ALAN Richardson’s mantra since he took charge at St Kilda hasn’t changed. After two years out of the finals race, he’s committed to returning the Saints to September action via a relentless and contested brand of footy.

“The expectation that I have, as the leader of the footy department, is that we are a really hard team to play footy against,” Richardson said at last Thursday’s season launch The Road to 2018.

“That we get back to the spirit that you guys admired three and four years ago that we’ve fallen away from. We are not going to hide away from that.”

How this ‘spirit’ manifests itself will not be guided by ladder position or overall results, but rather specific statistical key performance indicators that can be measured on a quarter-by-quarter and week-by-week basis.

“We won’t be putting any limits on the group in terms of wins or losses,” he said. “But we will continue to work as hard as we can on our craft and give ourselves every opportunity.”

“Our focus all pre-season has been to be much better defensively, and that we’re much more physical.”

While Richardson acknowledges the small sample size of the pre-season and the significant amount of work his team still has to do in order to be successful, he is optimistic St Kilda is heading in the right direction.

“We’ve gone from 18th last year in terms of putting pressure on… to ranking in the top three in the NAB Challenge.”

“In terms of physical pressure and tackling, once again we’ve gone from 17th to number one,” he said. “Again it’s only the NAB Challenge – we get that - but that’s the only program we can operate in at the moment.”