(What's The Backstory) Mourning Glory?

I don't buy the idea that everything would be ok if we had a coach who yelled at players more, but our struggles over the last fortnight bring to mind that great motivational speech, "You climb obstacles like old people fuck!" Now we're in a giant mess, accompanied by the sound-barrier shattering noise of Melbourne FC's relevance to 2025 going out the window. Where else would you rather be? Other than an explosively decompressing jumbo jet over the Atlantic Ocean.

Remember when we used to win games with scores like 8.14.62? There are a few posts in the 2022-2024 region with the theme of 'happy to get the points, not sure this is sustainable', and indeed it wasn't. Things started falling apart after the memorable last stand against Geelong, not even pausing at the miserable on-field ending of the season before various big names were only held back from scaling the wall to freedom by long-term contracts. Which, and sorry if this comes as a surprise to any players, is sort of the point.

Despite everything that went wrong last year, 2025 offered good prospects for a reboot. If you cynically focused on the narrow losses last year instead of multiple high-profile implosions we weren't that bad. Now good players were back from injury, failed positional switches had been corrected, and multiple top draft picks had arrived. Even with the sour end of the GWS game, there was a strong enough combination of good signs and excuses to make you think things might just turn out alright.

So anyway, two weeks later the guy who once kicked six blessed goals in a Grand Final dropped a simple mark that would have at best kept us within range at three quarter time, then scrambled for a loose ball on the ground like an old man whose shopping bag had just burst, before said ball rocketed down the other end for a goal. It lacks the 'picture that defines an era' quality of this classic, but says everything you need to know about the direction we're headed in this year.

For all the scorn poured on the AFL, giving us consecutive home games against teams with no fans was an accurate prediction of Melbourne's trajectory. I don't know what it does for the game to deliberately have two empty looking stadiums in a row. Maybe tell the MCC to open the upper deck that can seen on TV instead of the hidden one? Maybe neither party gives a rats because games like this are there to be endured until lucrative meetings between popular sides come along.

Given the intensity of our collapse against North, I'm surprised this game had a bigger crowd than Round 1. As no self-respecting neutral would be seen dead at either, it means we've got a lot of Grand Prix fanatics, or Riverdance: The Post Goal Musical wasn't the draw they thought it was. Fair to say a lot less people were in attendance at the final siren this time. Relegation to the all-new graveyard slot of 1.20pm Saturday meant it was over early, but anyone who stayed to the end of this grim, miserable, slopfest without publicly disgracing themselves should get a personalised thank you from the club. 

No handwritten apology for me, as I was unavoidably occupied by [none of your business]. Won't pretend to feel guilty, consider it moral payback for all the live excitement I've missed in recent years. It's got nothing to do with expecting a five goal loss, if I'm going to suffer I'd rather it be in person. What if my presence had somehow affected the atmosphere, changing the cause of history and leading us to a thumping win that set us on the road to glory? Sorry about that. Can I instead offer you a disappointing thrashing from a side we hadn't lost to in 11 years (admittedly, with near-misses in 2016, 2019, and 2023)? 

More lifeless defeat was an appropriate end to another wacky week of following Melbourne. The fun started with Simon Goodwin's all-time classic press conference after the North disaster, responding to a question about Gawn's performance with an answer that will live in infamy. In launching a defence that wasn't required or wanted, the coach made it sound like some sort of deep dark secret was about to be revealed, kicking off a brief but memorable media frenzy. 

Just when you were worried that our captain had taken an idea from [deleted on legal advice, but it's still on his Wikipedia page all these years later] and flopped his chop outside Elsternwick Post Office, the matter was revealed to be a long-term illness affecting somebody close to him. That's no good for anyone involved (and also none of our business), but had also been a thing the previous week when Gawn was our best player. God knows why it needed to be raised then, other than as a panic reaction to facing the music after our worst loss in years.

The 'loose lips sink premierships' incident might have been relegated to a weird footnote in history if that loss shocked us back to life. Instead, for the second week in a row we were blown to strands of DNA by a team who - on paper - should not have been allowed to win that easily. Farewell to our longest unbeaten streak, and unless you think University can still avenge nine consecutive losses to us, the new unbeaten streak leader is eight wins and a draw in a row against Hawthorn. And fat chance of that surviving beyond Round 9.

Speaking of Hawthorn, for all the internal pain of watching our season crash out on the first corner I've got a perverse fascination in their evolution from what looked like rank amateurs against us to premiership contenders. I guess they refined the 'chip, chip, chip, chip, kick into a nothing happening forward line, watch it go the other way' style we've now adopted with the religious fervour of the mad bastards who crucify themselves for Easter.

One of these clubs is now the glamour side of the competition. The other is Melbourne, who have entered a backwards race with Carlton to see who can annoy their fans the most. Thank god we got something out of our brief time at the top, because I bet Blues fans who were snippy about us winning a flag in offbeat circumstances would self-mutilate for a bit of that action now. Now the race is on to see which board will crack first. 

We've got recent success going for us, but they haven't lost back-to-back games by 10 goals to emerging (e.g. haven't done anything for years) teams, but obviously Carlton will sack their coach first. Firstly, he's never won anything, and more importantly they live for bloodlust. If he does get the boot Michael Voss may be the lucky one. Obvious wounded pride and definitive end to senior coaching career aside, he'll bank a generous payout and head directly back to the media. On the other hand, I fear our only living premiership coach will be forced to put an increasingly strained brave face on things while he's dragged through toxic waste for the rest of the season.

As bad as the last two weeks have been, I don't know what you're going to gain from upending everything now. At the same time, you can't go on like this forever so keep your Coaching Chaos bingo card nearby. I predict journalists will start with phrases like "the club will wrap their arms around him", before switching to saying "untenable" a few weeks later when there's blood in the water.

We could always come back from the dead and make this gloomy post look absurd. If you're reading in the future I'd like it known that compared to the way many people were carrying on, my tone is positively inspirational. I stop at indulging any comparison to Brisbane winning the flag from 0-3 last year. What about the 999 other teams to do bugger all from the same position? Yes, we made finals from this spot in 2006, but the third of those losses was by five points and involved goal umpiring scandal. With 20 games left anything could happen, but if this year ends with us even close to finals my jaw will drop so far I'll be mistaken for a pelican.

Despite clear signals of an impending tits-up shambles in the second half of 2024, I emotionally invested in a revival. Not just for selfish reasons, but because I really wanted the coach to pull back from (what wasn't yet) the brink and stuff success elbow-deep down the throat of his critics. That's looking unlikely, and if things do end badly I want to focus on the time we unleashed 40 minutes of power on the grandest stage, not spiralling to our doom as the pound-for-pound most boring team ever to breathe air.

I don't expect anyone else to be this romantic about the coach, and as long as you can express yourself with basic human decency and respect I'm happy to stand together and silently shake our heads in dismay at how it's all gone wrong. Goodwin also comes across as somebody who'd do better in the club environment than sitting on the couch, so maybe we've got some bullshit Bez-style ceremonial job for him instead of everyone patiently waiting for the footy equivalent of putting the family dog down.

It's getting a bit Daniher '07, hopefully without the club hideously botching the transition and encouraging the coach to quit by making him reapply for his job. Strangely, Neale won nothing and went out to a hero's reception, while the guy who if nothing else kept things together enough to make 2021 possible will depart with people being tremendously rude about him. 

This might be because some of us had gone through an early dump-Daniher phase in 2003, and four years later you could tell the place was burning like buggery with no possible escape. There's still a feeling now that we should be doing better, not helped by the tripe served up in the last two losses, and plenty of time for the situation to either stabilise or completely spiral out of control before there's a change. 

After incorrectly predicting 'Yze by Anzac Day' in 2021, it would be ironic if the only undefeated MFC men's senior coach of all time is the one to pull the plug on his old boss. 

Having said all that, for god's sake no more please about how much players and coaches love each other. The Full Metal Jacket coaching methods of Barassi etc... are never coming back, so if they're happy behind the scenes so am I, but the ongoing effort to point out how happy everyone is doesn't compute with players who seem to have the enjoyment level of that Iraqi soccer team who were forced to kick a concrete ball as punishment for losing. 

They seem to perk up after a goal. Maybe a little too much, because as one correspondent who knows exactly what gets me going pointed out, the scoreworm shows that of the eight times we did what's necessary to win games of Australian Rules, six were followed by the opposition almost immediately responding. That's partly why this was such a slog to watch, but as wasn't as much of a problem in the first half when we were kicking a measly 2.9. 

The less said about the game itself the better. If you're a Gold Coast fan we wish you well (and vigorously hope for a Grand Final against GWS that will torment fans of big Victorian clubs), but in-depth details will be at a minimum. The TL:DR is that we were unsteady from the start, the collapse started during the third quarter, and by the final term the only thing left was a pile of rubble that even looters wouldn't want to touch.

The old possessions galore build-up nearly had an early win, with the ball transferred securely from defence, and after a nice mark Henderson... rolled the last kick along the ground and out of bounds. Our forward line needs work, but John Coleman wouldn't have known how to deal with that. There was another alleged attack that died when Oliver dinked the ball straight to an opponent and you could tell this was going to be a difficult afternoon. 

I'm happy we don't have a first round pick this year (yet...) because it will encourage playing out the season properly instead of strategically folding the tent. Besides, it got us the already impressive Lindsay and oh look he's just done his knee.

This kid might be The Chosen One, because he somehow sidestepped our walk under ladders/smash mirrors/punch gypsy fortune tellers in the face style luck and escaped with only minor damage. But when he was walking off like so many others who weren't seen again for a year I was about to curl into a ball. Now watch him slip on banana mid-rehab and break everything.

With all this going on, conceding the first goal to a needless 50 metre penalty was only a minor disappointment. It kicked off a Mayday May Day, perhaps the worst game he's ever played for us. It didn't help that Lever disappeared from the selected side, but let's be kind and say our best modern defender was rusty after a few weeks off. Like Gawn last week, there's no need to make a big deal of it (even if, in this case he has been fairly/unfairly implicated in legal drama), because he's got years of credit in the bank but lucky the Suns were still not good enough to take full advantage, and Max King kicks set shots like Earl Spalding.

Their second goal also came from a 50, which is how you can tell a team is losing the plot. The first didn't need to happen but was at least adjacent to the play, this was Oliver kicking the ball along the ground after a free because (?). Even in our Kamp Kumbaya atmosphere you'd think he'd be asked to explain this during the review. Maybe Clayts is still upset about Brad Green blabbing to the paper about how he was in tears during their post-saga trade call? How about we set a club goal of not exposing other people's personal business in the media? 

