The Demons were football’s best show at the start of last September, and so they have been again this March and April.
It’s a completely different show now, of course, a fully realised catastrophe that you can’t take your eyes away from. It’s compelling to watch a team build and find itself, and even more so to see it disintegrate and lose everything.
That’s where Melbourne are now – on the precipice of sweet disintegration. If they don’t win on Thursday night against a mediocre Swans outfit, their season will be essentially over.
The Dees are almost artful in their lack of rhythm right now, a destroyed canvas of what should have been. Everything that came easily to them is now impossibly difficult.
You can pinpoint specifics – Tom McDonald is lost and the forward line has no structure, the defence is leaking goals, and forward entries are being butchered by poor skills and a lack of imagination – but to single out particular reasons is to undermine the broader disaster; that this team just isn’t there right now.
The Demons were so present in the second half of last year. More than any other team, you felt their physicality from the screen, James Harmes and Clayton Oliver smashing into some more bodies and coming off best.
(Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
Melbourne weren’t the most polished and didn’t always run both ways, but they were, you felt, the most physical team in the contest, and somehow that registers with us more than anything else. If you can dominate at the coalface, you will always be feared.
They have been lacking in the contest this year, but it’s everything after the contest that has doomed them into farce.
They look like they can’t run, can’t fight, can’t resist. The opposition is moving the ball at will on them – Essendon, a team that couldn’t manage ten goals in Rounds 1 or 2, got to 20 against the Dees and left a few more on the table.
In the second quarter against the Dons, Melbourne burst into life, as if finally triggered by the awareness that they were so close to death. They looked like themselves. When they are on, there is something unmatched about the magnetism of their ferocity, where they look like a controlled football avalanche, crushing and overwhelming opponents.
They’re bruising at stoppages, frenetic in spreading forward, and the opposition players seem like unfortunate, meek bystanders unwittingly thrown into the vicious Melbourne pinball machine.
All of this came back briefly in that second quarter. Oliver, Harmes, Jack Viney and Angus Brayshaw dominated around the ball, Max Gawn took contested marks and Christian Petracca, who is everywhere or nowhere with no in-between, tapped into ‘everywhere’.
The avalanche happened.
Seven goals to two and the Demons turned a disaster into a rebirth. But then they quickly reverted, disaster catching up to them in the third term, with form completely flipping, as Essendon kicked seven goals to their two.
At that point, and as Melbourne failed to mount anything beyond a token comeback in the fourth quarter – a drowning team rising up for a last breath of air, the body already far too weak to swim back to shore – it became clear: the second quarter is not who Melbourne are, only who they were.
All this can change. All the personnel that made Melbourne seem as complete a team as any a month ago is still, for the most part, intact. There are a few key deficiencies. You dream of Steven May and Jake Lever but then wake up to Oscar McDonald and Sam Frost, the latter who is just not up to it.
Tom McDonald needs to be the force he was last year, Gawn and Viney need to rediscover themselves, and Petracca needs to make the leap now.
Everything is broken. The Demons look unfit and more than anything, completely unsure. This team has melted down on their biggest stage each of the last two seasons. It was expected that Melbourne’s next test, the next opportunity to emphatically meltdown or finally prove their point, would come deep into September.
Instead, it comes in early April.
IAP
Guest
They still have the talent to be a good team; having half their backline out is hurting them more than anything. They'll find their groove and come home strong. No need to panic. They can't win the flag from here though.
Grints
Roar Rookie
All Eagle suppirters have a chip on their shoulders and have since 1987.
Grints
Roar Rookie
Get the feeling that the Dees just need a win - but it kind if has to come this week or they will be chasing too many tails.
Enigma
Roar Rookie
Karma for what? Taking all of your far less interesting/relevant club’s column space?
Enigma
Roar Rookie
The second quarter vs Essendon wasn’t some sort of magic moment where we rediscovered our true selves. It was the byproduct of Essendon being two down on the bench. We’re underdone, carrying far too many players out of form and insisting on sticking to a gameplan that only works when every player is switched on and at 100%. We won’t win many games until we get a settled 22 and we are able to get our 2018 level of midfield dominance back (we’ve already lost the contested possession count more times this year than we did in all of last year).
peter chrisp
Guest
Should be an interesting game, you look at Sydney too, they haven't really set the world on fire. It may sound a little silly, Melbourne/Dees will win a game pretty soon. Could this be the one? With my footy selections only 5 last week. I have gone for Dees.
