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Melbourne’s AFL grand final run is about more than the players who’ll run onto the ground
When a football club has gone as long without a premiership as Melbourne, it is now customary to list all the things that have happened in the intervening years: 20,824 days, 16 prime ministers, two currencies, 17 love interests for Toadfish Rebecchi.
It is more revealing to think of how the game itself has changed since Melbourne last made a grand final in 2000 — a tactical revolution that has transformed footy from a man-on-man, end-to-end shootout to the high-speed chess of 2021.
In the sophisticated present era, Melbourne had been irrelevant laggards until the arrival of Paul Roos, Simon Goodwin and the unassuming administrators who put them in place and then got out of their way.
Which is not to say that grand finals don’t come with perennial vulnerabilities. On this stage, no team is immune from a single game-defining act: in 2000, we might say it was when Essendon great Michael Long obliterated young Dee Troy Simmonds with a shirtfront that would now fuel TV panel shows for a month.
Troy Simmonds being attended to by medical staff after the collision with Michael Long during the 2000 AFL grand final.(
Getty: Darren McNamara
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In 1988, when Hawthorn handed Melbourne a then-record 96-point drubbing, it was probably an incident unseen by the masses the day before the game, when Melbourne’s grand final greenhorns showed up 45 minutes too early for Friday’s parade through the CBD. Sitting on the ground in the baking sun, both patience and energy were lost.
Then, like now, Melbourne had come from a long way back. I once asked a football journalist of the 1980s what had changed between Melbourne’s early-80s torpor under Ron Barassi and the hard-nosed resurgence under John ‘Swooper’ Northey.
He said it was a question of matching coaching mentalities to eras: in the former years, he’d shown up to Melbourne training and seen the Dees squad split in two, playing schoolyard kick-to-kick, Barassi among them and unfurling drop punts. In Swooper’s time, he walked into the club offices after writing unfavourably of the Dees and the coach tackled him to the ground.
Northey wouldn’t think so, but this week has been as much about people like him as it is about Simon Goodwin, Max Gawn and Garry Lyon.
It’s about the late Robbie Flower, the shining light of those kick-to-kick doldrums, and his teammate Laurie Fowler, maybe the best Demons player that nobody ever talks about.
It’s about lantern-jawed full-back Danny Hughes, who won a best and fairest when Melbourne was at its worst because he was the only thing that stood between mere defeat and obliteration.
It’s about David Neitz, Todd Viney, Nathan Jones, Adem Yze, James McDonald, Aaron Davey, Neville Jetta and the brothers Lovett and Febey, who never lowered their colours.
It’s about David Schwarz, whose brutal genius was obscured by injury, and the cult heroes who gave Demons supporters a reason to show up every week: Steven ‘Strawbs’ O’Dwyer and his flying fists, airborne Shaun Smith, Jeff ‘Wizard’ Farmer, and the most outrageous of them all, Allen Jakovich.
It’s about Liam Jurrah, who said this week that he’s full of regrets but should know that he is, in the mind’s eye of most fans, still soaring through the air, as immortal as any player who has ever walked a lap of the MCG with a medal around his neck.
Liam Jurrah played 36 games across four seasons for the Dees, producing 81 goals and many more moments of brilliance.(
Getty: Quinn Rooney
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It’s about Rod Grinter, who links them all together and makes every person who has pulled on a Melbourne jumper even a single time feel as important as the ones in the Hall of Fame.
It’s about Brad Green and Neale Daniher, whom every Dees lifer would instinctively wrap up in a hug. And of course, it is about those lost along the way — Jim Stynes, Sean Wight, Troy Broadbridge, Colin Sylvia and Dean Bailey.
Melbourne’s supporters could rightly say that it’s at least a little bit about them too. The stereotypes about them are too tiresome to repeat. If we are honest, we all know Dees fans who don’t conform to the cliche.
I’m thinking now of the Dee mate who ran out of space in the behinds column of his Football Record when Jakovich was on a scatter-gun binge. And the ones who occupied the same standing room spaces at the MCG through the grimmest years and must now watch on from home. Or the one whose emotional equilibrium seemed to rest on the boot of Simon Godfrey.
Another moved west long ago, only maintaining a connection to his home city through a football team that never won. Now he’ll enjoy the surreal experience of taking a comfortable seat in a plush new stadium, thinking back on all the times he sat in driving rain at ‘Arctic Park’, Waverley, watching Graeme Yeats slide through the mud.
I’m barracking most for the one who brought blankets and a pocket radio to every game so that her brother — no longer with us to enjoy Goodwin’s magnificent new Demons — could experience just a few uncomplicated hours in his week and remember that life could still be perfect and sweet.
Could it also be that the universe is sending us signs? As grand final week progressed and many Melburnians thought such disorientingly positive things about the Melbourne football club, an earthquake shook the city from side to side. Perhaps it is time to yield.