Somewhere around here we actually had a shot. There were plenty more during the first half, but at the time it felt we best get one goal or it might never happen. A set shot also meant a few seconds not worrying about the ball teleporting down the other end where the defence has finally had enough of years after propping everyone else up. I know Foxtel/Kayo has to find four sets of callers on a Saturday now, but saying Kade Chandler is having a "breakout year" after one BOG performance was a bit over the top. He was good last week, and far from the worst in a crowded field here, but this was a Dwayne Russell level of mad hyperbole. 

He missed, the Suns were two goals up and well on top, and you could start preparing footage of that F1 car's wheels randomly falling off. It wasn't a big margin, but with energy levels flatlining on and off-field it felt like (and was) only a matter of time before the Suns pulled away.

It's not all what was left of the forward line's fault, the ball barely ever got down there in the first place. The structure is still completely rooted, and I don't understand dumping Turner after one game. He wasn't very good last week, but any chance of letting the kid settle for a bit? 

Various people assured me that this wasn't a mad abandoning of van Rooyen to Gold Coast's entire defence because Johnson was returning from suspension. I've got no expectations for Evil Nathan Jones other than having a crack and hopefully contributing, but did he impact a single forward contest in this game? This was just a case of looking at somebody's physical attributes and hoping for the best. But, in his defence he, Turner, or anyone else would've struggle to make anything of the way we were going forward.

As we looked more likely to build a grand Egyptian pyramid than craft a goal inside 50, the alternative was for Bowey to casually rip one from long distance. Which was good, but goals like that have to be complimentary to traditional ones or you'll only get eight per week and by the end of the year the member seats will be full of skeletons wearing Melbourne scarves.  

It was unsafe swings and terrifying roundabouts with the Lindsay injury, because it did allow Melksham to overcome the wishy-wash decision to make him sub and introduce some forward comptency to our team. 

I was prepared to cop the balance between trying to win and regenerate in Round 1, but after two losses you've got to pick a 'trying to win' or 'rebuilding' lane. He's obviously not the future, but can help prop things up while we work out where to go next. You can't tell me he wouldn't have contributed more from the first bounce than Henderson (who, like Johnson, I'm happy to have around but let's have some selection tension for last minute additions to the list) or Fritsch, who hasn't looked less likely to get involved in goals since the year we played him in defence.

We should know better than anyone that a game can miraculously change course at any time, but I couldn't have argued a decent case for us coming back to win this if you put a gun to my head. A missed shot at the end kept the damage down to three goals at quarter time but everything felt off this felt off. Even the Melbourne fan in the DoorDash ad burnt his chicken nuggets.

Whatever was said at quarter time didn't do much for the mood of players who trudged back out there like they were working on a slave labour project (and a couple of them probably do feel like that, albeit the first one ever with a million dollar salary attached) and went on like nothing needed to changed.

After the Lindsay tragedy/scare I was on hyper alert for Langford to suffer some dreadful injury as well. He survived and was (relatively) good, so what was the point of not just giving him a full game last week? Because there was a bunch of players who'd spent so much time in the VFL that there was no point sending them back there again? 

After a quarter and a half without one goal kicked from inside 50, the Bizarre Sub Club combined when Langford set up Melksham with a lovely kick. The latter knew exactly where to run, and aimed true from the set shot, but would still have been scratching his knackers on the bench if not for injury. I don't pretend to understand the deep, inner tactical workings of this game but during an election campaign where the phrase "doesn't pass the pub test" will be worn out, this is my equivalent. 

That's as good as it got before half time, by which point half our side looked ready to hand in their notice and go home rather then be yelled at over the fence by emotionally stunted slobbering losers after the final siren. The solution to low morale is never to hurl abuse into a player's face - unless each of them gets to swat one fan for free per season - but as much as I'd like to provide encouragement through the votes, this is the second week in a row where I couldn't seriously find five players who deserved them. There wasn't even a Chandler style standout this time, so please consider that whoever eventually gets five (and for once I didn't do the votes first then write the rest of the post) was roughly on par with the half of those who scored nil.  

For the second time we were saved on video evidence as a Suns goal was reversed for hitting the post. It lacked the same flavour as when it happens to a Victorian team and they cut to some anti-social freak doing their rag in the face of undeniable technological evidence. Our lunatic fringe were probably warming up a spot of final siren feedback by now, and while we need all the members we can get I'm prepared to make some exceptions. The club should park someone down there with an EFTPOS machine offering membership refunds in exchange for signing legal documents promising not to come back for the rest of the season.

There was a breakthrough in the Fritsch disappearance when he had two shots. They both missed, but we were still one functional forward line from being in this. The defenders and mids were no good, but you can cover up so much by locking the ball in your half. Preferably long enough that the opposition loses puff and can't just wipe goals out directly from the middle.

The loss to GWS might be a turning point, but the real genesis of this fiasco was Pickett flattening Darcy Moore seven months ago. You can argue the suspension (and three games felt excessive but you're living in Cloud Cuckoo Land to think he was ever going to get off) but he adds so much that I refuse to believe the conditions exist for 110 points of losses to middling teams with him in the side. I'm not putting it all on him to come back and save us now, but it would be nice.

It helps not playing Gold Coast at the MCG often, but this was the first time they've beaten us there since the names on jumper trial that didn't go anywhere. I thought it was the same day the Suns were rebranded by Gerard Healy and old mate waved the white flag but was conflating multiple shizen results in front of a handful of people. For all the hanging shit on our crowds, this was nearly as much as both those games combined. Which is not a defence of what we got now, but a reminder of how much worse it could be.

At the start of the third quarter there was still an outside chance of avoiding defeat. We survived several minutes of the Suns attacking without reward before Sharp made them pay. This lasted longer than some of our goals, until Billings wasted risking total paralysis by ducking into a tackle that the umpire wasn't fooled by. That led directly to one goal, indirectly to the other, and we were worse off than when the quarter started.

You already knew where this was going, but there was a bonus pisstake when King outmarked May and got away with a stupid play-on from close range that could have bounced anywhere else except through the goals. He then got a normal one through a mark and May was having the worst homecoming since Vietnam veterans were spat on.

Goals were so rare they're worth mentioning individiually, but I can't remember who get the next one because the focus instantly turned to giving it back. Petracca kicked a nice snap (after playing on and having to push past an opponent), and we tried bloody hard to let them wipe this out quickly like the rest of them. The centre clearance was lost and after taking an intercept mark Rivers got run down - yes this did happen with a different player/opponent/venue last week because we're in shambles. They missed this golden opportunity to lay the boots in, allowing Chandler to get one that made it slightly interesting.

Cue several minutes of attack which might have culminated in Fritsch's mark, at a distance/angle that would have likely cut the margin to 24 at three quarter time. Still not good, but enough to hope for a miracle. He wank-handed it, and everybody else must have turned their back expecting a set shot, because in the space of 20 seconds the ball was down the other end with a Suns player casually wandering into an open goal.

Obviously he kicked it after the siren, but I'm more upset about our missed opportunity. It's quaint that we're still going with the quarter not ending until siren acknowledged by umpire when "did ball hit foot before siren?" should be the second easiest review behind "was a big spike detected on the post as the ball crossed the line?" Nobody cares because it made no difference to the result in an anonymous game, but stand-by for the massacre when this happens in a marquee match. This is all I've got left to live for in 2025, anti-Victorian Grand Finals and hoping for fans of other clubs to be outraged. Basically the footy equivalent of Russia interfering in an election.

During the week I threatened to drink turpentine if we were already at the stage of playing Petty forward in Round 3, and the Poisons Information Line nearly got a run when this was our great death or glory move for the last quarter. 

As the Suns piled on goals he was busy not doing much before spending the last eight minutes on the bench, but I think it was his kick to the advantage of Fritsch or Petracca that they both politely left for the other one. You know Fritsch is off when he's not going for everything.

I'm an unashamed Tom McSizzle fanatic, but what has he done to be banned from ever going forward again? Did he not kick two goals when we were dying in the arse against Freo last year? Might want to end his attacking career with that memory, not floating upside down in the sea like everyone else who's been in our forward line recently.

Langford kicked a good goal. Safe to assume we gave it straight back, and the rest of the afternoon was just sad ebbing towards a near 10 goal loss. The Suns fans in attendance were loving it, and I assume the streets of the Gold Coast were empty as fans sat glued to the screen. I'd say this might be the old 'two teams passing in opposite directions' that I wasn't prepared to declare last week, except the Suns have form for looking good early in the year then spontaneously combusting.

I took to this garbage with the right "it's only a game" spirit, but there was a tell-tale Neeld-esque twitching eye during the last quarter, and at full time my feelings were eaten through an offensively sloppy burger so it'll be a miracle if I lived to publish this. 

That brings us neatly to the miracle that will be required to salvage anything from this season. I'm trying to convince myself that it's too early to be dramatic, but also spent a lot of the last day thinking about where this side sits against some of our other recent duds. More evidence required, but at the time of writing I say they'd beat 2008-2009 and 2012-2015, lose against 2017 or 2019, with 2007, 2010-2011, and 2016 too close to call.

I'm usually suspect about AI, but put Twitter's version to the test and asked it to judge a hypothetical 2007 vs 2025 game. Surprisingly it spun up a detailed and sensible analysis rather than encouraging me to do a racism, and according to them this year's team would win 14.10.94 to 8.9.57, but "the 2007 Demons could snag an upset if Neitz fired". Hard to argue. 

The next test was for it to summarise this game in the style of Demonblog.com. It was mostly standard 'excited sports report' but with enough of my overused novelty terms to make you think Skynet will be in charge before long. If the weapons are going to become self-aware and launch global thermonuclear war is to too much to ask for a delay until we've had one more quality win in the state of Victoria?

2025 Allen Jakovich Medal
5 - Harvey Langford
4 - Jake Bowey
3 - Ed Langdon
2 - Clayton Oliver
1 - Harry Sharp

Apologies to nil

Leaderboard
Take a screenshot of this, you'll never see a wackier leaderboard again. I don't know if Oliver deserves to be one vote off the lead, but if this was done on merit there would only be about five players listed. Bowey floats to the top amongst the defenders, Langford jumps into the Rising Star race with what's hopefully the least memorable of his career BOGs, and let's see if we can get some really odd players onto this list by the end of the year.

7 - Xavier Lindsay (LEADER: Rising Star Award)
6 - Clayton Oliver
5 - Jake Bowey (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year), Kade Chandler, Max Gawn (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year), Harvey Langford
3 - Christian Petracca
2 - Jake Lever, Christian Salem
1 - Harry Sharp, Tom Sparrow

Aaron Davey Medal for Goal of the Year
Bowey in the first quarter because it came when we looked like never kicking another one again. If Windsor hasn't yet been consumed by whatever flesh-eating virus he got from Round 1, let him know he's still the overall leader.

