It was the name of a hardware store in the town I grew up in. When my father had a problem, be it a broken fence paling, a leaking tap, a squeaky door maybe, there was only one oracle worth consulting.
“Let’s get down to Magilton’s,” he would say, “and hope he knows how to sort this mess out.”
Lately I have had cause to wonder if my late father might have whispered in the ear of the – ahem – steady helmsmen of the S.S. Melbourne Victory.
Stranger things have happened, and it feels like many of the decisions of the last twelve months smack of late night meetings around the Ouija board, drinking Wipeout from polystyrene cups.
Which leads to the key question. How do you turn a stable, successful, and financially viable entity like the Melbourne Victory into a desperate rabble?
Well, ask the boys in charge on Swan Street, because they did it. If our football club was a friend of yours, they’d be the former star athlete and academic whiz who was always the most popular bloke in the room before he discovered methamphetamine and all his teeth fell out. You know, the one you didn’t realise was in trouble until he broke into your house, stole the rent money and crapped in the washing basket.
For this scribe, the downfall of the Victory was like a 3D magic eye puzzle. The full horror of the image emerged slowly, but once it did I couldn’t believe I never saw it. I ended up feeling guilty for letting it happen and having too much faith in those in charge, and wrote a pointless article to assuage the guilt.
It began with the sacking of Ernie Merrick.
When a coach is flushed like that, some fans agree while many declare it a bad move. He was a two-time premiership coach and discovered some fine players along the way. He was never going to perform stand up at the Comedy Festival, or leave a whoopee cushion on your chair, but he was a good manager.
Not good enough, came the argument from the new board, not for an ambitious club like ours.
As both Portsmouth and Nicky Ward can attest, ambition in football is a dangerous thing. Gary Cole went quietly, the administrator and Merrick’s wingman.
His replacement was Francis Awaritefe, he of dull television punditry and exotic name, he of no experience whatsoever aside from playing.
No-one cries when the backroom staff goes, but from all reports Cole’s influence was incredibly valuable to the establishment and success of the club in the early years. It might well be that the rot set in there, before the sacking of the excitable and dynamic Scot.
Who to lead then?
Conspiracy theorists saw the shadowy figure of the ultimate black hat villain, Kevin Muscat, as a certainty. They were much mistaken, like any Victorian batsman who covets the baggy green.
In the interim, they gave the job to youth coach Mehmet Durakovic, former uncompromising Socceroo defender, who would be assisted by Slagger Muscat (seriously, the man spits like cheap bacon). Note the word ‘interim’.
The normal rhetoric of leaving no stone unturned and interviewing a plethora of candidates both here and overseas rang out across the wires.
Anyone who has ever coached or played in the English Premier League and happened to holiday in the Southern Hemisphere was linked to the post. The board demanded a high profile candidate who would lead the club to the pinnacle of Asian Cup and A-League football.
They hired Durakovic.
Why? A few draws and not a complete disaster in the Asian Champions League, even though we failed to get past the group stage and Etihad Stadium was emptier than the US Treasury. Well, said the board, changing their tunes, that is good enough after all.
The Victory have planned for the future, they said, and signed exciting talent. We brought in Cernak, Rojas and Solorzano before the biggest fish in the universe, the greatest footballer Australia ever produced, was linked with the club.
Nine months later, (once I’d stolen a police car, driven it backwards through a McDonalds restaurant, gone to court and served a custodial sentence) he actually signed! Hallelujah, came the cries, The Victory are back, and are unstoppable, and you wait until the season starts!
Early on, big crowds and fast football got the masses going like Stephen Hawking in a thunderstorm, at least in Brisbane. Meanwhile,Big Mem, leader and doyen, had more trouble with subject verb agreement and conventions of singular and plural than Mark Bosnich on a bad day. He made confusing statements about lack of preparation (strange after the longest preseason in domestic football history) and players needing to ‘gel’.
Mehemet used the word ‘gel’ a lot. In the first six months of the year, as the Victory form line plummeted and Slagger Muscat scowled on the sideline, the true horror of that 3D magic eye puzzle became clear.
The Melbourne Victory was a rabble.
Our once steady football club was driving very fast down a dark road with no headlights, and no one was really sure who was driving.
In the end, after all of the hullabaloo and navel gazing, once all the tweets were tweeted and the drums of the North End banged, once Bernie Mandic, Awaritefe, Gaddaffi, Amy Winehouse and bin Laden signed off, and Mehmet was put out of his misery, the board were clearly left with one option…
“Let’s get down to Magilton’s,” they said, “and hope he knows how to sort this mess out.”
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