Are the Storm in decline and does the game want them dead?

These are strange times. The pandemic, while ushering in fear and uncertainty, has also had a hand in fomenting unrest.

Grievances are taking hold. Revenge for perceived injustice and past emasculation is being exacted.

Revolt is in the air, even in rugby league.

But let’s go back 22 years to the night of Friday April 3, 1998 when the story of the Melbourne Storm really began.

The undefeated Storm had to wait until Round 4 before they got to play their first home game at Olympic Park that drew more than a passing interest from the 20,500 AFL-bred Melburnians who turned up.

The down-market venue struggled to get thousands in on time and when they did many were forced to sit it out on the edge of the athletics track surrounding the playing field.

They kept returning because the Storm kept winning. The opposition would stumble out into the screeching vocals of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck and the mist and the frost and the booing.

Olympic Park came to be known as the Graveyard. But a graveyard is a quiet resting place for the departed. This crumbling concrete and corrugated-iron-roofed amphitheatre in a rugby league backwater was a slaughterhouse.

In an article I wrote on the Thrilla in Manila, one of the great heavyweights fights of all time between Muhammed Ali and Joe Frazier, a Roar respondent said he knew someone seated behind Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, who was spattered with blood and saliva from the bout whose mesmerising brutality summoned the sad decline of both fighters.

None of the novices in the Olympic Park crowd were covered in blood and saliva but the sound of the impacts during that first game left a lasting impression.

Melbourne’s response to their team shouldn’t have come as a surprise, really. Four years earlier across the road at the MCG a world record league crowd of over 87,000 attended the second State of Origin clash.

During that match Peter Sterling expressed the pride of traditional league fans at the response to their game in AFL land when he said to fellow commentator Ray Warren: “Gets the heart pumping, doesn’t it Ray?”.

In the two decades since, that pride has turned to resentment.

On the competition’s return from the shutdown the rules were suddenly changed. The people’s chairman Peter V’landys claimed he was responding to fan polls calling for a more attacking game. The reasons given were based on enhanced aesthetics and, to be fair, on viewing the game there is some validity to that.

(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)

However, the prime reason for the sudden change to a single referee and the six-again rule is testament to the greatness of the Melbourne Storm. They had to change the rules to bring down an empire.

And I’m sure it was hoped that their fellow superpower, the similarly defence-oriented Roosters, would crumble beside them.

And on the back of a recommendation and dossier by a certain former club chairman, a vehement critic of the Storm, the NRL commissioned a report on the blight of wrestling in the game. It found less than ten per cent of tackles and four per cent of play-the-balls involved any form of wrestling and that no club performed such tackles more than any other.

To further assuage the traditionalists, V’landys ignored the success of the Melbourne Storm and its contribution to the game when discussing the location of a new team: “No good spending a lot of money in rusted-on AFL states. You want to go to the states that have the population that loves the game.”

You won’t find supporters who love the game more than those who follow the Storm, Pete. The membership numbers and the game and television audiences are proof of that.

The only rust here was on the old Olympic Park turnstiles, which ushered in a new, compelling era for the game. They have since been replaced by electronic ones and the Storm fans continue to pass through.

There has been evidence of a decline. It looked like the party was over just three years in after the departure of players and inaugural coach Chris Anderson. They failed to make the finals in 2001 and 2002.

Then, everything aligned in 2003. There was the arrival of a coach who had learnt under the greatest at the time and a trio of Queensland youngsters whose abilities and superhuman work ethics would forever haunt the rest of the competition, but especially the club that let them by.

Four consecutive grand final appearances, three consecutive minor premierships and two premierships followed before that day arrived on April 22, 2010 when David Gallop announced those penalties for systematic breaches of the salary cap of $3.7 million over five years.

The erroneous assumption that Gallop and many understandably angry fans made at the time was that the Storm had bought themselves success. Now while this isn’t an excuse for the rorting, they didn’t – and still haven’t – bought any star players during the Craig Bellamy era.

(Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

Even after the departures of Cooper Cronk and Billy Slater the club looked inwards. It didn’t work out for Brodie Croft so they turned to a fullback Jahrome Hughes, who has slowly but surely become a potent number seven. And Slater’s replacement, the sinewy third-string Tigers reject Ryan Papenhuyzen will most likely be making his Origin debut after only one full NRL season.

As Bellamy has lamented from the start, the club is outside the game’s heartland and is forced into luring youngsters and rejects from the game’s heartland and turning them into champions only to see the other clubs come poaching, and yet it doesn’t receive any compensation or salary cap concessions.

The team’s dominance was seen to be due to the fortuitous recruitment and illegal retention of the big four.

The first major victim of the salary cap scandal was the great Greg Inglis, who went on to help the Rabbitohs win a title with his former Storm assistant Michael Maguire as coach. Then one of the great halfbacks of the modern era left for love, but in so doing helped another club win consecutive premierships. Then the greatest fullback of all time retired to a chorus of boos and abuse.