Next Week
Just when you think things can't get any worse, it's off to a ground we're always putrid at, to play a side that will not just do the polite thing and piss off to the bottom of the ladder for a few years. It's the 10th anniversary of when we won after I tipped us to lose by 102, let's have some more of that. Geelong has also lost their last two games, but at a standard light years ahead of the twin-turds we've punched out recently.  

In 2019, I deluded myself that various wins in the first half of the season were a turning point but you've got to have the wins first. The idea of plucking out a rare win at Kardinia Park is so ridiculous that I can't even force myself to imagine how it might happen. You never know. But you sort of do. I predict a mind-alteringly bad result and will be extremely happy just to escape with our dignity intact.

The first change speaks for itself, Pickett is unsuspended (for as long as that lasts), and I'd play him this week even if he comes down with the plague. He can't be expected to save us single-handedly, but will add much-needed zing to a side playing like they're under heavy sedation. If fit, Lever is also an automatic selection, as we try to squeeze the last bit out of air from his great partnership with May.

Dropping Turner after one game then not rewarding VFL form is just the sort of stupid thing we'd do, but even if I don't think he'll be the difference between losing by a little and a lot, I'll blow up if he's not selected. Perhaps controversially, I'm making way for him and for Melksham to start, by giving Fritsch the week off. No need for the humiliation of playing a Reserves game against Watsonia on a gravel field, just have a week off, put your hair up, and let's see if we can work out how to recapture the old magic again after that?

And assuming Windsor is still hooked up to a drip and/or in an iron lung, I'll also have Laurie for Billings because, unlike Melksham, in this case the experienced player isn't adding much so you may as well have another crack at getting the kid going. Maybe the last crack, but I don't see much in the VFL stats to excite. Whether he deserves it or not Kynan Brown must get one full AFL game to make up for playing as sub twice, and otherwise you've got Adams if a defender is needed. And Poor Old Tom Fullarton watch fans will be pleased to see that he kicked three, so the comeback of the century could be on there.

Geelong by plenty.

IN: Laurie, Lever, Melksham, Pickett, Turner
OUT: Billings, Fritsch, Howes (omit), Henderson (to sub), Lindsay (inj)
LUCKY: Billings, Johnson, Rivers, Viney
UNLUCKY: Adams, Fullarton

Final thoughts
I'm getting ready for the big test of what it will take me to get genuinely angry post-premiership. At the moment I'm just sadly watching it all go wrong. Thank god I was only willing to buy into us being a fringe finals team, people who tried to manifest a top four finish with good feelings must be in therapy.

Disarray, thataway

So, the game that was meant to pay off last week's near-miss against a premiership contender instead turned into North Melbourne's revenge for blowing multiple golden opportunities against us while at the opposite end of the ladder. In the (probable) words of 1996 MFC Best and Fairest runner-up Al Clarkson, "wildcard, bitches", as they strung us along for three quarters before unleashing a direct nuclear strike in the last quarter.

I don't think it will be remembered as a definitive passing in opposite directions like the oft-cited Hawthorn '07 incident, but it was not good for us. The focus will be on the vigorous raising of white flag in the final quarter, but we'd been uncomfortably crap long before that. The margin was only narrowly more than Footscray last year, but that was end-of-season freefall, this was much worse. For 10 goal early season misery you've got to go all the way back to a slopfest against the Hawks (them again) in Round 4, 2018. At least that came after two wins, now we've dug ourselves a hole that's in danger of expanding into a gaping chasm.

From the 'How well are you going?' Files, sponsored by Tobin Brothers, it only took two rounds to become confused about when a game was being played. All week I thought this was happening on Saturday, before doing a comedy double-take when an extended squad came out. Good thing that clue set me straight or I might have turned up on Saturday afternoon wondering where everyone was. Maybe bad thing, because it would have saved me from coming back the next day and seeing our worst performance in Victoria for years. 

It says something about how (relatively) well we've had it recently that you've got to go back seven years for a depressing early-season blowout. Ironically that happened a week after we'd beaten North for the first time in 18 attempts. Since then we've been the better side, but have still teased a few farcical losses, including last year when I upset randoms by declaring it the worst win ever. The chickens came home to roost in spectacular fashion here, as we did everything possible to send a crowd who have spent years watching their team lose home with the happiest memories they've had since Drew Petrie did a funny walk.

Due to our unconditional surrender and really post-match comments by the coach, there's not going to be much room for niche grievances this week so let me get mine in first. Yes, it's time to go on about seating arrangements again so if you're over that search for the words 'first goal' to skip to the alleged playing of Australian Rules football. 

As the MCG went into full tightwad mode post-COVID I've been more polite to Docklands than almost any Melbourne fan in the last 25 years. It's hard times when the people who pioneered the closing of large segments of the ground to save money end up as the good guys. I'll reluctantly accept the logic of doing this when interstate teams are involved, or back when we'd play unwanted home games there (when both happened at the same time it would have been fair enough if they'd made us sit around the boundary line), but shutting half of level three for a game between even Victorian teams - even low drawing ones - was such a massive extraction of piss that they should've handed out catheters on the way in.

The result of this rubbish was general admission patrons being crammed in like battery hens, crawling across six people to get in/out of rows, having to stand up whenever somebody wanted to go past, and being forced to listen to people who should be exiled from the mainland of Australia talking nonsense. I've reached the point in life where comfort is king so wouldn't have shown up if I knew this was happening. Young people can scoff but this will happen to you eventually. The stadium operators will say this was advertised on their website etc... but what are we doing if you can't expect the full general admission area to be open for an all-Victorian game? 

I know I'm a special case who falls somewhere in the middle of being an active member of society and qualifying for the sensory room, but surely even people who are open human contact thought this was stuipid. The irony of being forced to sit in the back row was not lost on me, but the advantages are lost when you've constantly got people clambering across the fittings behind you while clutching three cans of booze for dear life because it's easier to get in that way than making everyone stand up.

It's hard to explain what triggers me so much about this, but it just feels like such a tight-fisted(forever) approach. You're flogging food at a 1000% markup, give a few more people jobs for the day and play your part in supporting the game instead of acting like ruthless for-profit arseholes. This goes double for a venue controlled by the AFL. I know they'd set both these teams on fire in an instant if they could, but at some point you've got to have a bit of respect for your customers.

Of course this was the day I cranked up the degree of difficulty by bringing a kid along. The good news is that purchasing a ticket meant they sent me a survey asking what the experience was like, the bad news was it meant the poor child who has about 1% interest in footy and just wants to watch people do their block instead got to see me slowly losing the will to live. 

The first leg of the quest was working out what part of the ground we were allowed to enter. Instead of letting people make their own way to level three then blocking off aisles as necessary, they only allowed access to the enchanted kingdom via two ramps. The next had a sign saying "no access to level 3" without any instruction on what to do about that, leaving us wandering around like clowns until finding a frantic ground attendant waving her arms like she was landing planes on an aircraft carrier, shouting out aisle numbers, and probably wondering why her bosses couldn't just put up a bloody sign explaining what was going on.

Now that I think about it, we should have just gone up the unattended ramp and walked around to the legal part of level three from there, but at this stage I still wasn't sure you could get up there at all. By now the game had already started, and that's partially on me for only showing up 20 minutes before the bounce, but the other 99% of this is their fault. By the time we got to aisle 43 I was starting to understand how Burke and Wills felt. Once I got to a seat I was hot, bothered, and if it hadn't taken so long to get there might have turned around and watched on the train. Yes, I acknowledge this is peak 'first world problems' but if we don't fight back in some lame way they'll have us playing home games at Princes Park again soon. 

The big hint that their strategy was a farce was when people behind the goals started to migrate into the wide open spaces of the bay next to them, but staff soon came from every angle to herd them back onto the other side of the tape. Credit then to the heroes at the other end who saw this and shifted across en masse so that by the time the ground staff got there they'd crossed the tipping point of being too big a group to shift. It was a minor version of how they can crash tackle one person running onto the ground but can't do shit when 10,000 do it. It's a shame because Docklands actually do a lot right (e.g. the location, and a ground entry system that shits on the MCG) but after this experience they can either drop dead or blow me.

I was so outraged by all this that I never seriously got into hating the footy. Which is probably lucky. By the time I finally got to a seat North had kicked the first goal (hello readers who skipped the whinging), but van Rooyen was about to respond and all was well with the world. Briefly anyway, because we were clearly not playing well. Last week ended in tragedy but there were moments of beauty, this was almost entirely struggle. It didn't start getting disastrous for about 2.5 quarters, but the signs weren't good early. 

They were having plenty of shots from different sources, while we were encouraging JVR to take on their whole backline every time. I feel bad for the guy, he hasn't done much to start the season but what help is he getting when the ball is being madly heaved down there with no care or concern. He's not completely innocent, he did one tremendous lead into space, got the ball set up for him on a platter and dropped it. Oops.  

I refuse to accept that slow build-ups and switches are going to help us, but the biggest difference between this and the practice match that Clarko probably tanked to lull us into a false sense of security was the lack of Pickett. Of course Harry Sharp wasn't going to kick four goals in a real game, but it's easy to imagine Pickett making life difficult for lesser opponents. Instead, it was springtime for North as they ran around collecting possessions at will. I'm still not sure how we were in front at quarter time but it might have been better to trail and get a wakeup call. If you believe that would have changed anything. Previous experience says we'd probably have lost by less if five goals down at quarter time after launching an ultimately futile panic mode comeback.

Nobody on our list is on the same continent as Pickett, but I appreciated Kade Chandler trying his best to fill the void. He couldn't do the crumb, but kicked a couple of set shots, put good defensive pressure on, and generally played his best game yet. Maybe it just looked better because other than Oliver nobody else did bugger all. I'm going to have a wild time handing out votes this week.

Spoiler alert - Gawn won't be amongst them After a fine performance against the Giants, he was comfortably beaten here. Which is fine, he's been up for the vast majority of the last decade so I'm not going to hold one ordinary game against him. Considering what he's done I probably wouldn't hold 15 against him. I'm sure everyone would have all moved on with their lives safe in the knowledge that we'll have to stop relying on him to save us eventually, before the coach got all philosophical and weird in the press conference.

Maybe I'm thinking too much into it, but the question felt like an attempt to bait the coach and he jumped in feet first. Instead of playing a straight bat and saying words to the effect of "he had a down day, so did everyone else, we'll work on it", Goodwin went off on one about things "going on", and how there's a "backstory" for the performance. There might be, but unless a ripper of a story is about to break and he was trying to get ahead of it, I don't see what this did other than make thousands of people who don't waste their time on AFL press conference stick their head up and go "huh?"

