Garry Sidebottom made a big impression in a relatively short career with the Saints.

At the age of just 64, our former club captain passed away yesterday evening after a brave battle against cancer.

As a bustling ruckman and centre half-forward, he was briefly rated as the most valuable footballer in the land, and when St Kilda recruited him from Western Australia in 1978, it was regarded as a major coup.

Teamed up with aggressive fellow rucks Carl Ditterich and Jeff Sarau, Sidebottom became a key cog in new coach Mike Patterson’s game plan.

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After the Saints had finished last in 1977 the team got away to a flying start in 1978 and narrowly missed a place in the finals. Sidebottom was at the forefront of that resurgence.

He had experienced an unusual path to League football, starting in the Western Australian Sunday League as a highly talented teenager playing against seasoned campaigners.

For a time, he gave football away, but then Swan Districts trialled him in the Colts team where he played a handful of games before drifting away again.

Still a teenager, he was working in a physically demanding job at a local abattoir before deciding that he would knuckle down to having a serious crack at football.

In an interview with Inside Football magazine, he told of his start in senior WAFL football.

“The coach said beforehand that I was playing on an ex-VFL player, Peter Eakins, and I said it was just another bloke. I got on top of him in the early stages, so I copped a few in the back of the head,” he said.

I gave a couple back, as my father taught me you had to give something back."

"Once I saw the glare in Peter’s eye, I knew he wasn’t going to take a backwards step, and this was not just a case of kick a few goals and have a few beers afterwards. As it turned out, I kicked on from there.”

He was playing impressive football the following season until a knock that initially paralysed the left side of his body and resulted in him being hospitalised for six months.

“The neuro surgeon said that it was a combination of the temperature of the body and where I was hit that caused the concussion and the blackout. I needed to go to hospital after a couple of days and found I had bleeding on the brain, and after about four or five weeks in hospital they found that I had a broken neck. Then I went down and did three or four months in rehab and had a stroke. They put me in a wheelchair. But it was a break that God gave me, that I got better.”

He came back and took his football to a new level with Swan Districts, which attracted suitors from Victorian clubs.

“Footscray was the first club that approached me. This was something I hadn’t dreamed of. You don’t know what to do, and I ended up getting Bill Walker to advise me on things. He said to sit back and play for Swan Districts for a couple of years,” Sidebottom recalled.

“In that time, Richmond and Collingwood came and saw me. I was in constant touch with Graham Huggins and Ian Drake of St Kilda, and they were always polite and kind and never pushed me. There was a bit of a West Australian connection at St Kilda with John McIntosh and George Young and Bruce Duperouzel.

“There were great players there like Jeff Sarau, Barry Breen, Gary Colling, Rex Hunt, Bruce Duperouzel and Carl Ditterich. They put me on the right path and Mike Patterson was coach. He was fantastic – turned me into a rover for a while! Just wound up the key and said go there, go here until you learned the caper.”

He said I needed to put on a bit of weight. He got me to the stage where I was competitive.

St Kilda’s flying start to 1978 featured a controversial game against the Essendon team known as “the Baby Bombers”. After the match, the Essendon president labelled St Kilda “animals”.

“It was a hard game,” Sidebottom recalled.

We were in the top four and Essendon wasn’t far behind. There was a bit of rivalry. We found our niche by playing it hard and fast. We thought if we did that, we had a chance to kick a winning score."

“Unfortunately, incidents happened during the game and I think the umpires lost a bit of control. Some of the things shouldn’t have occurred if they had been nipped in the bud early. I had a collision with a couple of blokes. Shadow (Ditterich) was reported. It was my first suspension in the VFL and I got four weeks. I thought I had let the club down.”

Sidebottom always admired the coaching style of Patterson.

“Patto said to me, ‘Don’t just get out there and start biffing people. You have good skills. But if all else fails … go in a bit harder’. I thought that was good advice. If it’s going to happen, it will. He was a fantastic person. I had seen him play in a couple of TV replays and he wasn’t over-endowed with a lot of skills.

“It was his attitude to the game, and the people he learned from, like Tom Hafey and Roy Wright. He came from Adelaide where he had won a couple of premierships as coach. He just had an affinity with you.

