Robert Harvey remembers the day he thought he had killed Nick Riewoldt

AN OPPONENT described it as a ‘car crash’. A teammate and club legend thought he had put Nick Riewoldt’s life in danger. Players who were there relive one of the greatest marks of all time.

Nick Riewoldt takes a flying mark against the Sydney Swans.

ROBERT Harvey wonders now whether he might have killed Nick Riewoldt.

It is 13 years on from that extraordinary SCG moment and still his voice drips with regret and embarrassment.

TOP EIGHT EQUATION: WHAT SAINTS HAVE TO DO TO MAKE IT

The Sunday Herald Sun has phoned Harvey at 6pm on a Tuesday night, an hour into a Collingwood board meeting that will decide the fate of many Magpie staffers.

But ask the St Kilda legend and Magpies assistant coach to recollect his part in one of the greatest marks in AFL history and he agrees without hesitation.

Mostly because Riewoldt’s astounding deeds deserve every accolade, a career stuffed with so many courageous moments like this.

Ever fallen off your bike or taken a nasty tumble and got up feeling for the snapped bones and gushing blood, then realised somehow you have tempted fate yet miraculously walked away unharmed?

Without fail the key players involved in Riewoldt’s Sunday June 6, 2004 mark have that kind of feeling.

How did everyone walk away from it?

How did Riewoldt not only get up, but casually flicked a handball back to Harvey for a long running goal?

Maybe because Riewoldt at times appeared superhuman.

On the eve of the day that is almost certainly the last of Riewoldt’s stupendous 336-game career the key players in that mark recall their part in one of football’s great moments.

Nick Riewoldt takes one of the greatest marks of all time against the Swans in 2004.

THE TEAMMATE

AS DAWN broke on that remarkable day, both St Kilda and Sydney knew this was not just any contest.

Grant Thomas’s St Kilda was looking for respect, the unorthodox coach desperate to drag this side kicking and screaming to the “utopia” he dreamt about.

St Kilda hadn’t played finals since 1998 and yet under Thomas the Saints had gone unbeaten to win both the NAB Challenge and the season’s first 10 games.

The team was star-studded, with Harvey, Lenny Hayes, Nick Dal Santo, Fraser Gehrig, Justin Koschitzke, Aaron Hamill and so many more.

Yet St Kilda was feeling the strain, a tired squad swapped training that week for a night at the movies.

“I remember that week we went to the movies,’’ Dal Santo said.

“We were 10-0 and I just remember that day we were flat. Kosi laid a really good tackle on someone in the centre square and it was what we needed to get going.”

The Youtube footage is grainy and hard to follow, but is shows Dal Santo weaving through traffic 20 minutes into the third quarter.

The Saints are 21 points down and need inspiration.

Enter Riewoldt, moving through the centre square after Dal Santo darts through the pack then handballs to Harvey.

Harvey’s kick tumbles diagonally forward and Riewoldt just takes off.

As Stephen Milne and Jared Crouch sprint at the Sherrin from the opposite direction, Riewoldt soars through the air, grabs the ball and is flipped over in a freakish twisting, spinning motion.

He lays prone for a second with ball pinned firmly in hands, then springs to his feet to finds Harvey with a perfect handball on the run.

As Milne and Crouch lay scattered like ninepins on the ground, a legend is born.

“The one thing I learnt from ‘Rooey’ quickly — and this incident confirmed it — was that he was just kamikaze at the footy,” Dal Santo said.

“He couldn’t go about it any other way. Most people when the ball goes over their head say that kick wasn’t mean for me, I can’t get it.

“But Nick thought he was a chance to get it even if a teammate was in the way.”

THE KICK

“WHEN I see it I just get really embarrassed,” said Harvey, still so modest despite his reputation as one of the game’s great champions.

“He was really young in his career and he really trusted me with my ball use.

“When I look back at that, I don’t even know what I was doing. It’s not a drop punt, it’s not a torpedo, I don’t even know what it is.

“And I am thinking, ‘I have nearly got the guy killed before he has even started’. He went so hard at the ball.

“I just look back at it and cringe. What on earth was I doing? All it takes is a clip from someone coming the other way and he is history.”

Harvey is right — of the 5648 kicks in his remarkable career, it wasn’t his best.

“It was a hospital handball but a kick instead,” Harvey said.

“He actually accelerated right at the end. You see a lot of guys who mark running at one speed, but he actually accelerates.

“He hit it with such force it was excruciating. I look at it and it’s such a great mark, but I really don’t like looking at it because of what I did to him.”

Harvey might have regrets now, but with that relentless chugging engine he motored on, took the handball and slotted a 50m goal to tighten the margin.

“He reminds me of Trevor Barker, the blond hair flying and those reckless marks,’’ Harvey said.

“With Rooey his courage was next level. Those 70m heartbreaking leads and the Trevor Barker-like marks.”

Robert Harvey sends the Saints into attack again. Picture: George Salpigtidis

Nick Riewoldt and Robert Harvey — two St Kilda legends.