At first, I thought he was alluding to some sort of maltreatment during the game. This is known in the industry as the 'Sir Ben Kingsley Defence'

But if Max had been groped, prodded, gouged, or rabbit punched we'd have seen footage by now. So, at the time of writing we have no idea whether he's got a major life challenge or the washing machine flooded his house overnight. Thoughts are with him either way. 

I've deliberately not looked for any clues about what's going on because a) it's none of my business, and b) this is the kind of situation where dickheads validate their disappointing lives by making up crazy shit that bozos swallow without question. 

For god's sake can we not publicly resolve this issue until I publish this post so it doesn't need rewrites? I've barely got time for first draft editing at the moment. "Maybe reign it in a few thousand words and stop complaining about having to sit next to people" I hear you say. "No" I reply. That's the enjoyable bit, it's discussing the actual playing of footy that weighs things down. Good thing I know rock all about tactics because it saves us about 4000 words a week.

I know we're lacking depth - see last week's debutante extravaganza - but even before he was injured Charlie Spargo hadn't done anything since blowing the lid on Ricky Nixon's fake premiership merchandise scam, so what was the undue haste to throw him back into the side off the back of one VFL practice match? My theory that Chandler does the same things better took a bit of a hit last year, but bad timing for Charleston to show up just as his rival (in my eyes anyway) had his best day. He's a contributor, but I don't know if we'd have been hurt by letting him bubble up in the Reserves for a couple of weeks.

The backline looked a lot more prone to collapse this week, but that's not surprising when North has better key forwards than a Hogan-less GWS. And if we let the ball get down there quickly before our talls defenders can set up then other sides are off to the races. It would help to keep the ball inside our forward 50 for more than five seconds at a time, and no I'm not just copying slabs of text from last year when we had the exact same problem. 

Remember when garbage bin enthusaist Greg Stafford got the sack and people thought all our forward woes were going to mysteriously resolve? He'd be pissing himself laughing at home watching this because nothing has changed. I'm still ready to fight anyone anywhere to defend the legacy of the premiership, but any doubt now about the importance of Ben Brown to that structure? He was fit for about five minutes with us but they sure came at the right time. 

Now it's amateur hour and I don't blame van Rooyen for not being able to do it all on his own. Jefferson might have blown the record books up last week but he's still awkward, with Turner included the first quarter was mostly them running into each other.  Eventually one of these collisions left Jefferson with a busted hand and the moral highground of leaving while we were in front and everyone else being responsible for what happened next. If we're dead and buried by the time May comes back then persist with him, and definitely give him more chances throughout the year, but I'm convinced that having McDonald down there (Melksham too?) would help - as they say - straighten things up while we've still got a pulse.

Other than Oliver, the midfield was obliterated. Viney's first two weeks make me nervous and I don't fancy Langdon in the centre at all. I'd like to remind you that at this point we were still winning. It didn't feel sustainable though. At the same time Brisbane was demonstrating how a good side can mow down an upstart challenger after giving away a start, but when was the last time we were an indisputably good side? Probably the fantastically grimy win over Geelong that briefly made you think everything was going to turn out alright before conceding six goals to nil in the first quarter a few days later. 

I desperately wanted to believe that we could continue to win by being boring but how many times did we hold opponents to reasonably low scores and still lose in the last two years? We've had some quality wins by strangulation, but I agree that it's not easy to win like this all the time. And what did we do to sizzle up an attack that was going to be without its most electric player for the first three games? Zilch. No idea if it's a good long term move, but I respect North for signing Jack Darling when they already had two tall forwards who have been outperforming the rest of the team for years.  I hope he thinks fondly of us for not drafting him due to going on a sex romp, because otherwise we'd probably be lamenting his disappointing #fistedforever era career and counting down Lucas Cook 300.  

As you may have noticed I'm a long-term Tom McSizzle fanatic, but playing on with an opponent right behind him was the opening ceremony of the rot. We'd already come back from quarter time trailing them all over the ground, and though that free kick missed, Oliver gave away a 50 and we were left wobbling until three quarter time when everything fell over. There were a few good minutes, including goals to Chandler and Oliver, but were we ever likely to stop them scoring long enough to win? Doesn't look like it now, but stranger things have happened. Getting the ball would have been a start. 

When pondering the changes last week I rudely forgot Daniel Turner existed, and he didn't offer any signs of life for the first half here. He finally had a shot here that he unconvincingly celebrated wobbling it through from not much of angle before it was overturned by another off-air video review. I dispute the need for replays to try and be certain that the ball deviated off somebody's fingernail, but fair enough enough overturning this when they've technology to prove it hit the post. Any chance of sensors/vibrating anal beads that can alert umpires to call a review, instead of wasting everyone's time having players return the middle first? 

If it's purely so Channel 7 can get a free ad in between 'goal' and withdrawal, can they activate the beads on Saturday only? I'm patiently hanging out for the day somebody thinks they've won a game on the siren before they're interrupted with bad news halfway through the victory lap. When it happens in a Grand Final (and I'm reasonably sure now that we won't be involved) don't forget who predicted the carnage.

When Gawn followed the goals by storming inside 50 a'la Perth '21 I thought we might be about to take off, until 0.5 seconds later when his wonky kick missed by miles. Never mind, as long as we don't do something stupid like letting the ball go straight down the other end for a goal eh? We still had chances but they were like pushing shit uphill, including Henderson's low snap towards what would have been an open goal if it wasn't for the North defender standing in the way. More astute analysts may want to nominate Charlie Comben as a prospective Kingsley, but his induction was helped by feeding him non-stop intercept marks because we had NFI how to craft goals.

In the future, everyone will remember this era for Gawn, Oliver, Petracca etc... but nobody represents our brief period as a good team better than Jake Bowey. He turned up just as things were about to exploded, played in a flag before losing, won his first 17 games... and has gone 23-23 since. And has he really improved that much in that time? By enormous default he and Salem were probably amongst our 'best' players here, but both are treading water. Sadly for Bowey, he only had one recorded clanger all but it was a ripper, storming through the middle of the ground and kicking it straight into a group of North players, with the ball helpfully sitting up for them to rocket it back down the other end for a goal. 

By the time Woewodin surprised himself with how high the ball came back to him after bouncing and cost another, we were all but dead. The only hope was for a throwback to those great days when North used to blow big leads in the last quarter. Not against us though, and if you thought the bouncing disaster summed up the day perfectly then let me introduce you to the opening bounce of the final quarter. Gawn got his hand on it first in the ruck, and even after North got the clearance it was intercepted by Petty. Who played on disastrously, causing us to turn a hit out and an intercept mark for into a goal against. That takes some skill.

Staying to the end of 186 earns me the right to flounce out once every few years, so once the third goal in as many minutes went through I'd had enough. On almost every other day I'd have taken my medicine, stayed until the end, and shuffled glumly through joyous opposition fans. This time I haven't had a decent night's sleep in six months and may be going a little bit bonkers so there was no need not to catch the early train. Fortunately, technological advances mean that I could still watch us being ruthlessly pounded. I think it topped out at six goals in six minutes, but they were nice enough to pull up there. It was their version of that game less two years ago when we only missed beating them by 100+ (don't forget the trivia question about Schache and Grundy as teammates, I'm sure it will be relevant one day) after slamming on the brakes in the last few minutes.

Other than that night we've struggled to beat them recently so I'm no surprised that they finally got us, just at the scale of the collapse. Whether North go on with it, or this is their version of us thrashing Sydney in 2010 is none of my business, but the alleged 'easy draw' that some people wanted to tank for at the end of last year means we get a shot at redeeming this disaster in ? May it be a repeat of when King Harley Race and the Eagles jumped us last year before a correction in the rematch 

This was an unspeakably putrid performance, but as the process of getting to a seat had already popped a valve in my brain so I didn't take it nearly as badly as I would have in the past. Life goes on. For about another month, then I'll probably chuck dignity out the window and start sulking.

2025 Allen Jakovich Medal
5 - Kade Chandler
--- A bit of distance ---
4 - Clayton Oliver
--- Immense distance---
3 - Xavier Lindsay
--- A bit more distance ---
2 - Christian Salem
--- Couldn't make a legitimate case for anyone so I outsourced this ---
1 - Jake Bowey

Leaderboard
Congratulations to Chandler, who had the good fortune to play well in a slopfest before the usual suspects really get going. And he would've grabbed the most unexpected lead in this competition since Kyle Cheney got five votes on debut in Round 1, 2009 until Lindsay came along to vault into first place. He wasn't nearly as good as last week but led our tackles, which either says something good about him or bad about everyone else. 

7 - Xavier Lindsay (LEADER: Rising Star Award)
5 - Kade Chandler, Max Gawn (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
4 - Clayton Oliver
3 - Christian Petracca
2 - Jake Lever (JOINT LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender), Christian Salem (JOINT LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender)
1 - Jake Bowey, Tom Sparrow

Aaron Davey Medal for Goal of the Year
The Oliver one on the run was nice, but I'm going for Turner from the set shot as an encouragement award. He fails to dislodge mystery infection victim Windsor from the clubhouse lead.

Next Week
The glamour matches just keep on coming, as we welcome Gold Coast and their new 1970s British TV station logo to the MCG. Thanks to natural disasters, they've played one game three weeks into the season so god only knows what's going to happen. The only certainty is the stadium will be empty but everyone outside the AFL/MCC will probably be stuffed into one confined space like the Black Hole of Calcutta. Not me, two straight weeks of live games is as much as I'm ever going to get these days and I'll be otherwise occupied so it's partially my fault when we're subject to public humiliation about crowd size.

I'd love to unleash carnage at selection, but who are you going to bring in? I'll make the wild, baseless assumptions that Windsor will recover from 'TBC' status and May won't, because you can pump antibiotics into an infected foot but not a wonky throat. Nothing jumps out from the VFL stats, except that the Poor Old Tom Fullarton backline experiment must be over because he kicked two goals and took the most marks. Maybe he's the shock solution to our forward woes? Maybe I'll win a TV Week Logie Award.

Now that I've decided to champion the cause of Tom Campbell, maybe this is the week that you give Gawn some help instead of making him ruck 95% of the game while [insert whatever the hell Goodwin was talking about here] is going on? And even if he's not the remotest type of forward, if he gets within 10 metres of our mad long bombs inside 50 it'll be twice as close as anyone else. Johnson will come back but just let the guy play forward instead of as a 'just having a crack' second ruck.

I'd like one last crack at Hore before he's filed away as 'depth' (especially because it'll give a chance to bring up that goal against the Suns), and no matter what Langford did in the Reserves they'd be absolute flanges not to give him a start this time. What will actually happen is that they'll pick Billings and Laurie, neither of who will have a serious impact. But how would that distinguish them from anyone else?

