Country footy legend Saad Saad still flying to the end

COUNTRY footy legend Saad Saad has graced the Goulburn Valley league for 10 seasons - but he has declared this is his last. So catch his goalkicking and high-marking while you can.

CLEARLY someone missed Saad Saad when he left the Goulburn Valley league for a season last year.

As The Weekly Times interview with Saad wraps up, the Seymour footballer is approached by one of the goal umpires for the game the 34-year-old is about to play.

He shakes Saad’s hand. “Good to have you back,” he says, before reminiscing about all the times he had a front-row seat for the Saad show over the years.

A Lions supporter’s description of Saad probably wraps up how he is best known in country football.

“This bloke is five-foot nine, but when he’s got his footy boots on, he’s six-foot four,” he says.

Saad is known statewide not only for his goalkicking prowess, but also his ability to soar over teammates and opponents — journalist Paul Daffey once wrote he could take “high marks like most people eat Vegemite on toast”, while a video highlights package published 10 years ago has racked up more than 28,000 views on YouTube.

This season, his 10th at Seymour’s Kings Park, is shaping as his swan song as he has declared: “This year will be my last. I’m done, my body is not holding up”.

“What we’ve achieved it doesn’t come often to many players,” the three-time Seymour premiership player says.

“For what I have achieved here in Seymour and the GV and country life, if I could turn back time I would do it all again.”

Enjoys the view: Seymour’s Saad Saad takes one his famous marks during the grand final against Benalla in 2005. Picture: Yuri Kouzmin

Steve Daniel, who coached Seymour from 2004-06, recruited Saad to the Goulburn Valley league for the 2005 season.

The two had met via the VFL outfit Northern Bullants, where Daniel was among the coaching staff.

He remembers when the Bullants had a tip they needed to “have a look at this player from Northcote Park who was pretty special”.

He and Bullants coach Mark Williams, a former Carlton and Footscray player, went to watch Northcote Park play a grand final. Saad started in the midfield, Daniel says, then at three-quarter time was moved inside 50 “on his own”.

“Mark and I looked at each other and thought, ‘Gee, putting him inside 50 on his own, because he’s only 5ft-whatever-it-is, and they’re talking about how he’s going to win the game and all this,” he says.

“We were quite excited to see what would happen.”

They were not disappointed. Daniel says he could not believe Saad’s leap and agility.

“It was unbelievable. I think Saad took mark of the year on two occasions,” he says.

Saad played with the Bullants in 2003-04, then was approached by Daniel to join Seymour.

He kicked 99 goals in his first season from 20 games, including a 2005 premiership against Euroa in which he took a screamer (pictured — the footage is also on YouTube).

His travelling partner from Melbourne was Bernie Haberman, who was first a teammate and assistant coach, then coach at Seymour.

Haberman says Saad was the only player who could make him feel like a spectator in the middle of a game.

Air up there: Saad Saad in action.

“As a player I was pretty mentally involved in a game but he did have that ability to go wow, it was unbelievable what he could do,” he says. But the two could not have been more different in their approaches to training.

“We were very chalk and cheese. I’m very anal when it comes to my preparation and the times I want to get there, the food I eat and the time I eat it, the amount of fluid I drink,” Haberman says.

“Saad ... he’d eat hamburgers and dim sims on the way up and if I was picking him up he was always late.”

Daniel, who would coach Tatura to the 2012 flag against Haberman’s Seymour and is now coaching Gold Coast in the NEAFL, knew exactly what to expect.

He says there was a day when Carlton was having an intraclub match with some of the Bullants players and Denis Pagan wanted to have a look at Saad — and remembers Saad “rocking in very late just to play”.

Daniel loves that Saad is “just so laid back”.

“That’s just the way Saad was. He could rock up to a game half an hour before the bounce after driving one or two hours, wherever he’s come from, and just go out there and jump on people’s heads and turn people inside out. It’s just what he does,” he says.

If Saad was not a household name in country footy circles before 2007, he was by the end.

This year marks 10 years since Saad booted a point after the siren for the Victorian Country Football League team to defeat VAFA and claim the Brian Molony Cup.

The VCFL team — which included future AFL players Scott Thompson and Michael Barlow — led at the final change and kicked away in the fourth, only for VAFA to close the gap and level the scores with less than a minute remaining.

That Saad point gave Vic Country its third successive cup, but it was the only time Saad represented the state.

The year ended on a high note for Saad and the Lions. Seymour, under Haberman, charged to its third consecutive premiership.

The Lions marked that three-peat with a reunion last weekend of all the club’s premiership teams, where Haberman was made a life member.

“That era we had, the buzz we had around the club, was amazing,” Saad says.

The father-of-two says after this year he wants to “give it a good rest”, and it probably doesn’t surprise many he is not interested in coaching when he retires.

It might be more surprising that he has very little interest in the AFL, where his nephew Adam plays for Gold Coast. “I am more into rugby than AFL. I love my Melbourne Storm,” he says.

Saad was up to old antics last weekend. Coming back after a week off, he booted nine goals against Shepparton Swans.

Alas, he will not reach his 200th game for Seymour, or his 1000th goal if he retires this year.

The goal kicking machine has amassed 182 games for Seymour and 893 goals between 2005-09, 2012-15 and this year.

He kicked two goals in a one-off appearance in 2014 for Castlemaine, whose coach, Shane Robertson, coached Seymour the year before, and spent last year at Coburg Districts. The bulk of his career has been with Seymour and his former home club Northcote Park, which he returned to in 2010-11 so he could focus on his electrical contracting business.

Time will tell if the lure of playing his 200th game — thus earning Seymour life membership — would be enough for him to play on next year.

Haberman, who is now coaching Golden Square in the Bendigo Football League, says that there were two qualities that went overlooked for Saad — loyalty and courage.

“We get caught up — and so do I — in his mercurial ability, ability to find space, ability to kick a goal from anywhere,” he says.

“But when it was his turn to go, he was as tough as anyone.

“His courage was underestimated, and his loyalty to Seymour, he is a 10-year player. Not many do that.”