Although they sit near the bottom of the list of top 100 game players at St Kilda, Bruce Phillips, Jayson Daniels and Darryl Wakelin can rest easy in the knowledge that they will be a member of St Kilda’s elite for at least one more year.
Placed equal 99th, they still have one position to fall before they disappear off the list and there is only one Saints player with any credible chance of making up the gap in the 2019 season to pass their games tally of 115: Sebastian Ross.
Even Ross needs to play 14 games to dislodge the trio from 99th position but I would suggest that if this key Saints player doesn’t play that many games he has had a woeful season – and given his importance to the Saints line up – the Saints have had a woeful season also.
As with a number of ‘hot seat’ or near ‘hot seat’ players I have profiled in my recent articles, two of the trio played AFL games at other clubs.
Jayson Daniels started his career at the Saints but had a three year, 58-game spell at Sydney in the years 1993 to 1995 before returning to the Saints and playing three more years before retiring after the 1998 finals series.
A popular player at both clubs, the redhead’s nickname was ‘Jack’ after the Jack Daniel’s brand of whiskey. He was a tenacious tagger whose kicking let him down at times, but played many fine finals including the 1997 Grand Final.
Darryl Wakelin also played for two AFL clubs during his career and in fact played more games at his second club than he did at St Kilda. His 146 games at Port Adelaide see him sit in 26th position on Power’s all-time top 100 game players.
(Mark Dadswell/Getty Images)
Wakelin’s twin brother, Shane, played for the Saints in the first six years of his career (1995 to 2000). He also departed to a second club, Collingwood, where he sits in 77th position on the Magpies’ top 100 game players list. The Wakelin twins hold the record for the most number of AFL games played by twins, having amassed a total of 513 games between them.
The third member of the group started his league football in 1947 but struggled at the club as a forward, playing only 12 games in his first three seasons. In their last game of 1949, the Saints tried Bruce Phillips at fullback with immediate success.
His form in 1950 was so good that he won the club’s best and fairest award, The Herald best player award and finished equal third in the Brownlow Medal. He was a Victorian representative in 1953.
His blond hair and long runs out of defence followed by booming kicks into the forward line made him a hero to St Kilda supporters and it was a sad day in 1956 when a knee injury in a practice match brought a premature end to a blossoming career at the age of 27.
Phillips, who was originally recruited from Camden, died in 2014 at the age of 85 and will be remembered as the Saint who turned his career around.
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