ROSS Lyon's situation at St Kilda started out being fraught and nothing has changed, no matter what you might hear about 10-year contracts and the like.

Lyon had not coached before Rod Butterss hired him after the 2006 sacking of Grant Thomas, which gave him no money in the bank of public opinion, even if he was a widely respected assistant at Sydney, Carlton and Richmond and before that, the owner of one of the most lethal shirt-fronts in the game.

The St Kilda players were shocked, quite clearly, and had not seen it coming. Moreover, some of them were close to Thomas. Most of the supporters also liked Thomas, who was a St Kilda man and never hid the fact.

Hence, Lyon started out with a tough gig, albeit with quite a good list for a first-time coach (but not, it seems now, a premiership list). As a person who has been around football for decades, he would have known full well that he needed to get some results to establish his bona fides. The public expectation was that St Kilda had a red-hot team that merely needed moulding, a notion that is crumbling day by day.

So into Moorabbin he rode, bringing along some of the Swans' discipline, accountability and planning that had been the hallmark of that club under Paul Roos. From the Saints' point of view, they hoped he would also bring Sydney's injury management expertise (a sore point at Moorabbin in the preceding years).

Butterss was sold on the idea and why wouldn't you be? Sydney's method might not be popular in Melbourne, but you can hardly question whether it works. The Swans are in contention for a sixth straight year. That's right: six straight years beginning with their preliminary final appearance in 2003. The system was meant to have hacked them down at least two years ago, but it has not.

Yet there is a problem. St Kilda fans don't like the Sydney system or anything resembling it. They've seen it from the other side of the ledger and they would prefer an offensive brand; truth be told, most fans like an offensive brand, even though it's established that strong defence has been a cornerstone of premiership teams.

The Sydney style, based on its personnel and on a short playing surface, has been hard man-on-man with an accent on defence, keeping your opposition to, say, 10 goals, and backing yourself to kick 11. But it is not fashionable. Smooth-talker Roos has managed to sell the idea in Sydney by winning games, but Lyon is not the media performer that his mate is.

And if the fans don't like it, that puts pressure on the board. And if the board is a different group to the one which hired the coach, you can see where the speculation about Lyon comes from.

Which may be why Lyon recently appeared to deny that he was turning St Kilda into Sydney. It was an interesting moment. Lyon himself says that this was merely the headline in the newspapers. What is the truth of it?

He has tried to bring a lot of Sydney to St Kilda, as he should. It is worth a try.

Quite possibly, if he cannot graft the message on to another club and make it stick, he will not last beyond his current three-year contract. Right now, it is a fair question to ask: are the players on the same page as their coach?

Maybe the St Kilda supporters should start looking at the players, rather than the coach. I didn't see a flag hoisted above Moorabbin under Grant Thomas' methods, although they got close. I don't see Lenny Hayes bothered by the current ways, or Robert Harvey, to name but a couple. And I didn't see Ross Lyon running around in a St Kilda guernsey last weekend as Brisbane Lions tore the Saints to shreds. Too many people in footy blame the coach and his game plan when it's the execution that is the problem. Do they seriously believe that St Kilda plans to play that way?

As for any 10-year deal, nobody could take this seriously in the world of football. All that club chairman Greg Westaway has said this week is that he would "love" Lyon to be at Moorabbin for 10 years. The unspoken rider, of course, is that he brings some success to the club in that time, and that will be difficult to achieve given that St Kilda's list is not what it was in, say, 2004.

It's a ruthless industry. We all know what will happen if the Saints miss the finals this year and next. Ross Lyon, a smart man with football savvy and a dry sense of humour that he keeps well hidden from the public gaze, knows it better than anyone.