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Nearly three years ago, the Brisbane Lions made the shock decision to sack favourite son Michael Voss as its head coach.
This came despite an improved season in which they had won eight games to that point in the 2013 season, and were still in with a chance to contest what would’ve been just their second finals series since 2004.
The fear of missing out on former Sydney Swans premiership coach Paul Roos, as well as fears of a player walkout, prompted the triple-premiers of 2001-3 to dismiss Voss, who as captain led the club to that hat-trick of flags earlier this millennium.
Former Fremantle coach Mark Harvey would step in as caretaker coach and would win two of the three games that remained, with the only loss coming by just a solitary point against the Geelong Cats in Round 23.
Harvey then left the Lions and another favourite son of the club, Justin Leppitsch, was appointed as head coach on a three-year deal. This came after Roos decided he’d be better off rebuilding the Melbourne Football Club instead.
The decision to overlook Roos in favour of Leppitsch could come back to haunt the Lions, with the club all but having gone backwards under the former premiership defender’s tenure.
Since his appointment in September 2013, the Lions have won just 12 of 60 games under Leppitsch, with seven wins and a 15th-place finish in his first season their best return.
In addition, the club has seen the likes of Joel Patfull, Matthew Leuenberger, Jack Redden and James Aish leave the club, and Lions fans would be hurting at seeing some of these players starring at other clubs.
This came on the top of several other players, namely Sam Docherty, Elliot Yeo, Patrick Karnezis, Jack Crisp and Billy Longer, leaving the club within a month of Leppitsch’s appointment in 2013 to return to their home states.
Still, they did gain some experienced players such as Allen Christensen, Dayne Beams and Ryan Bastinac, among others. Beams, in particular, excelled in his first season at the Lions, winning the best-and-fairest in a four-way tie, but has struggled with a serious knee injury this season, managing only two games.
Beams’ injury, which has cost him the rest of this season, is one of many lowlights for the Lions in 2016, whereby they have only managed just one victory, against the Gold Coast Suns at home by 13 points in Round 4.
In many of their other matches this season the side has been anything but uncompetitive, with last Sunday’s 79-point thrashing by the GWS Giants counting among many of the shockers the fans have been treated to in 2016.
The match was played in front of just 10,195 fans, with several factors such as the unpopular Sunday twilight timeslot, poor rain and a low-drawing club being factors behind the poor turnout.
For the Giants, their next match against Port Adelaide at the Oval, also a Sunday twilight fixture, is set to be played in front of a crowd nearly three times the figure they played in front of on Sunday night.
It was a far cry from the corresponding match four years ago, when the Lions put the cleaners through the Giants, who were playing in just their eighth AFL match, by 92 points.
This will only heap more pressure on coach Justin Leppitsch, and many believe that if the Lions lose to an equally-poor Essendon side this weekend, that he might be axed immediately.
Not helping the Lions’ cause will be the fact that for the first time all year, the Bombers will actually start as favourites among the bookies on the back of some decent performances in the past few weeks.
The fact that the match, which could decide the wooden spoon and thus the number one pick at the AFL Draft in November, is at Etihad Stadium will also lengthen the Lions’ chances of causing what, even in normal circumstances, would be an upset victory.
The deep hole the Lions have found themselves in is similar to what Melbourne found themselves in as recently as three years ago.
Late in 2011, after the Dees suffered a humiliating 186-point defeat to the Geelong Cats at Simonds Stadium, the club acted swiftly, sacking then-coach Dean Bailey despite still being in finals contention with five rounds left that season.
After a tough first few years under Bailey, the club was starting to turn things around on and off the field and even spent a week in the eight, but the catastrophic result in Geelong and Bailey’s subsequent sacking sent the club backwards by miles.
Collingwood president Eddie McGuire said on his Triple M Hot Breakfast Show the following Monday that the club had acted too quickly following the near-record defeat.
