ST KILDA had a new look last Friday night, and it was more than guernsey-deep. The stamp of new coach Ross Lyon, so recently of Sydney, was upon all its endeavours as it unexpectedly beat Melbourne. Asked about it, new-old ruckman Matthew Clarke affected to be puzzled. "Sydney-style? You mean St Kilda style!" he said.

Central to and in the new guise was Clarke, now 33 years old, but crucially, still 200 centimetres tall. Previous St Kilda coach Grant Thomas was sceptical about the worth of tap ruckmen, believing they had to earn their keep around the ground, and shaped his teams accordingly.

Clarke, 14 years an AFL ruckman, believes a ruckman's first duty is to ruck. "That's your No. 1 job," he said. "If you're a defender, your first job is to stop your opponent, then run off and create. A ruckman's first job is to compete strongly in the ruck, and the rest is a bonus, I suppose."

So it proved on Friday night: moderate possessions, artful taps, salvation for the Saints. "If I'm the saviour," said Clarke, "I think we're in trouble."

Clarke, from Mt Gambier, began in Melbourne as a teenager, playing under 18s for Richmond, but flourished in seven-year stints with the Brisbane Lions and Adelaide. Though successful, a scar remains: he has played in five preliminary finals, but no grand finals.

"It's a bit of a sore point," he said. "Probably the Adelaide ones the last couple of years were the worst. We'd played some really strong footy through the year, but didn't put it together in the prelims." Pausing, he added: "West Coast are a pretty good side, by the way!"

At the end of last year, he felt his time was up. So did the Crows, who had a couple of young ruckmen they desperately wanted to bring in. Still, there were hitches. "When (Rhett) Biglands injured himself for the second time, I sat down with them and said: 'Where do we sit now?'," he said.

"From their end, they were pretty confident it was time to go with the young blokes. If they went through the process another 10 times, they would come out with the same decision." Later, two more Crows ruckmen went down. "You can't plan for that," said Clarke. "But they've got four good young ruckmen. Five. That's plenty. They'll be right."

Clarke was avowedly retired. Then Cain Ackland left St Kilda for Carlton. Lyon, briefly a teammate of Clarke's at Brisbane, called. Clarke discovered an unexpected motivation: after weeks in the US on the Crows' end-of-season trip, his fitness had begun to ebb. "That was part of it, the recognition that I would never be really fit again," he said. "That was part of the internal monologue."

Still, there was the pre-season to negotiate, a recurring horror for veterans. "Pre-season's not a lot of fun. Anyone who says it is obviously is really fit naturally," he said. "Having said that, I really enjoyed that first month, starting unfit and feeling myself regain fitness. It was a good feeling."

He signed for a year, noting that at his age, that was as long term as it gets. He had played with Brett Voss at Brisbane and Fergus Watts at Adelaide. Saints fitness adviser Craig Starcevich was also a teammate at Brisbane, but left Moorabbin almost as soon as Clarke arrived. He settled quickly: after all these years, neither club nor player could or would surprise each other.

"The thing everyone says is: 'You must notice the difference in facilities'," he said. "Realistically, we've got a great oval, and all the things you need are here. It's just an older building. You need a level of facilities to go about your business, but do they need to be in a shiny new building?"

Unexpectedly, the Saints appealed to him in another way. All his senior career, he had been at new, manufactured clubs.

"I quite like the fact that it feels like a footy club here," he said. "That sense of tradition that you got at the season launch, all the old guys getting up there collecting their hall of fame awards, that was nice to be part of. To belong to a football club that's existed for 100-odd years."

Clarke's career has spanned a time of change, in playing and thinking. He played under John Northey, the last of the old-school coaches, and Neil Craig, the foremost of the new. He began under Robert Walls ("a lot of structure, a lot of discipline"). Northey arrived "and freed up the players a lot". Craig, he says simply, is a "great coach".

He sees the best as a synthesis. "There are many elements. You need to let players express themselves and play," he said. "But you need the flipside, which is a lot of structure, a lot of analysis. Now it's about empowerment and feedback from your playing group, as opposed to the more autocratic style. But I don't think there's one formula."

Lyon's mark is upon St Kilda already. "To be honest, I didn't watch a lot of St Kilda over previous seasons," Clarke said. "But … one thing that comes up is that the group is really coachable. Introduce a concept, throw it out there on the track and be able to see some sort of move in that direction almost immediately."

The game has changed, but not so that it is unrecognisable to Clarke, nor beyond him. "There've been a couple of rule changes which have worked towards diminishing the role of the ruckman," he said. "There's been a move to free it up, so that number of stoppages has dropped. They've brought in the centre circle, which has limited the ability to get really clear ball out of the middle.

"In some games, ruckmen neutralise each other. But if you get a level of dominance or even a slight ascendancy and swing stoppages your side's way by even 10 or 15 per cent, it can have a reasonable influence."

Clarke is a dinosaur, but like the original dinosaurs, suddenly and wildly popular again, at least at St Kilda.