IT WAS late Saturday night in Sydney some six weeks ago. The Saints had just lost their seventh game of the season at the SCG against the Swans.

Back in Melbourne, thousands of St Kilda supporters who had been watching the game on the box had gone to bed frustrated and angry. Many had lost faith and felt that a season that promised so much was going to amount to little more than a mini-disaster.

Over the next week, the club took a battering. Captain Nick Riewoldt couldn't kick straight and at times didn't look interested, so said the talkback caller. Another felt that coach Ross Lyon had restricted the team's flair and that the players didn't want to play for him. One journalist wrote that ruckman/forward Justin Koschitzke was a pretender, that he had done nothing of real substance in his time at the club. Another journo believed that Lyon, who came from Sydney, hadn't embraced his new cl