Jack
Guest
I tipped WC to win the flag in the pre-season of 2018. They lost so many close games in 2017, much like the Lions last year. I’m pretty sure that I have got the bet slip to prove it.
User
Roar Rookie
And your opinion on Melbourne is?
Grwin
Guest
Melbourne have a tougher draw this year and they need to adjust to fact more of their opponents will hang around for longer and won't capitulate. I think the rule changes has affected their style of play as well they can't set up off the back of the square like they did for much of last year. A lot of the experts talked them up but the experts are notoriously bad and biased in the AFL few of them look at the teams in anything like an objective manner. A lot of teams are affected like this and coupled with the lopsided draw this has a fireworks effect that make average teams look brighter and flashier than they really are, usually a team has to be in and stay in the eight for a couple of years before they learn what it takes to remain there.
Gee
Roar Rookie
Melbourne are ok, all they need is a gun full forward who kicks a lot of goals. I wonder where they can find one ;)
IAP
Guest
I was wondering how he'd fit West Coast into a story about Melbourne, but he managed to do it. These West Coast supporters seem to be incapable of talking about anything other than their team.
Raimond
Roar Guru
They did beat up some second-rate opponents last year, but I think they were flattered even in their wins in Perth and against the Giants. West Coast lost a player in the first term, but the Dees only ran over them in the dying stages; GWS lost interest in that R23 match, which had little bearing on the top 4.
Dan
Guest
I am sick and tired of hearing people bag the experts, m,ate, nobody on planet earth thought the eagles would win the flag at the start of last year. Stop dribbling nonsense
Kaniel Outis
Guest
This is karma. I hope they lose all their games.
shifty
Roar Rookie
You won the flag and still have a chip on your shoulder.
Paul D
Roar Rookie
I assure you Jay, the Demons are already in Hell, all 9 circles of it. The team remains in the eternal limbo we have endured ever since 1964. Our lust for free agents led us to Lever and May, who have proven to be true Delilahs of the AFL, betraying us with their flesh. One only needs to see the bulging business shirts and buttons flying across the room during the half-time gorge at the MCC restaurants to see the gluttony on display. Our greed for premierships and the unsavoury and underhanded tactics we employed to try and rebuild our list some ten years ago is well documented. The anger from supporters is white hot, the steam coming out of the ears of MCC members declaiming the poor performance of the Fuchsias is one of the leading causes of premature snow melt on the slopes of Perisher every July. The club's heresy in cutting ties with the holy mother church that was the MCC in the 1980 has not led the club from the promised land, not even the returning apostle Ron Barassi could lift the team onto the premiership dias. The violence of young Tomas Bugg reflected very poorly on such a distinguished club and it is no surprise he was forced into retirement to prevent blackening the club's reputation and further eyes of fellow players. The fraud perpetuated by the board of the MCC and their disgraceful antics in scapegoating poor old Dean Bailey for a deliberate attempt to lose games of football will damn us for all time. And finally the treachery of players like Tom Scully and Jesse Hogan who undid all the hard work the club undertook to deliberately lose games of football only for the draft bounty of those losses to walk out on the club proves once and for all that this club is truly damned in the eyes of the football gods. We are truly lost.
WCE
Roar Rookie
and yet all the so called football experts were saying the Dee's would be the team to rise and beat this year , doesn't say much for there opinions does it . like last year the prediction by many football "experts" that west coast would be bottom 4 - how'd that one work out?
Tony Tea
Guest
The Dees changed their pre-season to fit in all the players returning from operations.
Gordon P Smith
Roar Guru
It does seem like, more than any other teams in recent memory, the Demons and the Suns are proving this early season that there really isn't much difference between the top and the bottom of the league. It's mostly a matter of the mental things that lift a team up or knock them down.
Jack
Guest
I seem to recall that it was Goodwin that said they changed their pre-season routine so as to peak later in the year, or was it another team? If it was the Dees one has to wonder how much of an impact that this has had on their slow start? Or maybe they simply the press and thought that all they needed to do was turn up?