One recent TV skit by Nathan Hindmarsh and Bryan Fletcher, a time-travel piece, opens with…

“The year is 2060… and Cameron Smith [cut to an image of a grey haired and bearded Storm captain] is playing his 63rd [actually it would be his 59th] season for the Melbourne Storm”. We then see three versions of Hindmarsh – a current day, a middle aged, and a sickly elderly one – seated together on a couch. One of them picks up the remote and asks: “Time for some league boys?”. One replies: “As long it’s not a rerun of the 2009 grand final.” Another mutters: “F…ing Melbourne Storm!” and the third follows with: “F…ing cheating bastards!”

It’s been a running gag among his contemporaries since Hindmarsh’s retirement that the 330-game Parramatta great failed to win a premiership. Despite his good-natured response to the jibes (and the fact that Parramatta are now officially cheats also), the aforementioned 2009 grand final loss to a team later found to be rorting the salary cap must burn deeply.

Although witty and lighthearted, the skit expresses the exasperation, if not underlying contempt, for the way the Storm have achieved their seemingly never-ending success. Also significant is its identification of Smith, the greatest player of all time according to Andrew Johns, as the lynch pin of the club’s modern reign.

(Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

Most supporters would gladly have the family pet cavoodle put down if it would get Cameron Smith to their club yet they still view him as the embodiment of arrogance, sly diplomacy and questionable morality.

In response to the incessant booing before, during and after his final game in the 2018 grand final loss to the Roosters, Billy Slater could have been excused for replying: “You’ve just won the competition, with the help of our great former halfback, and one of the greatest players of all time is retiring and will no longer cause you palpitations playing against your club and state, so give me some respect you lousy b——s!”

Instead, realising the nature of fan passion, Slater responded with: “If Wally Lewis can cop boos, I’ll be okay with it.”

Many in the media have also had a gut full of the Storm.

There are at least two journalists who regularly ooze contempt for the club. It began with the salary cap and the use of wrestling and the supposed dark arts of jiu jitsu and now focuses on Cameron Smith’s influence on referees.

And however hard he may try, Greg Alexander just can’t hide his bias against the team.

Phil Gould issues intense monologues on the nature of the game. He is a former NSW State of Origin-winning coach who had witnessed the salary cap rorting yet still wrote the foreword to Craig Bellamy’s 2013 autobiography Home Truths.

(Photo by Brendon Thorne/Getty Images)

“Melbourne Storm is everything you want your football team to be. They take kids, develop and nurture them, and turn them into champions. Every club would like to do that.”

These days, however, he has become more critical or simply tired of their influence on the game hence his increasingly unenthusiastic, almost biased, commentary of their matches.

On Jahrome Hughes’ equalising try off an error against the Roosters in Round 8, compare Andrew John’s comments with those of Gould.

Johns: “They’re just an incredible club. Think of the legends they’ve lost. Other teams lose legends in certain positions and they struggle for years. This club just keeps powering on”.

Gould: “Another fortunate try for the Storm”.

Despite winning the opening games in two of the toughest road trips against Manly and Cronulla, the Storm were disappointing in their Round 3 loss to the then premiership favourites, an impressive Canberra.

Gould had this to say: “They [Storm] are not the side they were. It’s been an incremental decline in them over the years. I don’t see a premiership in them this year, I don’t even really see a top four”.

Incremental decline? They were last year’s minor premiers by three games and a massive points differential and the same two years before that when they won the premiership at a canter. Ten minutes from the 2018 regular season ending, it looked they had that minor premiership sewn up too before the Roosters steamrolled Parramatta.

(Photo by Robert Prezioso/Getty Images)

Understandably many were hostile towards the Victorian team on its arrival at a time other clubs were facing extinction or amalgamation.

But many good judges saw the Storm’s entry as a bit of a joke: a band of Super League leftovers and eager youngsters with an ageing, decaying former star as captain by the name of Glenn Lazarus (but, unlike his namesake, he was deemed beyond resurrecting).

Even the locals were sceptical about the club’s prospects. However their success was immediate. Those who had previously been giggling into their Tooheys at the prospect of playing a motley crew thrown together in a pathetic attempt to make the game a national one couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

Suddenly the narrative changed to one of invasion sponsored by News Ltd. It became the story of cultural appropriation of the game.

It’s said the Storm introduced the wrestle. What’s wrong with introducing something? There is strong evidence that Wayne Bennett introduced it but Bellamy perfected it.

Everyone says how great the game was before the Storm became dominant. I don’t agree. Perhaps viewing themselves as outsiders with something to prove they saw the game as a novice might: tackled players wobbling and thrashing about on the ground like suffocating fish in order to milk penalties and stiff-arm cheap-shot tackles.

The game has become more aesthetic with organised defences and perfectly executed shoulder-on-shoulder, shoulder-on-hip tackles.

And has it really been an empire? Four premierships (two were stripped) from eight grand finals. They went very close in 2006 and 2016. They were never in it in 2008 and 2018. They didn’t make the big one after winning the minor premierships in 2011 and 2019. They won seven minor premierships (three were stripped).

But the success of a team can be gauged on its influence on other clubs’ eagerness to import a winning culture. At the start of the season six of the NRL coaches were former Storm assistants.