IN THE WRECKAGE

“THERE was space in front of me and I charged out. I was going for the ball and all of a sudden I nearly got my head taken off by a flying Rooey,” Stephen Milne says.

Milne mostly shies away from the media spotlight and yet on the end of the phone his recall is perfect, his manner still cheeky and his admiration for the mark undiminished.

“I am pretty lucky I came out of it OK. I skinned my face but was lucky to be only dazed,’’ he said.

“I did have a chuckle afterwards, I got to him and said, ‘That was mine Roo, but you want to put yourself in that position go for it’.

“He was see-ball get-ball and that was probably the mark of the century.

“But he did that 10 times a game for 15 years. Only the best of the best do that.

“Normally Harves used to put them laces-out, but as soon as he kicked it Roo said, ‘I will mark it and no one will get in my way’.

“How he came out of it unscathed and no one was injured has still got me.”

Milne’s opponent Jared Crouch, now the Swans’ academy boss, said Riewoldt’s mark was the second greatest he has seen.

Second?

“Leo Barry’s is pretty special,” Crouch said with a laugh.

Fresh from a Youtube viewing of that crazy-brave spectacle, he says: “It’s not until you watch the replay you realise how amazing a mark it was”.

“I was following Milne out try to spoil the ball and in some respects he almost came from nowhere.

“It was almost like I cushioned his fall a bit as he landed across my legs.

“We had so many great battles with St Kilda, we played in the 2005 prelim too and as soon as he retired I mentioned it to my wife.

“My young boys didn’t see me play and it was a reminder Dad did actually play.

“Working with the 700 academy kids a lot of them mentioned the Nick Riewoldt mark.”

Nick Riewoldt and Stephen Milne combined for plenty of St Kilda goals.

THE COMMENTATOR

“RIEWOLDT, remarkable ...’’ screams Dennis Cometti.

And yet as television viewers compute the feat they have just witnessed, special comments man Dermott Brereton is circumspect.

It takes Cometti’s labelling of the screamer as one of the game’s greatest marks for him to join the party and compare it to Jon Brown’s back-with-the-flight 2002 classic.

“I remember it for the courage and judgment,’’ says Cometti, happy to be distracted as he awaits the dentist’s chair in Perth.

“Put it this way, he had a lot to consider but he didn’t consider anything.

“The one thing that stuck me was Dermott’s matter-of-fact appraisal of it.

“Derm probably has a different threshold of determination and courage to me when it came to playing footy.

“He was rather stoic, but he warmed to it after a while.”

How does Cometti feel to have called such greatness so often?

“Well, as I have said about all those Olympic gold medals, I couldn’t have done it without them. It’s a well-rehearsed line, but that’s pretty much it.”

THE ONLOOKERS

WHEN you think of courage, Swan Jude Bolton isn’t far from the top of the tree.

But he was also whip-smart on the footy field, which is why he was waiting for Harvey’s kick to spill over the back of the pack.

“I was working around to get the crumb and he just took the entire pack out,” Bolton said.

“I think it’s staggering that everyone walked away from it. There is no greater show of courage. It was a complete reckless abandon.

“I can remember thinking, ‘This is going to be a car crash’. It almost feels in slow motion in that sense.

“It’s almost a grimace you can remember as he went steaming back for it. Nick would have known he was putting his body at risk.

“But he didn’t want to let his teammates down.”

Riewoldt’s teammate Lenny Hayes was only a few metres back, caught up in the initial centre wing contest then pushing hard forward.

“I just remember it being one of those classic games against Sydney where they don’t give you an inch,” said Hayes, now a GWS assistant coach.

“I was in between where Harves kicked it and the actual mark and just seeing Rooey’s body flying.

“And then I watched as he got up straight away and gave it to Harves. No one really put any pressure on Harves because they were all in disbelief about what they saw.”

How did he get up so quickly?

“Yeah, that’s very unlike Rooey, actually. Normally he milks it for all it’s worth,’’ Hayes joked.

By year’s end, West Coast’s Ash Sampi would win the Mark of the Year for a lovely but dime-a-dozen spekky on Melbourne defender Paul Wheatley’s head.

It was a farcical decision given Riewoldt’s heroics.

“Yeah, he used to talk about that all the time,’’ Hayes said.

“I think Rooey is still filthy he didn’t get mark of the year, just quietly.

“I used to see it every week, he would take one every week where he had no right to go there.”

Supporters saw only the finished product with Riewoldt, but as he leaves the game his teammates have opened a window into his amazing intensity.

“We (the Giants) came off the track today and there was a real intensity coming into the big games ahead,” Hayes said.

“You could feel the pressure out there. I said to the boys there is no more pressure than breaking out of the stoppage at St Kilda training and having to hit Riewoldt.

“If the ball went either side of him and he couldn’t quite get it you would get the biggest spray of all time.

“It made us better because he was so intense.”

Dal Santo remembers Riewoldt sometimes booting a training half-volley over the fence and having to meekly go and fetch it.

“There was no one harder on his teammates than Nick,’’ Hayes said.

“But there was no one harder on himself either and it drove us to be better.”