Are We The Real Deal?

by Demonblog's newest recruit - Bartram_Class

As I sat through the agony of Lance Franklin flogging Chopper like a dead horse in the last quarter of the supposed meaningless NAB Cup, it felt like a big case of déjà vu.

2004 – Great start to the year, tailed off and a first round exit in the finals to an Essendon side going downhill faster than Jonathan Hay’s career.

2005 – Great start to the year, tailed off before scraping into the finals before getting flogged by the Cats, who we had beat in that 1 point thriller a few weeks earlier.

2006 – Great start to the year, tailed off before beating a St. Kilda side that was running on extras in the Elim. Final. Went to Perth and soundly beaten by the purplepuffs.

Now some would say that timeline shows improvement. Now I’d love to think of myself as an optimist, but surely you would have to have Lawrence Angwin on speed dial to be happy with our results in previous years with the list at our disposal.

However, as 2007 came upon us, we were flooded with forecasts of a Demon resurgence in ’07. Daniher was pumping us up like only he can, the boys were cutting it up on the track and everything seemed rosy. Now call me a pessimistic fan, most of us are, but there were so many gaps in our performance against the Hawks that you can’t be confident about our chances this year. Forget we were missing the best player, the best kick and the fastest player in the competition. Its other areas that are of more worry. Namely the ruck, White is 30 and has never been the same since the centre circle rule came in, the Russian is big and can win a tap but that is about it, once the ball hits the deck, hes as useful as tits on a bull. Paul Johnson is a 200cm giant that plays like Tony Liberatore in his prime. All credit to him but he needs a shitload of work before he becomes a decent ruck prospect. Merge them together and we’d be unstoppable, sadly we can’t afford to have one of them in the ruck at the moment, let alone both.

Of course it was only the first round of the NAB Cup and Hawthorn had almost their best side out on the park. However, we had three quarters of ours out there also and we failed to beat a team most expect to be down near the bottom for the 4th successive year. Go figure.

I am not ready to throw in the towel yet for Season ’07, not by a long shot, but to think we are going to march into the top 4 and stay there would be profoundly inaccurate. Never forget, we do support the Melbourne Football Club, capable of anything on a given day.