Also, it doesn’t take long to forget that a player used to be at another club. I watched the Cowboys in one of their games and realised they had four former Storm players in the team: former premiership players Jordan McLean and Justin O’Neill, Ben Hampton and young star Scott Drinkwater.

When Ryan Papenhuyzen kicked that long-range drop goal to level the scores against the Roosters there was a chap behind the posts with a towel and water bottle, his head following the ball’s curving trajectory willing it to miss. It was Matt King, the former garbo and Cronulla reserve team bench warmer who the Storm picked up and made a star.

Nick Politis admitted he bought Cooper Cronk to win the competition and to use him – just as he intends to use Sonny Bill Williams – as a coach and mentor after retirement.

(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)

Both Luke Keary and James Tedesco have attributed their rise to superstardom to the former Storm orchestrator.

Brisbane, their grand final vanquishers of 2006, have been a rabble ever since against Melbourne. Manly, the great rival of Storm’s modern era, and Cronulla have come and gone as genuine premiership contenders. And that’s no criticism. It’s a tough relentless competition.

So how have Melbourne remained at the pinnacle?

It’s exhausting being at the top. I watch other games and they are rarely at the same intensity as those involving Melbourne. Every side – those on the rise wanting to prove their premiership credentials and those at the bottom with no prospect of a finals berth in the foreseeable future – play at grand final intensity against them.

Titans and Queensland prop Jarrod Wallace recently commented that beating Melbourne in a regular season game back in 2017 was his most memorable victory in club football.

For all his success in league and boxing, Anthony Mundine, by his own admission, remains haunted by the Storm and his mistake in that 1999 grand final.

Australian writer Robert Dessaix wrote: “Can there be a more important word than ‘home’ to make your own in the English language? ‘Love’ I suppose, although I wonder sometimes if they might amount to much the same thing”.

Virtually no one at the Storm hails from here. For the several New Zealanders it’s at least closer to home than Sydney. They’re closer knit for being outsiders. And with the current forced cohabitation in Queensland it seems, if club footage is anything to go by, they have become even closer.

The necessity of having to create a home for its recruits is shared by Canberra, who have an equally dreadful climate and unwelcome culture for kids spawned on the beaches of Sydney and Queensland.

On the excellent but now defunct all-female-hosted show League Life, Ricky Stuart was asked how difficult it was to attract young players from places like Bondi, Manly and Cronulla to the bureaucratic, icy wasteland of the nation’s capital. With his usual surliness Stuart refused to concede the disadvantages of his location and instead repeated: “They’ll play for me!”

Fed up with potential recruits deciding to stay home or back-flipping on deals he came up with the brilliant idea of summoning a squadron of forwards from the north of England used to ordinary weather. I assume he didn’t tell them that despite being half way to Sydney, Canberra is actually colder than Melbourne, or that training in Wigan and Hull during the middle of summer is preferable to training in Canberra in mid winter.

Cameron Munster after a game commented: “We miss Melbourne. That’s our home and we’ll never forget what Victoria has done for us as a club”.

(Photo by Graham Denholm/Getty Images)

A vee with the words ‘Our home, Victoria’ now has a permanent place on the front of the jersey. That should be a source of pride for the game.

So what are the Storm’s secrets?

All recruits, Brenko Lee being the latest, say the same thing: meticulous preparation, hard work and gaining self belief. And without exception, whether they’ve been at other clubs or believed they were never going to get to play NRL, they mention their pride at being given a Storm jersey.

The great clubs have no diseased segments. Everyone works to the best of their ability (without admitting to themselves they’ve achieved their best) towards the same goal, which is success.

Successful culture is about winning but it also has the more endearing aspects of mateship and passion. It’s extremely difficult to pull that off, even with a financial advantage like the Storm, being a one-city team (albeit an AFL one), and the Roosters, whose board is stacked with business gurus who can legally exploit the third-party system.

For the Storm, I’m sure the level of success will end eventually. The one failing so far has been the lack of promotion of Victorian talent to the elite level. Without an AFL-style draft this may be the club’s eventual undoing.

Soon they bid farewell to three more players they made into stars, as Josh Addo-Carr, Suliasi Vunivalu and Tino Faasuamaleaui return home and/or take advantage of their enhanced market values.

(Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)

After the retirement of Bellamy and Smith, will promising youngsters and rejects still travel south in the belief they will be coached by the best?

Whether the changes this club have brought to rugby league are good bad or ugly or a combination of the three will depend on your perspective. Some judgements will be measured, others will be tainted with envy and resentment, or blind passion for the club.

When the northern border is reopened I wonder if the soon-to-be-completed bronze statues of Cameron Smith and Billy Slater will – as is consistent with the mood of the times – be pulled down by a mob chanting “cheats and grubs!” and hurled into the sludge-lined shallows of the Yarra River, or strung up from the rafters of AAMI Park as a warning to Victorians, who dare to excel at a sport that’s not their own.

I appreciate not everyone wants the Storm dead, rather that they just become an ordinary team, for a little while at least. I can understand that.

To the NRL, I thank you for allowing the great game to take hold down here. I realise it’s been controversial and that for many the experiment has been too successful.

But it has been a compelling time. The story of the Melbourne Storm is one of the great ones in Australian sport.