AFL top 100: The Champions of St Kilda

To me, St Kilda is the most enigmatic club in the AFL.

One of the founding clubs of the VFL in 1897, they’ve played 461 more players than fellow foundation club Collingwood, have won only one premiership and currently have only two top 100 game players – No. 34 Jarryn Geary and equal No. 87 Sebastian Ross – on their playing list. Apart from their one-point win over Collingwood in 1966, the Saints have appeared in seven other Grand Finals, drawing one and losing six.

The Saints won only two games in total in their first six years in the competition, claiming the first six of their record 27 wooden spoons.

Despite all this, they have had some wonderfully flamboyant players who have made them a great team to watch over the years: Daryl Baldock, Verdun Howell, ‘Cowboy’ Neale, Trevor Barker, Nicky Winmar and Carl Diettrich to name just a few.

St Kilda’s three greatest game players – and their careers overlapped, with the first one starting in 1987 and the last one finishing in 2017 – played a total of 1042 games for the Saints and kicked 1057 goals. In those 31 years the trio jointly accumulated two Brownlow medals, 17 All Australian selections and 13 best and fairest medals, and one of them was the team’s leading goal kicker on four occasions.

The two Brownlow Medals were won by the Saints’ greatest game player, Robert Harvey. Harvey played 383 games for the club and is considered by many as one of the greatest players of all time. Recruited from Seaford, by the time he retired in 2008 he was the second oldest player to play for St Kilda behind only Vic Cumberland the oldest VFL/AFL player ever. Harvey also four club best and fairest awards and was All Australian eight times.

Robert Harvey (Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)

Second on the list of the top 100 greatest game players at the Saints is Nick Riewoldt. Riewoldt played for Queensland team Southport and was chosen by St Kilda as the No. 1 draft pick in the 2000 national draft. By the time he retired in 2017 he had played 336 games and kicked 718 goals, placing him third on the Saints top 100 goal scorers behind only Tony Lockett and 1930s champion Bill Mohr. He had also captained the team for 11 seasons, won six best and fairests and been chosen as All Australian five times.

In six seasons he took more marks than anyone else and in three seasons averaged more than ten marks per game. His sister Madeleine died of aplastic anaemia, a rare bone marrow condition, in February 2015 at the age of 26. Riewoldt and his family established Maddie Riewoldt’s Vision to raise funds for research into new treatments for blood cancers.

Nathan Burke, third on the top 100 game players list at St Kilda, made All Australian four times and won three best and fairest awards. The now 50-year-old is coach of the Western Bulldogs in 2020 the AFLW competition. Described by St Kilda’s then football manager Gary Colling as “almost too good to be true”, Burke was recruited from Pines, the same club as former Saint Russell Greene.