Michael Gardiner recalls the day he helped St Kilda beat Geelong in epic 2009 clash
Footy might have reached its nirvana on July 5, 2009, when St Kilda and Geelong fought out one of the greatest home and away games ever. Cat Cameron Ling recalls how the Saints jumped out of the blocks.
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Ten years after he rose high to cement his place in footy folklore, Michael Gardiner will celebrate another milestone birthday.
And, just as it was a decade earlier, he says there won’t be too much fanfare.
A low-key 40th celebration on Friday might come as a surprise to some, but 10 years ago the controversial Gardiner had ample reason to paint the town red — to go with the Saints’ black and white.
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On the day he turned 30, Gardiner was the big-marking hero who helped St Kilda clinch victory over Geelong in what many consider the greatest home-and-away game ever played.
“I think I ducked out for a couple (of beers) after it, nothing major though,” Gardiner said this week.
“I think my old man was over and we caught up with some teammates and couple of friends for dinner and few drinks after.”
While Gardiner’s matchwinning grab in the dying seconds is forever etched in football fans’ memories, so too is the epic heavyweight clash.
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This 2009 clash was no ordinary mid-season encounter, and these were no ordinary teams.
The Saints were coming off preliminary final heartache the year before, and under Ross Lyon were pressuring and harassing oppositions into oblivion.
The Cats, 2007 premiers, had been stunned in the previous year’s decider and were hellbent on redemption.
Entering the Round 14 game — played under the roof of Etihad Stadium on a Sunday afternoon — neither team had tasted defeat that year.
After 13 matches, St Kilda topped the AFL table with a percentage of 177.5.
Below them were the unbeaten Cats (149.7%), with a four-game buffer to the rest.
What transpired over that two-and-a-bit hours has stayed with fans across the years — so much so that AFL great Brian Taylor was recently moved to reference the match when discussing the state of today’s game.
“I reckon football reached its peak as a spectacle and aesthetically when St Kilda and Geelong met at Marvel and they were 13 and zip,” Taylor said on the SuperFooty podcast.
“I thought that year, and that game, was the peak of how football should look to me … that’s the best game I’ve ever seen.”
The Saints won 14.7 (91) to 13.7 (85), with Gardiner’s mark inside the last two minutes the iconic clip shown when harking back to that frenetic day.
But there was a lot more than his last-gasp heroics on a day when footy hit new heights.
THE BUILD-UP
Never before had the AFL seen anything like it — two unbeaten teams drawn to clash after 13 rounds.
The build-up hit fever pitch.
“Ones like that do stand out,” former Geelong captain Cameron Ling said this week.
“We knew how well they were going that year and we were doing the same, so there was that sense of anticipation to play each other.”
A record 54,444 crammed in to the Docklands stadium to see who would take the mantle as frontrunner for September glory.
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“There hadn’t been a time in the AFL where two teams hadn’t been undefeated going into a game to that stage of the season, so it was obviously a big build-up,” Gardiner said.
“There was pretty good quality on both teams. It sort of built for a few weeks.
“We were both humming along pretty well. Probably three or four weeks out that game started to build up.
“It’s very rare that three or four weeks out that you’re looking forward to a home-and-away game … we were probably focusing in on each game but Ross (Lyon) is a smart enough coach that he probably had us doing things and preparing for that game without us even knowing about it, to be honest.”
OPENING-TERM BLITZ
St Kilda’s ferocious pressure brought about the game’s first goal when an uncertain Gary Ablett hesitated before attempting a handball to Tom Harley.
His fumble resulted in tagger Clint Jones — Ablett’s direct opponent — dribbling through the first major of the day.
It was a taste of things to come. Lyon’s men were showing Geelong they were no run-of-the-mill challenger.
“That first quarter I had never experienced speed of the game like that,” Ling said.
“You had basically zero time to get rid of the ball.
“As soon as you hesitated at all they were just onto us, and they made us turn the ball over a couple of times, just took the ball away and piled on those early goals.”
After Nick Riewoldt took an incredible mark and goaled, and Justin Koschitzke converted soon after, the Saints had the first four.
But it was to get worse for Mark Thompson’s team.
“One of the main things I remember and sort of a big moment was Lingy had the ball about 15m out from goal and got pressured,” former Saints star Nick Dal Santo recalled.
“He was playing on me so I actually remember him getting the ball in the game and one of my teammates put good pressure on him and he tried to lace one through the middle (of the ground).
“It got intercepted and I think Sam Fisher kicked a goal … I do recall that one particular part of it.”
Fisher’s goal made it 5.1 to 0.1 and the Cats, untroubled for much of the year, looked gone.
Dal Santo said he had never watched back the whole game but the Fox Footy commentator caught a replay of the opening term during the week.
“It was unbelievable. You sort of forget how good the game was at times I think,” he said.
“I forgot about the intensity of the game. People always talk about Gardy’s mark, but the crowd noise (was unbelievable).
“Watching it (again) on TV, it almost felt like a soccer game where the crowd was constantly involved with a constant noise as opposed to when something special happened on the ground.
“As a player I don’t remember that constant sort of buzz and excitement and cheering and that part of it … but in terms of the style of the game the thing that struck me was how intense it was in the first quarter, the attack on the football, the speed of the game and probably the execution as well for both teams.”
CATS CLAW BACK
Despite trailing by five goals, it was not in the experienced Cats’ DNA to panic or roll over.
Ablett marked at half-forward and after being awarded a dubious 50m penalty he booted a nerve-settler for his team.