IN: Hore, Johnson, Langford, Windsor
OUT: Jefferson (inj), Howes, Spargo, Woewodin (omit)
LUCKY: Bowey, Fritsch, Henderson (to sub), Sharp
UNLUCKY: Campbell

Two games in it's already hard to imagine winning, but it's a good test for everyone who thought GWS had an advantage against us because they'd played the previous week. Here's to their win in the Coast Derby being misleading due to shite opposition, and whatever level of blow torch we get this week inspiring a response. I'll piss myself laughing if we win but am buying White Flag Incorporated shares just in case.

In case you missed it
Some people would celebrate instant fortune by helping the needy, saving furry woodland creatures etc... I'd spend all day reading old newspapers and watching archive footage. Like the recently unearthed tape of Optus Vision's coverage of Merger Night '96, which I spent far too much time reviewing. The coverage is Hawthorn-heavy, mainly because their speeches were happening while our meeting was stuck in the sort of stalemate you only get by booking a criminally (quite literally if you believe in maximum capacity rules and fire codes) undersize venue but it's still worth it for the Hawks meeting featuring both the worst and best speeches in footy history.

Final thoughts
This was as much fun as doing your taxes while being punched in the face by Mike Tyson, but the answer isn't manbabies hanging over the fence yelling at players. Nobody's expected to be happy with it, but even as somebody who has carried on like a pork chop at the footy in a previous life, the idea of yelling in a professional athlete's face for not living up to my standards (sitting on the couch eating potato chips) never appealed. We'll stick to anonymous character assassinations on the internet thanks.

Reviewed: Merger Night 1996

As far as I'm concerned, people who archive pre-internet sports footage come right behind police, fire, ambulance etc... in society's hierarchy of heroes. Without them we'd never have seen the 1990 Celebrity Variety Concert, 1999's Football Feedback Summit, and the post-Norm Smith sacking TV show, that I must have imagined writing a post about.

Now we've been delivered another ripper. Thanks to Rohan Connolly (taper) and Rhett Bartlett (uploader), we can watch see the live program that went out on Optus Vision while the Hawthorn and Melbourne merger meetings were descending into unhinged chaos.

Here's the full version on Rhett's YouTube channel, highlights and analysis to follow.

   

Firstly, we've covered my history with the proposed Melbourne Hawks in bits and pieces across blog, social media, and book, but the short version is that I missed the lot. 1996 is the only season since 1988 that I didn't see a single game because it coincided with the sulky teenager era. I remember going specifically for Kevin Dyson (and by extension Sydney) in the Grand Final, but otherwise refused to participate.

Even while distracted by something else (e.g. playing Championship Manager 2 not schoolwork), you couldn't avoid merger chat that year. All I know is that I was 100% against it. Nothing to do with moral outrage about selling the spirit of the club in a naked grab for quick success, but because trying to avoid Hawthorn was the reason I ended up following Melbourne in the first place. 

Of all the Victorian teams to try a bunk up, the easy local option I'd turned down in 1988 met the team randomly selected for me by way of playing the Hawks in that year's Grand Final. I wasn't having it, and floated the controversial plan to go for Fremantle instead. God knows how long I'd have carried on with that, but chances are you'd never have been introduced to Dockerblog.

If this fiasco happened two years later I'd have been punching on at the meeting/still handcuffed to an MCG goalpost after the post-Dunstall ton ground invasion. But as we missed this show by being too pov for pay-TV I remember turning on mum's clock radio, permanently set to 3AW, hearing a news bulletin that said it looked like the whole thing was going to fall over, said words to the effect of "grouse", and went back to trying to see norgs on the SBS 9:30 movie. The TV guide for that night suggests I probably got more than bargained for: 

But you're never too old to learn something new right? Even not long after just turning 15. This movie (and there's a reasonably safe for work trailer if you're curious) had two things in common with the program Optus was broadcasting on their AFL channel at the same time. They both had somebody called Roko/Roco, and various elements of what we're about to see were indeed Totally F... Up.

I assume in any other week, Footy Feedback was an early version of the standard panel show we see now. Like On The Couch but behind a desk. However, on this night their timeslot intersected directly with the two member meetings that would decide the fate of the merger. Bad luck Optus subscribers who tuned in for in-depth finals analysis, we'll be cutting back and forth between Dallas Brooks Hall (Melbourne) and Camberwell Civic Centre (Hawthorn), where officials of both clubs will be receiving direct feedback from their members on the proposed union. 

Tonight's anchor is sensible father figure Tim Lane:

Joined in order of appearance by...

Leigh Matthews, who spent half his career whacking Melbourne players and was now trying to take the whole club out. Spoiler alert: As a pro-merger figure he gets very awkward and self-conscious as they start to realise there's no chance of Hawthorn fans voting for this nonsense.

 

Rohan Connolly, sporting some delightfully mid-90s facial hair and having absolutely no idea that nearly 30 years later the tape he was recording at home would end up on streaming video with his name superimposed in the top right corner. Or that streaming video would be a thing. Back then you'd have needed two weeks just to download this file.

... and Peter Daicos, who doesn't get to say anything merger-related for about 30 minutes of this club, then asks something banal and pointless just to get involved.

Your reporters on the ground - capturing the Melbourne experience from the woefully unsuitable Dallas Brooks Hall, please welcome Rob Gaylard. Because we had to make our own entertainment in this era he'll always be the host of Saturday night harness racing on Channel 31 to me. One night his horse won and they cut to highlights of him creating absolute pandemonium in the studio, which was a solid grounding for this assignment. 

And taking the Hawthorn at a venue better known for computer swap meets, record fairs, and model train exhibitions, it's an early Youse Blokes Andy Maher wearing what looks like a merkin on his head. I reckon he's standing in the exact spot where I bought a shareware copy of One-Nil by Wizard Games on 3.5inch floppy disk a couple of years previous.

* Lane goes straight for the jugular in his opening question, getting 'the putting-on-a-brave-face Matthews' to admit he's getting cold feet about the merger. Then he doubles down on the 'Lethal' nickname by saying it would be like "turning off the life support system, the facts might make it necessary but it's not something you'd want to do", which would have been alarming for any elderly relatives watching.

* Rohan cuts straight to the most important topic, saying he's "worried about these mysterious proxy votes". Which is code for "I think these ballots may be a swizz". He says the worst start for the Melbourne Hawks would be a vote decided on proxies when both meetings were solidly anti-merger. Not wrong there, so thank god the Hawthorn board either had too much dignity to go full Saddam Hussein at the ballot box, or they didn't have the same rorts budget as us.

He says the worst outcome for the Melbourne Hawks would be proxy votes carrying the idea after both meetings were obviously solidly anti-merger. He's not wrong, so thank god Hawthorn's board either had too much dignity to completely stuff the ballot box, or they just didn't have the same budget ours did. It would be the last off-field thing we'd be superior to them at for the next two decades.

* Matthews is trying very hard to be jolly, saying how happy he is that he can't go to the meeting because he has to be on TV. Deep down he probably felt sick about the prospect of his old club disappearing (or having to show up to joint functions alongside Melbourne legends), but his coping strategy is to come off like he thinks the whole thing is a bit of a laugh. By the time he sees the reaction Alan Jeans gets he'll be even happier not to have turned up.  

* On the first proper cross to our meeting, Gayland is with a purported Hawthorn fan who keeps saying he's only there to "save the Melbourne Football Club". The logic is clear because it's exactly what saved us, make sure the other side votes no so it doesn't matter what happens at your meeting. This is never discussed because Gaylard gets suspicious of the fan's motives, basically accuses him of running a false flag operation, then disturbs the man's personal space to peel back his sign and expose what he obviously thinks is going to be smoking gun evidence of skulduggery. Instead he finds that the man, who seems to be quickly losing with this interview, is wearing what looks like two strips of sticky tape.  

 

* The first controversy from our meeting is a bit pissweak in the grand scheme of things, with the board changing the speaking order so the Demon Alternative would have to deliver the 'no' case first. If I was cynical I'd say this had the double benefit of a) delaying voting as long as possible so people stuck outside might give up and go home, b) forcing Dixon et al to wrap it up quickly so a) didn't become an issue.

* Back to the Hawthorn, and the one real heroic figure of this whole saga Don Scott. I don't give a rats about the Hawks and he was still a crap special comments man, but he delivers an all-time classic performance on this night. 

The famous speech comes later, for now he's struggling to hear what Maher is saying at close range because the crowd is going absolutely boonta behind them. He reveals that the proxy vote is split 50/50 and everything will be decided in the room, which is an early spoiler that the merger is going to die a sad, loud death. Queues are reported to be 'half a mile long' and I'll hazard a guess that they weren't lining up to vote yes.

This is the point where it would have been good to use the dangerously overcrowded Dallas Brooks Hall as an excuse to shut our meeting down and let Hawthorn do all the hard work of sinking this ill-fated concept. But I suppose with 1996 level communication nobody at our meeting knew what was being said here. Now the news about Hawthorn's proxies would have spread like wildfire within seconds, causing our crowd (both inside and out) to spontaneously erupt in celebration. Can't imagine somebody sitting at home on the couch ringing Brian Dixon on a giant Crazy Johns-style analogue mobile phone to give him the update. And even if they did, I doubt he'd have toned down his speech.

* Don tries to directly address his old teammate Matthews, and after a bit of shambolic back and forth where they can't hear each other properly and 'Lethal' isn't quite sure what he's being asked so he just admits to voting yes again. "I know how you voted" replays Don with a bit of venom, then suggests Leigh ditch Optus and get down there by 9pm to change his vote. Back to the studio where Matthews is left with a plastered on smile, trying to pretend he's having a fun time while internally realising it's too late to backtrack on voting for the losing side.

* I thought the crowd was chanting that somebody was a wanker, but sadly they were saying "Hawthorn forever".

* I'm not a fan of Matthews' brave face performance, but he deserves credit for showing up and justifying his position instead of chucking a sickie and bunkering down at home. His analysis of their finances is jarring. I always knew the point of the merger was Hawthorn = poor, Melbourne = unsuccessful, but he's only willing to say they'll go on for "another year or two" in their own right, and that without the $800-900k raised by Operation Payback that they would have had to close down in a couple of months. Maybe we could've ended up with Glenferrie Oval anyway. And how long would that have lasted?

* In a strange interjection, Lane points out that the last five games between the clubs at the MCG have drawn an average crowd of 56,000 and that football administrators should be "fighting to preserve" two teams that draw that sort of audience. But it's not about that is it? We all know the story now, but surely at the time he knew it had nothing to do with this.

* After a cut for some boring contemporary September 1996 chat, we're back to Fire Hazard Hall to speak with silver fox extraordinaire Brian Dixon.

