coaching fraternity in an age where coaching careers are typically like election cycles – many coaches have careers started and finished in three-year swings.

The first year of a coaching appointment usually entails getting established – it’s not generally necessary to deliver immediate success, so the coach is playing with house money.

The second year is where the rubber hits the road. Underperformance to expectation will immediately build pressure, success defers it the cycle a year.

Get it wrong two years in a row and it might just be curtains – unless you are Carlton of course, in which case you can largely rinse and repeat year on year.

It’s like one of those comical flow charts from the depths of the internet. The likes of Scott Watters, Mark Neeld and Mark Harvey can attest, albeit it’s doubtful they would find it comical.

Hardwick had endured seven long years at Richmond before 2017, for three finals losses and many well-documented and deserved jokes. When they took a number of steps backwards in 2016 to finish 13th, the signs were ominous, and the simple fact that he made it through to 2017 is remarkable in its own right.

However, the club backed him in and he duly delivered one of the most remarkable campaigns ever seen and has followed it up equally impressively to date.

Richmond during tougher times. (AAP / Julian Smith)

Looking down the road in St Kilda and you see a similar crossroads to Richmond at the end of 2016 – albeit without any recent finals participation. Devoid of premiership success for five long decades, the Saints are in a long rebuild post a period of relative good performance but no elusive flag.

Alan Richardson took over in 2014 and has had four complete seasons heading into 2018. From 18th in 2014 to ninth in his third year, things have gone backwards ever since – 11th last year and complete and utter disaster this year. This was the year to turn it around and the side has been found wanting.

The list isn’t great. No budding superstar, midfield plodders, ageing key backs. Some glimmer in key forwards in Josh Battle and Paddy McCartin (when he is playing).

Jack Steven is a one-dimensional stat-happy best mid with poor vision and an even poorer haircut, and Seb Ross is well rounded but not quite an A-grader. They have 27 other blokes named Jack but none really leaping out to take the competition by storm. The club of Jacks has yet to produce a trump card.

Jade Gresham has shown he has the smarts, tricks and skills to break out and maybe the great hope.

Coach Alan Richardson of the Saints. (AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy)

Maybe this gives the coach some leeway. A playing group with no prize cattle gives scapegoats in plentiful supply. But this would be the easy way out. A premium coach would unlock the star potential.

Find the magic beans Jack needs to become something great (last Jack pun, I promise). There is little evidence that Richardson has the imagination to make this work. Moving Jade Gresham to the midfield a fortnight ago forms a small evidence base.

The coach has a game plan that revolves around a mosquito fleet, with the main problem being too much scattered buzz and not enough bite. Poor skills, poor goal-kicking, poor decision making, limited cohesion.

Enter Sam Mitchell. When West Coast dismantled Collingwood at the MCG a few weeks ago it was a clinic of Hawthorn 2013-15 proportions.

The ball use was methodical behind centre, using every inch of the wide MCG. It was a clear game plan, executed perfectly, that had Sam Mitchell written all over it.

He has turned a talented but uncoordinated midfield into an elite outfit that knows what each other is doing and their own roles similarly (albeit one that got smashed on the weekend in Tasmania). He has helped add an inside game to Andrew Gaff, averaging a career high in contested possessions and shaking a Libba-like tag of one-trick front runner (it was a pretty good one trick mind you). He has found the keys to the Jack-Redden-is-actually-very-good-Bus and fired it up after years of dormancy.

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Mitchell has announced he wants to return to Melbourne at year’s end, only half way through his four-year West Coast contract. Already there are murmurings of where he should continue his Assistant Coaching career – with many suggesting St Kilda should be front of the queue for his services.

A bigger, bolder move would be to part ways with Alan Richardson and hand him the top job. Yes he has only had two years in an Assistant role, the first being in a hybrid player-development coach capacity. But Mitchell has long been anointed a ‘coach in waiting’, maybe even with the word Hawthorn etched at the front sentence. He has always been defined as having a pure footy brain.

The St Kilda of 2018 has been a debacle, and would surely benefit from a fresh approach, and a new game plan.

Dejected Saints players walk off the ground (AAP Image/Joe Castro)

Mitchell will likely have almost every Victorian club enquiring to fill an Assistant role, it is hard to see why he would pick St Kilda from the pack. So for the Saints, it is time to play the ace and offer him the top job.

It is time to move on from Alan Richardson and consign his reign to history as largely underwhelming, save for the coining of the phrase “the noise of affirmation”.