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In the rooms after winning the 2021 premiership in Perth, the Demons’ leaders made no secret of the fact they wanted to create a dynasty.
“This is a starting point, it’s not an end point for us,” CEO Gary Pert said.
Melbourne won the 2021 premiership under lights at Optus Stadium.Credit: Getty
They haven’t won a final since. In fact, they have not won one at the MCG since 2018.
Melbourne have been good, not great.
And a series of incidents since the finals started have coalesced to make the Demons’ culture the main talking point since Collingwood won the flag.
The club blames its recent travails on a few isolated incidents rather than a larger cultural problem and in many respects they are right.
When a star player is the subject of debate and the issues surrounding him are complex, it is tough on the leaders of a club to get the message right. That point is significant in assessing Melbourne’s response right now.
There are also legal constraints on what can be discussed when it comes to Joel Smith’s potential violation of the AFL’s anti-doping code after he tested positive for cocaine on a match day.
Many clubs would adopt similar positions in similar circumstances.
There are people at the club who are performing in their roles responsibly, even exceptionally well, but are being let down by the headlines created by a few. The club has also repeatedly denied the rumours that senior coach Simon Goodwin had used illicit drugs and wants the ongoing innuendo to stop. The effect on his life and family is real.
But the club leaders, although they remain unconvinced, would do well to concede signs of hubris have been evident since the team cheekily sung Freed From Desire after their premiership win, an act that mocked the vanquished Western Bulldogs.
Gary Pert rejects accusations that there are cultural issues at the clubCredit: Getty
Such signs are often missed, but they can determine how a club is perceived when the inevitable “isolated incidents” occur. Perception matters because this is the trail Melbourne have left since their flag win.
The fight at Entrecote after one teammate allegedly belittled another for not playing in the premiership was followed by a straight-sets exit blamed on injuries and mistiming their run.
In summer, Melbourne lost a mini-battle in the Supreme Court with a member over his rights to members’ details, his reading of a section of the corporations act backed by the judge.
There was Goodwin’s comment that former Magpie and now former Demon Brodie Grundy was “finally at a club that valued him” ahead of the King’s Birthday clash a month before Grundy was dropped. Then there was misdirected anger at Brayden Maynard’s bump on Angus Brayshaw and the subsequent decision to clear Maynard, which lingered in the background in the lead up to the semi-final against Carlton.
Their claim after the qualifying final loss that they played the Melbourne way even though the same goal-scoring woes, bombed entries inside 50 and inaccuracy that plagued them mid-season affected them in the finals sounded delusional when they blew their lead against Carlton in another straight-sets exit.
They kicked 16.28 from 122 inside-50s in the two finals losses.
The delay in responding when other clubs were made aware they might be open to trading out star midfielder Clayton Oliver before they sent a letter to members on the eve of the best and fairest raised questions. The club president Kate Roffey responded by telling members that night not to believe trade speculation in the media and only take notice of information from the club. Please.
Then Steven May said Melbourne should have “smoked” eventual premiers Collingwood, giving everyone a laugh at Melbourne’s expense.
Melbourne’s Joel Smith tested positive, in competition, to cocaine which led to renewed focus on the club’s cultureCredit: Getty Images
Smith tested positive on game day after traces of cocaine were found in his urine.
Most are minor, some less so, and who doesn’t want the participants creating a bit of controversy with remarks about opponents? Ed Langdon’s “all duck, no dinner” comments were great for football last year. But great clubs show more often than they tell.
Throughout it all, Melbourne finished top four for the third season in a row and their AFLW team were premiers, the McClelland trophy evidence of their on-field success, while the men’s team also had the stingiest defence for the past three years. That’s important, but the public no longer buys the argument that you can’t win without a good culture. You can win and still be on the nose.
Melbourne will likely disagree that any of the above examples matter more in what has happened than inaccurate goalkicking. They argue, undoubtedly with justification, that if they won the flag none of those minor incidents would be mentioned. But they didn’t win, and the incidents are being mentioned, particularly after the Smith revelation.
The stingy defence so important to their on-field success has transferred to the off-field in recent seasons.
Defensive actions have the opposite effect off-field, leading to a mindset that appears to have resulted in perspective being lost and criticism too quickly being pushed aside.
That does not lead to success and also makes the inevitable hiccups harder to manage when they arise.
In his recent autobiography The Price Paid, Australian cricketer Tim Paine admitted it took him time to understand why people were so outraged at the Aussie team after the ball-tampering incident on the 2018 South African tour.
Then, as he reflected on the reaction and listened deeply to the public response, he understood the team had become disconnected from the public’s expectations.
“We’d got caught up in our own world and lost focus,” Paine wrote.
Melbourne are in danger of doing the same thing if they do not acknowledge the perception that now surrounds them is not only due to isolated incidents and some, even if a precious few, people in their club are considered, fairly or otherwise, arrogant and unwilling to listen to others. It’s time to consider how others might view them and why that might be the case, as Paine eventually did.
There is an admission from club leaders that the constant leaking of board conversations may have created barriers between them and the media, which in turn leads to a certain narrative delivered to their supporters and the public.
That, to a point, is understandable, but Melbourne have been under attack before and fought it with openness and humour. There have also been other clubs who have handled similarly potential combustible issues without falling into a furnace.
Articulate and respected Max Gawn deserves to lead a club that is making news for the right reasons.Credit: AFL Photos
Remember Goodwin channelling Matthew McConaughey’s “Fugazi” line from Wolf of Wall Street in 2018? I know, it’s hard.
When they said then that the internal environment was fun, it was easy to believe.
When Goodwin said it was still the case at the best and fairest count this year, it was harder to believe. Apart from Gawn’s regular, beautifully timed quips and the Gus and Gawny podcast, we don’t see much evidence of such.
We don’t think of elite list management, a great women’s program, the league’s stingiest defence, Goodwin’s ability to drag the club from the bottom to the top four, the Big Freeze and Neale Daniher and their passionate supporters when the club comes to mind.
We hear May say “our team’s so much better than these guys” and no one internally condemning him.
We see a club with great players. But we don’t see a great club.
The Demons risk being another club that found handling success as challenging as achieving it.
Goodwin promised on SEN on Tuesday that the club wanted to open itself up and show the world what was really happening there, to prove their words were not merely words. That is a good call because there are plenty of good people at the club and their supporters deserve to be proud.
They have preferred to send a carefully vetted, if strongly worded, letter to fans and place the CEO and coach on SEN for a pre-recorded interview. Pert spoke to this masthead and the Herald Sun on Monday after days of delays, but was restricted in what he could say due to the sensitivity of some issues.
The universally respected leaders of the club, such as Gawn, Jack Viney and Angus Brayshaw, need to catch up when the players return and acknowledge publicly that the club has not been at its best in the past two months and has many lessons to learn from the way the post-premiership years have unfolded.
It might annoy them to have to do so, but that responsibility falls to them if they want to retain the club’s many gains.
That’s professional sport. You can do 95 per cent well, but the last 5 per cent is what everyone recalls. Any Demon who watched the last two minutes of the semi-final against Carlton knows that too well.
This needs to be the end point for Melbourne, for a new starting point to arrive.
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