Dixon is said to have "taken a moment or two out of the meeting", but it hasn't started yet because they're still frantically trying to work out how to conduct it in a building already well over capacity with thousands of people still trying to get in. Ian Ridley later claimed that they wanted to book the Tennis Centre but the Dalai Lama got in first. Which is fine, but was every other indoor venue in Melbourne also taken? Glasshouse? Festival Hall? Arts Centre? Showgrounds? 

If all of them were hosting the Moscow Circus On Ice or kickboxing, you'd have gotten away with an outdoor event in September. I'm sure if we'd made a final played on a Monday night people would have come from everywhere, what about conducting the full and frank exchange of views to/from an MCG stand? That requires believing they wanted everyone to get in.

Dixon cites the response to a telephone poll as definitive proof that a majority of fans are against it, and even though I'm prepared to go with him on everything else Dicko is having a flashback to his days as a politician here. I agree that the majority were against it, but there's as much credibility in the no campaign coming up with a no result in their poll as a yes vote in the Guest Furniture staff newsletter.

He is right to say that based on the obvious anti-merger sentiment in the room that if there was a yes vote it would look incredibly suss (not his words). There was and it was. I reckon he'd have gone to the ends of the earth to wipe this stain off our club's history if he hadn't been thrown overboard by Joe Gutnick about 12 hours later.

Asked the same question about proxy votes as Scott, Dixon will only say "we know what our proxy votes are" but doesn't know the overall picture. Nobody's going to the trouble of getting a proxy to vote informally, and surely by this stage anyone changing an earlier proxy was switching to the no vote, so would you not just subtract your count from the overall to get an idea of your position. I think he knew full well that the fix was in but didn't want anyone to give up and go home.

Gaylard tries to bring some sizzle to the interview by bringing up the animosity between the Ridley and Dixon forces before becoming flustered under the steely gaze of the microphone-haired legend and admitting he'd forgotten what he was trying to say. He finally gets around to naming Bill Guest as reportedly rounding-up large numbers of lounge-suits operatives to vote yes, but can't phrase this in the form of a question. Eventually Dixon jumps into save him, throwing a bonus haymaker at Ridley for telling him "no block votes had been bought", while "Guest sat there not saying a word".

As somebody with the voice of a three lighter a day smoker says "GoodonyaDicko!" on the way past, we're back on the high school debating style argument about the order of speeches. Dixon says the no case should be speaking second, and I morally agree with him but unless the aforementioned time delay scam is in play I don't see why it's a big deal. He also says the Demon Alternative should be on the podium, which would have robbed us out of some of the maddest footage of this night.

* Gaylard suggests they'll be go to Camberwell next, but Andy Maher must have gone out for a milkshake because we come straight back to the Melbourne meeting. With the meeting well beyond start time, he's gone outside for some atmosphere where a reported 3000 people are queuing. It's hard to think how they could've found a worse venue for this meeting without holding it in a high school gym.

Rob says "a lot of the proxy vote people are coming along to see what's being said", which is weird. I think the majority of people who voted yes by proxy were already tucked up in bed dreaming about how they were going to flog couches on Tuesday morning. 

* For the first time Ron Barassi's last minute backflip to the 'no' camp is raiser. The PM edition of the Herald Sun (yes kids, they used to print two different editions of the paper every day) is shown carefully folded so it's just the headline. Until we can access this edition of the paper on microfilm I'll assume there was a big fuck off ad for Telstra and/or Foxtel that they needed to hide. 

I don't hold anyone's 1996 pro-merger views against them (but reserve the right to treat you with contempt if you try to see me on why it was a good idea now), but always found Barassi's switch to be a bit self-serving. Proxy votes had closed at the very strange time of 8pm Sunday night and the final result was hours away, so what was this other than a blatant attempt to come off looking like a good guy no matter the final result? 

He wasn't the only ex-player to change sides before the vote, but leaving it until the last minute comes off as icky. Compare to Leigh Matthews, who is prepared to go down in flames saying he doesn't want the club to merge but believes it's the only way to save it. Meanwhile, Robbie Flower hasn't had a single mention in this program yet but he called bullshit on this whole scheme from day one, and conducted himself with dignity the whole time.

* Back to the studio where Lane notes that our meeting is now officially starting half an hour late. I can't find the TV guide for this channel that night, but did they plan to keep broadcasting meeting footage after the original show ended, or did RoCo set the video for long than usual just in case?

They discuss the old Barassi switcheroo and the contradiction between his change of heart (but not, we assume because he's never seen at the meeting in person, change of vote) and stated support for a national competition even if it means a reduction in Melbourne clubs. Matthews reveals that Ron told him the day before that he thought the vote would be lost, so no wonder he defected at the last minute. Sadly not with a few hundred proxies under his jumper. 

There's a moment of confusion where Lane says Barassi is "not xenophobic" (I presume in terms of not being against footy in other states), and gets no responses because Lethal either doesn't understand the concept or what xenophobic means, leaving him trying to smile along without saying anything. By the time this was over Leigh must have had sore cheeks from all this fake levity.  

As the bombed gag stinks up the room Rohan doesn't know what to say either, and just gamely grins along until they move onto something else.

* Lane betrays his one true love by throwing to the "Carlton.... err Camberwell Civic Centre", where Maher reports that crowd has become "positively hostile and angry". Which is exactly what we're here for. The guy behind him starts the clip laughing and joking with somebody, before turning to the camera with a 1000 yard stare that suggests he was going to absolutely do his block when the meeting started.

The mystery man spends the rest of the cross either looking unhinged or trying to work out whether Maher had to send away to Canberra to get his 70s muff-like hair. Maher suggests the Hawthorn board may be "refusing to come out" due to the anger of the crowd, who are chanting "We want Don!" Lane asks "do you think the meeting will get underway?", and ;Andrew' rightly points out that it has to at some point or "there'll be a riot". I know they were trying to fill time in a rapidly changing live environment, but did Timbo really think the Hawk board would say "nah, go home we'll do this another time".

In another violation of the building code, Maher reveals that the capacity of the Civic Centre is about 1600 but there's approximately 3000 people there. Imagine the condition of the bathrooms in these venues? My god. At least Hawthorn fans who'd spent time at Glenferrie Oval and Princes Park would have been used to skating across piss-covered floors to spend a penny, some of our more refined/elderly members might have dropped off when confronted with toilet conditions that looked like day six of a hostage siege.

* RoCo betrays his political viewpoint by asking if there are any pro-merger people there "wearing suits and ties", like he's secretly hoping for Russian Revolution II to break out. He's assured that there are anti-merger people there in suits too, just in case word gets back to the attendees and they decide to purge anybody who looks even remotely middle class.

* Maher reports that the people who aren't participating in the anti-merger chants are doing so "with their heads in their hands looking sheepish", which is quite the visual. 

* Lane suggests the program has only got half an hour to go but there's plenty more in this clip so they must go into overtime. Long play VCR guru Connolly makes the fair point that football administrators are continually underestimating the passion fans have for their team. Lane says it's the "irrational, inexplicable emotion that makes the game was it is". Which is true. Merging or relocating may sometimes be the best thing for your club on paper, but if what comes out on the other side isn't your club anymore what's the problem?

I'd rather the club fold than merge, but would reluctantly consider relocation if there's a South Melbourne to Sydney style transfer of history. But in this case our fans weren't voting to save the club, and Hawthorn supporters were taking a massive gamble when their finances were being talked about as if one step above Fitzroy's. The hit the jackpot by staying solo and good luck to them. I got a bit sick of the Hawks by the time James Frawley pocketed a flag at the first try, but I appreciate the fans who risked losing everything to having one more shot at saving their club here.

* Back to the Hawthorn meeting, where Don Scott is on the mic and trying to calm fans down so the meeting can start. The audio wasn't fully coming through the TV feed, but he's berating a crowd made up 99% of people about to carry him out on their shoulders. He demands that his own people "show a little manners out there" and "be quiet". He's just being his usual abrasive self and it's contributing to the greatest performance in footy history.

* The sound properly kicks back in just as he launches another stern "be quiet", and the fans must have been wondering if he was about to do a 'Hulk Hogan joins the nWo style' turn and tear his shirt open to reveal a Melbourne Hawks jumper. Unlike certain speakers at our meeting, he demands respect for the club board, gets booed, declares it "not Hawthorn like", and tries to shut the people up by gently waving his hand. Nothing says 'feral crowd' like turning on the hero of the piece because he doesn't want the opposition to be dragged out into the street and strung up from traffic lights.

When the hand waving doesn't do the job there's a bit more paper waving before the audience finally shut up. I'd love to know what they were going on about. He asks for "decorum" (an underrated word not used enough these days), and says "we know how you feel. We all know, we're all upset too. Just as much as you. We're bleeding". Everyone's gone quiet until some yahoo yells out indecipherable commentary and gets a personal talking down. This targeted humiliation finally wins over the rest of the audience who forget that they were also making a scene 30 seconds ago and give him a round of applause, at which point he abruptly turns around and leaves Hipster Cameron Schwab in charge...

... but he doesn't get a word out before we go back to the studio. There's a replay of the commotion that required Scott's peacekeeping intervention, featuring somebody giving the board a vigorous Jakovich-style "up yours" that would have left them with a bruised arm the next day. 

There's a brief shot of Alan Jeans in the corner of the stage clearly thinking some variety of "oh shit, why did I agree to speak?" 

Obviously they only have one graphic ready for this meeting because it says 'live' over a replay and my god that brickwork is giving me flashbacks to childhood.

* Leigh Matthews is not happy with all this yelling and thinks the fans should be prepared to listen to the opinions of others. This is an optimistic attempt to apply logic to an emotional scenario, like showing up in the Middle East and telling both sides that things would be great if they'd just get along. 

Fans on both sides went a bit over the top in their abuse but we're not talking about a meeting of the United Nations here. Who'd have guessed that people would go troppo when faced with their club effectively being wiped off the map? Lucky Boutrous Boutrous Scott was there to calm the situation, while later that night we'd open the batting with a speaker who went off like a man doused in petrol while holding a grenade with the pin out.

* Finally 'Daics' gets involved, asking his old coach a Dorothy Dixer about whether the hostility could be because the fans blame the board for the position they're in. These are the most rusted-on, hardcore fans, but surely the problem was more that Hawthorn had won everything in sight during the 70s and 80s and still had bugger all fans. I can report that they've done reasonably well for themselves since.

* Rohan advances the controversial theory that if the Hawthorn board had just admitted they were financially rooted instead of "trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes" the Don Scott group could've raised the required money to survive without having to propose a merger. Yeah, but that would have required the holier than thou types who did (still do?) occupy club boards to cede some of the limelight to an outsider.

* God knows what was going on at Dallas Brooks, because now that the other meeting has started they've completely forgotten us. After Hipster Schwab is named as former two-time premiership player Richard Loveridge, Blakey from On The Buses seconds the merger resolution.