He had a bit of presence about him, and when you spoke to him at eye level, he was a man’s man."

“I could relate to that, and he was very good at understanding what made me tick. He’d always ask how the wife and kids were, and to me that was important, living away from Perth.”

Unusual moments dotted Sidebottom’s career such as the time he was hit by a can during a game at Moorabbin.

“It was in the course of the game and the umpires were giving me a hard time. I knocked this bloke over the boundary line and I thought I might have got a free for holding the ball. As I walked toward the umpire this can came over and hit me in the eye, and I went down like a sack of s--t. It came from our supporters and was aimed at the umpire. Later on, the coppers asked if I wanted to charge him and I said not to bother. There was a bit of blood here and there, but I just said make sure that next time you hit the right person!”

After a brilliant 1979 season, he was appointed captain for 1980. Lindsay Fox had taken over as president and just two games into the season, Patterson was sacked as coach and replaced by Alex Jesaulenko, who had come to the Saints as a player after coaching Carlton.

“From the outset, I was captain and he was coach. We had a bit of a yarn and I said that I thought he should have been captain-coach. Here he was, one of the greatest players that ever played, and I thought it made sense for him to be captain-coach. He obviously thought differently.

“I was on the selection committee and he wanted to play young blokes down the middle and the older blokes outside. I thought it should have been the other way around. The training was very arduous and sometimes wouldn’t finish until 9 o’clock. I didn’t mind that, and we won a couple of games, mainly because Alex was playing.

“Then the real coaching started and we weren’t in the same league as Carlton in playing strength and he had to come back and speak to us on a different level. I just don’t think he was ready for that sort of team. We had experienced players and young players and he had to find ways of making it gel.”

It complicated the way Sidebottom captained the team and the differences between him and Jesaulenko became apparent. As his form slipped, other clubs circled.

“I spoke to one person who wasn’t really involved at Carlton and he said there could be an offer on the table. I said that I was captain of St Kilda and I would be here until I was asked to leave. I got to Perth in the off-season and my contract was up for renegotiation and I didn’t want more money, just incentives.

If I won the Brownlow it would be another 10 grand, if I won the best and fairest another 10 grand – that sort of thing."

"There were about five options and maybe Lindsay Fox thought if I could achieve two or three of those it could cost them a few quid. Next thing I heard was that Geelong wanted to talk to me and it was with Lindsay Fox’s blessing.”

With St Kilda desperately in need of money, Sidey was sold to Geelong. He joked in later years that he got started on the wrong foot.

“At my first training session at Geelong, I bumped someone and it turned out being Terry Bright who was (coach Billy Goggin’s) nephew!”

His single season with the Cats ended in a shambolic situation where he was alleged to have missed the team bus on preliminary final day. It turned out that Geelong had sacked its team manager during the week and he had been supposed to tell Sidebottom he was in the side and would be picked up at a usual meeting spot in Lara. It wasn’t Sidebottom’s fault, but the story went into football folklore.

He then went to Fitzroy where his career enjoyed a resurrection under Robert Walls and he played in finals.

He admitted that it rankled with him that some people remembered him primarily for the bus fiasco that wasn’t his fault in any case.

“I’d like to think that people remember that you played over 200 games in WA and Victoria, you played state footy for 10 years. That’s probably a lot to absorb for some people.”

He cheerfully tackled his long battle with cancer and last year was undergoing experimental therapy. St Kilda was keen to see him come over to Victoria with his daughter, but plans of the St Kilda Past Players and Officials Association to fly them to Melbourne for last week’s opening game had to be abandoned when his condition worsened.

He will be remembered for much more than the bus incident.

As teammate Gary Colling tweeted, “Big fella, even bigger heart for others. I’ll miss his conversations n humour. Vale Sidey.”

GARRY SIDEBOTTOM

Clubs: St Kilda (1978-80, 54 games, 86 goals), Geelong (1981, 7 games, 6 goals), Fitzroy (1982-84, 43 games, 53 goals)

Swan Districts WAFL (1973-77 and 1985-87, 114 games 227 goals)