“I hate to say this, but I think they’ve pulled the wrong rein on this one,” he said.
“What have they done? All they’ve done is blown the club up this week. You never make a football decision within 24 hours of getting belted like that because the only thing anyone wants to do is sack everybody. Your mood changes sometimes while walking from the stands down into the rooms.”
Nearly five years on and it remains to be seen how Melbourne would have eventually fared in the subsequent years had that result at Kardinia Park not occurred and Bailey, who would eventually pass away in 2014, remained as coach.
A month and a half later the club appointed Mark Neeld as head coach and he famously said that he wanted to coach the club “that’s hardest to play against”.
Those words would come back to bite Neeld hard after he was sacked just 21 months later, presiding over five wins from 33 matches and suffering several heavy defeats, the worst of which was a 148-point loss to Essendon in early 2013.
It was after that loss to the Bombers that speculation started to pile on Neeld’s future, and after months of speculation he was eventually dismissed, to be replaced by Paul Roos, who would restore some common sense to the club.
That included appointing the always hard-working Nathan Jones as co-captain (he’d later become the sole captain of the club), recruiting the likes of Bernie Vince, Heritier Lumumba and Dom Tyson and appointing Simon Goodwin to be his eventual successor as head coach.
Though it has taken a while, the hard work Roos has invested in his three years at Melbourne is starting to pay off and he will without a doubt leave the club in a much better state than when he found them.
The Dees’ slow but gradual improvement is a stark contrast to the huge hole the Brisbane Lions find themselves in at the moment.
In a similar manner to the crisis Melbourne were mired in all those years ago, it also remains to be seen how the Lions would have fared had Michael Voss not been given his marching orders in August 2013.
The club had reached the finals in his first season in charge back in 2009, but despite the much-hyped recruitment of Carlton full-forward Brendan Fevola the following year would crash to 13th place with just seven victories.
A dismal 2011 season would follow before some improvement in 2012 saw the club finish 13th on the ladder with ten wins.
They were sitting on eight wins for the 2013 season when Voss was sacked ahead of two winnable home matches against the GWS Giants and Western Bulldogs.
That would’ve seen them on ten wins for the year, and after Essendon were expelled from the finals as a result of irregularities in their well-documented supplements program before Round 23, the race for eighth place was open wide.
All the Lions had to do was defeat the Geelong Cats at Simonds Stadium, something they hadn’t done since 2003, and they’d be in pending the results of the Port Adelaide versus Carlton and Collingwood versus North Melbourne matches.
In the end they’d eventually fall short after a shot at goal from Ryan Lester just metres out was touched on the line. The Cats escaped with a one-point victory and the Lions’ finals hopes died with it.
Had his shot at goal not been touched, the Lions would’ve won by four points and they would’ve entered the eight, but in the end Carlton would defeat Port Adelaide by one point to lock up the last finals berth vacated by Essendon.
Since that missed opportunity the Lions would appoint Justin Leppitsch as coach, shortly after Paul Roos signed on to coach Melbourne.
Nearly three years on history will say that the Lions got it completely wrong by giving up on Roos when his services became available. Many will also ponder what could’ve been had he signed on as Lions coach instead of embarking on the rebuild project at the Demons, which he has done impressively.
If the Lions are to sack Justin Leppitsch at some point from here, ranging from even next week to the end of next season when his contract is due to expire, they should not waste their time trying to pursue Roos again. The 53-year-old will very likely retire from AFL coaching for good at the end of this season.
It would be up to them to seek out the best coach possible and they’ll need some patience with whoever eventually becomes their next mentor going forward, because unlike the Western Bulldogs, who reached the finals last year despite being touted as wooden spooners pre-season, it won’t be a short-term fix.
In the end, when Leppitsch’s coaching tenure at the Brisbane Lions come to an end, so too will one of the most disastrous periods in the club’s recent history unless he can turn things around in whatever time he might have left at the Gabba.
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