Sadly he doesn't say "this merger was due out 10 minutes ago", or threaten somebody called Butler but sensibly does his administrative duty and legs it before the snipers can aim properly.

* Usually we go out of our way to avoid covering other clubs on this page, but for the sake of the historical record - and the fact that I don't think they're ever going back to our meeting - we'll carry on with highlights from Camberwell. In reality, these events are actually more important to our future because they confirm the Hawthorn 'no' vote, but I was really hoping for some long-lost footage of our fans going apeshit.

* The other side sticks with the traditional speaking order, sending the 'yes' case up first. Enter President Brian Coleman, with Lego hair and a look of concern about somebody leaping from the crowd to biff him.

These days there would be about 200 security guards blocking the stage just in case, but in all these clips so far I've only seen one calmly wandering around the background of our meeting. For all the emotion in the room nobody tries to rush the stage or piff projectiles at him, so a big win for human kindness there.

Colemania kicks off with a line about "how hurt he is as the president of this football club..." before being interrupted by turmoil. I really thought he was about to say something like "... that I have to propose a merger for my beloved club", instead he shows an illiterate level of room-reading skills by launching into a tone-deaf airing of personal grievances. He wasn't happy that three (or four, he's not quite sure) past presidents stopped him from chairing the meeting. Well boo hoo. Why does it always rain on me etc..? How was he supposed to chair and speak, was he going to call on himself?

To an almost entirely hostile room he goes on about how he's lost respect for those gentlemen, but the crowd couldn't give the faintest rat's arse. It's a laughable approach under the circumstances, and I know nothing was ever going to make a difference but yelling "I've been a member of this footy club for 30 years, it's my team too!" is no help. Surely prepared remarks had been deviated from by the time he was going the crowd for being "spoilt" and reminding them that they weren't around for the tough pre-juggernaut years.

Bry Bry responds to the persistent interruptions by aggressively saying "if you do not shut up..." then suggests off mic to the board that either he or they is going to walk out before temporarily ceding the mic to Loveridge and asking him to "do something". Rich asks the crowd to "hear out the speakers and save the jeering until the end". Surprisingly the promise of club-endorsed jeering time calms them for a bit, other than a lone woman yelling out "wanker!"

I did feel a bit for him as his voice started breaking in frustration. The fact that they only had 9500 paid up adult members after a finals season is wild. I know the bar for counting members was a lot higher then (insert later allegations about signing pets up), but how bad were the numbers before people started buying in bulk to sway the vote? Modern Hawthorn can go piss up a rope, but their recovery from this position is amazing.

* We haven't had a screenshot for a while, so let's check in with how the body language is going.

That well eh? He tries to point out that Waverley is a shithole, but this crowd is not interested in facts. The succeeding administration disagreed, to the point where players appeared on the Footy Show singing Beastie Boys inspired classic You've Got To Fight For Your Right To Save Waverley. History shows that he's 100% right that you're better off at the MCG, but this audience aren't interested in getting their by submitting to a team that hadn't won dick all for 30 years.

It didn't help his cause to compare Hawthorn unfavourably to Essendon, who were apparently $1.6 million ahead on gate receipts and memberships. Then he makes a strange, angry reference to how "there are now five interstate finals" and that "three interstate clubs have the best under 23 sides in the competition".

There's no room for conciliatory language, as he suggests the electorate have "rocks in their head" if they think the Hawks can compete with these interstate clubs without Dunstall, Langford and Collins. This sounds stupid in an era where the draft means everything and fans would rather a top pick than a fading legend, but I suppose there was a genuine fear in this era that it was too much of a lottery to be relied only. Lucky things turned around when they started hoovering up Franklin, Hodge, Roughead etc...

* For the first time the camera zooms out, just as the crowd has temporarily regained their composure. Old white shirt is still there, looking unimpressed but not vengefully hurling coins at the stage.

Coleman's claim that the Melbourne Hawks will be a strong club "right away" doesn't get much traction. On paper yes, but imagine if all this happened and they'd been shit? Brisbane recovered from plummeting to the bottom post-merger, but that was even more of one-way takeover than we were trying to pull off. Not to mention both Fitzroy and Bears fans were used to losing, it would've got ugly if our fans were jibbed out of the promised instant success and theirs saw a side that had just played finals go into a death spiral. And as far I'm concerned they'd have all got what they deserved. 

There's more scathe directly at Waverley, shaking his in disbelief when the crowd indicates they'd rather play there than the MCG. I think it's more that they'd rather play as Hawthorn anywhere than the 'G as Melbourne's fluffer. Talk about misunderstanding the passion of fans, especially after going on about how he's been a member for 30 years. 

It's one thing proposing the merger for reasons of survival, but talking down to the fans for not buying into the business masterplan is bonkers. By now he's almost pleading, assuring them that "everything" would remain at Glenferrie. Wonder how long that would have lasted. He concludes with a plea to "vote with your head, not with your heart" then shuffles off in digust, hoping nobody has recorded this.

* The studio team is still there, talking about how "sad" the reaction to that speech was. Strap yourselves in lads.

* There's no time for further chit chat - or god forbid an update on what's happening at our meeting - because here comes Ian Dicker to present the case against. 

* At first can't get a word in because the crowd has started arguing with each other

No idea whether this bloke was for or against, but in the words of that classic Late Show street talk segment, "Does Daryl Somers know you've got his jumper?" The only thing that gets things back on track is vigorous anti-merger chat, including a Dicker Kicker where he disputes Coleman's claim about the meeting chairmanship, saying that it wasn't the past presidents who ditched him, but there would be "a motion from the floor", whatever that means.

Dicker was in the opposite role to Coleman, where he could have said anything and been applauded. Surely nobody bought the claim that he needed "inspiration to get off my backside and vote against this merger", especially when that becomes the set-up for a folkesy anecdote about his father in law and an incongruous history of Sir Robert Risson saving Melbourne's trams in the 1950s. 

As an example of how quaint and low budget things from the past seem, Dicker was heartened by the news that the club had a net $1.4 million in assets. Now teams would be on suicide watch if that was the case. He compares this favourably to the dear departed Fitzroy, but also Sydney, St Kilda, and Brisbane who were all in the negative. He lists Melbourne as a side with positive assets, but of 'only' $700k.

* Back to the studio where in lieu of telling us what's happening at Melbourne we get fun facts about Dicker's involvement in Melbourne's 1996 Olympic Bid. He's said to be involved with a number of companies, including Ansell which Tim Lane says "has grown in recent years for the wrong reason". Either that meant something in 1996 or he was doing a straight-faced gag about the inflation rate of their frangers

* Finally we get a cross back to Melbourne, where they seem to have entirely missed Brian Dixon's famous outburst. We rejoin with Ridley having about as good a time as his Hawthorn counterpart, but without the courtesy of his opposition stepping in to lecture the crowd on their manners.

I don't know if this is just after his famous demand for the board to get on their feet, but either that or the gesture recruitment enthusiast Bill Guest is making in the background suggests they're about to be off. I'll be generous and say the board was dudded by the angle of the one available camera and you just couldn't see them on the corner of the stage. The only other big name seen is CEO Hassa Mann, who ducks over for a welfare check of his old teammate. 

For the first time a security guard is seen on stage, helpfully standing behind the speaker so if somebody turns their "No Merger" sign into a paper airplane and piffs it at the stage, he won't have time to heroically leap in front of the President and stop it with his own body.    

Poor Ridley looks absolutely shattered here. Nobody knew at the time that his wife had gone to hospital thaty afternoon. In the modern context you can guarantee that would have been leaked to the media to try and dampen the reaction a bit. Unfortunately he's in the same position as the Hawthorn president, albeit less belligerently, where the Dalai Lama could've dropped in after his Melbourne Park gig, serenely asked the crowd to consider the merger, and been told to piss off.

Because our event aren't progressing quickly enough for Optus they ditch our meeting and go back to Hawthorn. Even by 1996 standards, any chance of some highlights of Dixon's outburst? This is an incredible find, but we're still on the lookout for extended vision of the mayhem at Dallas Brookes.

* No wonder Rohan Connolly sent this tape for digitisation because he makes the sage prediction that "these images are going to linger on a long time". I have NFI why the shot of Dixon and Gutnick at the merger meeting is the header on our Facebook page, I think it was the first remotely suitable image I found that fit the required dimensions. Classic shot though.

* There's a rare Daicos appearance, as he suggests we have $3 million in assets, which is sure better than what Ian Dicker was giving us a few minutes ago. He asks why we're looking at a merger when in better financial position than "five or six clubs", again missing that the whole point of this is not to save us financially (which is ironic when you consider where we ended up a few years later), but a naked attempt to grab instant success by pirating Hawthorn's list.

* You can't even get the main event speakers from our meeting, but over at Camberwell it's time to hear from George The Banker. He's got facts, figures, and a slide show that will definitely convince the audience that they've been silly to oppose the merger.

His presentation about financial deficiencies comes complete with somebody's hand seen pushing the slide onto the screen, which will be a familiar site for anyone who went to school before technology was invented. The crowd is so off chops that he gets heckled just for saying he's here to tell them facts, then calls a female heckler "darling", which you could still get away with in 1996.

George claims that to match the financial claims of Don Scott, the club would have to attract 6660 new members. These numbers seem laughable now, so no wonder clubs started artificially boosting their membership totals with all sorts of fake sounding categories. There's no way this is more interesting than a cut back to our meeting, maybe Gaylard had ducked out to the TAB?

"Can I talk about sponsorship?" says George, "fuck off" says the crowd. One of them tells him to get off his arse and do something, to which he invites them to go first, and throws in another darling. By now he's even less popular than Coleman, all while regularly coughing like he had COVID-96.

* Turns out Hawthorn does have a security guard, even if he looks more like a turn of the century butler who'd be no good at holding back an angry mob.

* One of the alleged 'gains' shown is $100,000 for 'Grand Prix', whatever that means. This slide doesn't last long before the mystery hand of doom yanks it away in front of our eyes, at which point George gives up without a fight and leaves without a closing statement.

* Despite a promise to "go back to Melbourne", they stay with an anti-merger ex-Hawthorn president, presumably one of those who either did or didn't stop Coleman from chairing the meeting. 

He responds to somebody yelling from the crowd by saying "you come up here if you want to talk". Surely nobody pro-merger was brave enough to be heckling by this stage, so I assume a misunderstanding due to the highly charged environment. "I've only got five minutes" he says, before invoking memories of Glenferrie Oval's pre-premiership years, naming a raft of old committeemen, and talking about the time they nearly bankrupted the club in 1961 by buying a property over the road from Glenferrie Oval for 50 pounds over the 7000 pound budget.