When Travis Varcoe made no mistake after getting a second chance courtesy of a Zac Dawson indiscretion, the margin was cut back to 19 points.
Somehow, after being completely outplayed for much of the first 31 minutes, Geelong was in the game at the first change.
“We were a good team and we knew what we were doing but I reckon in that first quarter where we were going, ‘hang on, we don’t exactly know what to do here’,” Ling said.
“They were so onto us. It was a brilliant game. It took us that little while to settle and actually try to get it going back the other way a bit because they were just so good.”
BIG NAMES FIRE
Key battles flared everywhere.
In the middle it was Lenny Hayes (finished with 33 disposals), Brendon Goddard (24), Leigh Montagna (24 and 10 tackles), Luke Ball and Dal Santo (26) up against the likes of Ablett (27 and two goals), Jimmy Bartel (37), Joel Selwood (30), Joel Corey (27) and Ling.
“It was fun to be involved in,” Ling said.
“Once we got over the initial bit of, ‘we don’t know what the hell we’re doing’ the challenge of knowing we were playing against a ripping team in that game (was fun).
“You know every time you do get the ball you just have to be that sharp, every defensive decision we made had to be spot-on otherwise they were going to get through us.
“Those games are fun because you know they matter … it’s always hard at AFL level but you get occasional games where you might just know you’ve got the opposition covered and you know it’s halfway through the last quarter and it doesn’t really matter.
“You knew in that game every moment mattered.”
At one end Saints defender Dawson was doing his job on Big Cat Cam Mooney.
At the other Justin Koschitzke booted a couple for the Saints while running machine Riewoldt was giving Cats defender Harry Taylor hell.
When the Saints skipper marked, played on and drilled a 55m bomb from right half-forward he extended the margin back beyond a kick at the final break.
Meanwhile Gardiner, opposed to Mark Blake and Shane Mumford — who was playing his 14th game — had kicked two through the first three quarters and was having a big say.
But the best was yet to come.
ANYONE’S GAME
An unmarked Gardiner slammed through his third of the game to make it 23 points, but the Cats were not done.
Geelong’s Max Rooke curled one home and when Paul Chapman’s mongrel punt evaded defenders to bounce through, the comeback was on.
When Mooney found Mathew Stokes in space as the clock ticked under five minutes, he levelled the scores and commentator Dennis Cometti declared “the tide is running for the Cats”.
“I’m tingling and I’m not playing,” AFL Legend Leigh Matthews said in the commentary box.
Soon after a desperate Cats backline sees off a Saints forward thrust, and then wins the footy.
“This place is going ballistic,” Commetti screams.
And it was.
“I remember sort of looking at a few of the Geelong guys and scores were level and we were almost sort of laughing about it, because we knew how big the build-up had been,” Riewoldt would later tell the AFL website on a video marking the epic clash.
“The fact that we were level so deep into the game, it was almost sort of comical. The crowd noise … that’s the loudest I’ve ever heard a crowd at Etihad Stadium.”
THE MOMENT
“This deserves a draw,” Cometti said with two minutes remaining.
Dal Santo passed the ball to Montagna in the middle of the ground and he was made to earn a free kick from Corey Enright. Somehow, Ball found space on the wing and Montagna spotted him and chipped wide.
Gardiner, sensing his moment, ran forward.
“I always used to like getting forward and kicking a goal,” he said.
“I could see the ball down the off side. When you play with a team and you trust your teammates, I sort of knew where the ball was probably going to end up, so it was just a matter of put the head down and getting there and flying for the mark.
“Bally obviously kicked it to where we thought it was going to go and I was lucky enough to bring the mark down.”
The ruckman’s efforts in soaring to take one of the great pack marks in recent memory had multiple effects.
While Saints fans erupted, Harry Taylor lay prone on the Etihad turf after copping an errant Gardiner elbow to the head.
The game was stopped for more than three minutes as trainers attended the concussed Cat before he was taken from the field.
“I remember waking up in the changerooms … I just kept going over the same questions all the time,” Taylor later recalled on the AFL video.
“I kept asking the trainers, ‘did we win?’ They’d say we lost (and I’d ask) ‘how many goals did Riewoldt kick?’ They’d say, ‘three’.
“Twenty seconds later (I’d ask again), ‘did we win? How many goals did Riewoldt kick?’.
“This went on for about five minutes, and Cameron Mooney walked in and said we’d actually won and that Riewoldt had kicked 10. At this stage I was sort of in tears!”
Gardiner said the mark, now forever linked with the match, was the best he took.
“For that time of the game and with the scores the way they were, against that kind of quality opposition like Geelong, yeah definitely (it was),” he said.
As they waited for Taylor to be carted from the field Gardiner came in for sledging from two of the Cats’ best.
“I think Matty Scarlett and (Andrew) Mackie had a bit to say. They’re both good lads,” Gardiner recalled.
“But being a pretty well-drilled team and having the leaders that we did, a lot of the time was spent in a huddle, working out what we were going to do if we kicked the goal or if I’d kicked a point.
“Most of the time was spent in the huddle, some of the time was spent having a bit of a chat to Mackie and Scarlett, and then obviously (I) went back and kicked the goal.”
The Saints had won by six points.
Gardiner’s celebration after ramming home his matchwinner — where he stuck his tongue out as he eyeballed the Geelong defenders — was captured by cameras and has continued to be shown since.
“I’m glad I did it now because it’s had a good run over the years,” he said.
Originally published as Michael Gardiner recalls the day he helped St Kilda beat Geelong in epic 2009 clash