Having achieved a long-held AFL dream of hosting a premiership match outside Australia, St Kilda, the team that sealed the deal, could not quite manage the fairytale.

A 16-point victory instead went to the hot favourites and an earlier version of Australian football pioneers, the Sydney Swans.

It was not the ''classic match'' promised by AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou immediately beforehand. The damp conditions lowered it as a spectacle. No one took a screamer and the audience did not fill the Westpac Stadium.

But you could not deny the noise, the atmosphere and the emotion the locals threw into the game from the moment they sang along to the New Zealand national anthem before the first bounce.