Good luck to you, but there's 25 minutes of this video left and I'm starting to lose hope of seeing any classic MFC highlights. Like many Melbourne performances over the years we just weren't entertaining enough to draw viewers.

There is one good revelation here, that the Hawthorn board (allegedly) cooked the books to a crisp, failing to declare $1.5 million of losses between 1991 and 1993. The camera pans directly to a glum looking Peter Hudson as if this is somehow his fault. Then he goes back to anecdotes, telling the crowd that Collingwood made more money playing them at home in Round 1, 1966 than the Hawks did all season but they've won eight premierships since. Which is good for the fans, but the Pies weren't the ones holding a merger meeting were they? It's hardly a convincing argument, but for this audience you didn't need to be anything except anti-merger to be a hero.

* They must have heard me 29 years later, because against all odds we do go back to the DBH and see Diamond Joe for the first time all night. He's reentering the meeting alongside Brian Dixon are previously leaving because "we had to to discuss that with the Melbourne Football Club board". We missed what that is, but I assume from the follow-up question that they were discussing the ludicrously small venue. It's hard to know what's going on because the chaotic atmosphere is being helped by a helicopter hovering overhead.

* And that's all you'll get from our side, because then it's straight back to Camberwell where we join Alan Jeans yelling at the crowd in progress:

The way that Jeans' speech has been talked about over the years, I thought he'd walked on as a kindly old man, asked the crowd for five minutes of their time and been unfairly maligned for simply stating his opinion. In reality, he continues the strategy of loudly talking down to the audience like morons. No wonder people heckled him, there was no gears to this, it was straight to maximum screamage, even when talking about trying to get the 'Victorain Football Council off the ground' to help save traditional clubs. 

I'd rather have heard more about the life and death of the VFC than more spooky talk about how interstate clubs were going to put everyone out of business. "Victoria doesn't produce enough players for 10 viable competitive sides", he shouts, followed by statistics about the amount of Victorian produced players against the number of teams in the state. I know the draft was even less of an exact science then, and players sometimes simply went "nah" when drafted (e.g. Darren Jarman when we picked him in 1986) but this feels so defeatist. Nobody ever flat out says they don't have time to rebuild before the liquidators are called in but that must be what they mean.

This was almost as ridiculous a speech as Coleman's. He goes on about why Jarman and Allan moved interstate. Anything to do with the fact that clubs randomly sprung up in their home states? This is the attitude of people who've had a tremendous run of success and can't understand why things are going as wrong as possible when you've just played finals. It didn't say much for their faith in the youngsters and fringe players likely to be out of a job if Merger Incorporated got up. Must have been a tense night for Randall Bone, who celebrated his near-death experience by playing three games over the next two years. 

Jeans starts to warn about the looming introduction of free agency (well, I suppose they did think it would turn up a lot quicker than it actually did), detours into the 10 Year Rule, then moves on without making any sort of point. I expect he was meant to talk about player payments but instead aggressively switches to a list of all the off-field changes that the club has gone through in recent years as if the fans are at fault. Out of respect for a legendary coach they don't give him the bell, but after Loveridge has a quiet word in his ear ("you're wasting your time") he trudges off without a concluding statement.

* The Melbourne meeting is still stalled. We're told the board wanted to call it off but the Demon Alternative wanted to proceed. I'd like to climb in the time machine and cause absolute anti-merger havoc on their behalf, but this was a terrible tactical decision. Surely they knew by now that Hawthorn would vote against, so we'd have escaped with our dignity intact if they'd been the ones to strike the final blow. Maybe they expected a knockout blow when the votes were counted, not counting on the enormous lobbying power of the furniture industry. And returning to the earlier discussion, maybe Dixon didn't really know how many votes the other side had.

* Anyway, never mind that shit because here comes the main event. It's Don Scott, and wouldn't you know it he's brought a jumper collection. I wonder if that will become important? appears to have a jumper collection with him. Did anyone ever ask where he got the Melbourne one from? Was Robbie Flower still running a sports shop at this point and able to bung him one under the counter?

Once he hangs up his props, Don stands there for a moment of silence where he looks like the coolest middle-aged man on the face of the planet. It's almost cinematic. Like classic clips of Paul Keating eviscerating hapless opposition leaders in Parliament, I don't think we'd get along but I appreciate the outstanding performance.  

He starts by silently staring into the crowd, surveying them like an old school dictator about to tell a baying audience that the rebellion has been crushed. He begins slowly and calmly, which is textbook stuff when building up to a blockbuster finish, reminding everyone that his group had raised $900k in five weeks. Importantly, he puts out an olive branch to the opposition, saying it's "them vs us" on the night, but "when we walk out the door, it's we". 

Don says there's been a lot of dirty tricks along the way, "and we've done our share". This is a dead-set epic performance, and if you've got time for nothing else watch it. He sets up the grand finale by mentioning that "the jumper is a problem with you people" (even at this late stage he's not prepared to go with 'us', definitely seeing himself a notch above the common man in the crowd), and warns fans not to boo in advance before suggesting the new club board would be compromised by having ex-Hawthorn directors on it. Indeed it would if they were the same people who 'forgot' to count $1.5m in losses in their accounts.

Nothing I write can do his performance justice, including telling the crowd to hush up when they react to his lines. He's not happy about the merged club's name, recalling how he told Coleman to go to Ian Ridley and demand that it should be the Hawthorn Demons. That's great content for this audience, but if this really happened can it have been for any reason other than trying to annoy Melbourne so much that we pulled out of negotiations? It's a bit harsh when he calls Ridley an "an arrogant little bastard", but you've got to give the crowd what they want. 

Appropriately for a speech where he's coming off like the greatest Prime Minister Australia never had, there's some pure spin when he says a club called Melbourne Hawks "wouldn't be a true merge". And Hawthorn Demons would? This is followed by savage reviews of the MFC propaganda (some of which I've uploaded to Internet Archive for the enjoyment of future generations), reading a bit where it says we've changed nicknames so many times why would this be any different?

"They don't what they're called as long as it's Melbourne" he says, and not without some justification because you still see people today speaking like it was nothing more than a change of nickname accompanied by a free social club and Jason Dunstall. Suffice to say I disagree. He gets a good reaction from a line where we tell member than Glenferrie Oval will be 'ours'. 

This is not exaggeration for crowd-pleasing effect, our letter to members on 3 September says:

Sure they go through the motions of assigning this to the 'new entity' but gee whizz the capitals and exclamation mark don't come off too well.

* Let's see how Old King Coleman is going:

Maybe he's still thinking about getting the arse from chairing the meeting?

* Now for the most famous bit of all. If you've ever seen footage related to this story you know what's coming next.

"This is not the greatest fashion statement around" he says, saying what everybody was thinking. It's partially what turned me off going for them in the first place. Then for some reason he pulls out both a contemporary MFC jumper and a disco version that's so old it's from before we had sponsors.

And here's everyone's friend, the Melbourne Hawks. Has it ever been revealed where Don got this from? It's too official to be something knocked up on the home sewing machine, but flimsy enough to be dismantled live on stage. Was it a sample provided by the club? If so, what ridiculous pretense did he used to get hold of it? He's got to have discussed this at length somewhere, it's just that until now I didn't care enough to research it.

Don asks the rare question "Where's the brown?", before tearing off the gold trim, and issuing the immortal line "What have you got? A velcro Hawk on a Melbourne guernsey", before holding it in the air like he's whipping his supporters into massacring their enemies, before departing to a massive reception.

Now, to be fair to this cheap and cheerful looking jumper, I'm sure the real version would have had a more robust Hawk than something stuck on with materials bought at Spotlight but it's the thought that matters.

* Back to the studio where Rohan likens it to Footscray refusing to merge with Fitzroy and making finals two years later. Matthews points out that the Dogs have recently explored mergers, before Mystic RoCo makes another accurate prediction by bringing up the new TV contract scheduled to be signed at the end of 1998. It didn't save clubs from getting themselves into deep financial shit (hello Melbourne), but it was certainly the launchpad for them to become multi-million dollar businesses instead of glorified local clubs.

He says that the AFL Commission can't comprehend scenes like we've seen here, to which Tim says they must not have Optus Vision and Sports AFL. Them and 99% of the rest of the population. "We might just have to send them a tape" says RoCo, safe in the knowledge that he's the man holding said tape. Is Peter Daicos still there? We'll never know.

* Hawthorn may have been forgotten about in the lead-up to this vote, but they're getting all the attention here. The outside broadcast truck at Dallas Brooks Hall might be on its side and burning, because we're sticking with action at Camberwell. It's questions from the floor, as a questioner who the camera can't find wants to know where the new club is going to find all this alleged support.

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It's more of a statement than a question, but after some more derisive noises from the crowd Coleman angrily grabs the microphone and tries to enter the re-enter the arena of combat before being interrupted by a clarification of which group the 'question' was aimed at. Pretty bloody obvious I'd have thought. For some reason while this is happening Don Scott has moved to menacingly hover around behind him in the dark. 

Turns out Don is actually launching the reconciliation process by sitting down next to his opponent. Even though the question - which is re-asked in actual question format - is directed at the yes campaign Don adjusts the microphone to his height, only for the Cole Man to passive-aggressively snatch it away so he can answer. Apparently he never said they'd get 20,000 members, he said "initially we'd get 17,000" and after this rock solid guaranteed success in the first year, which he claims would be "immediate" then "the rest of you would pop along". He's very pleased by this zinger, despite the sort of audience reaction that won't be seen again until Ben Elton Live From Planet Earth.

* The second questioner can just be seen through the crowd,

 In the last three weeks he's had "eight loads of mail and been telemarketed twice" which makes it sound like he's about to be really boring, but instead he hits the high notes and says "why did you never try to raise membership as diligently as you tried denegrating our club?" Well, probably because it's easier to send mail to people who are already on the database rather than posting random letters to the community inviting them to sign up. Never mind, the crowd goes apeshit anyway.

Coleman decides to go down cracking funnies, saying "we tried every avenue. I guess in the end we just didn't have Don Scott or Dermott Brereton doing it". LOL ROFL ETC... It feels like he's warming into this and could have let rip with any sort of loose comment from here, which makes it sad that there's only about three minutes of video left. 

As they try to get another microphone to somebody in the wings he demands that whoever called him a gutless wonder stands up as if half the crowd wasn't already on their feet. The offender isn't afraid to reveal themselves (off camera) because this bloke will be out in his ear in an hour, and in what was surely a novelty comment the President says "right, where's the security bloke?" (because they've only got one) as if this was the tipping point after an evening where he's been called every name under the sun.

* There's time for one more question, asked by the dad from a mid-80s sitcom:

Barry wants to know about the promise that the new club - and we're all just pretending at this point like there's some chance it's going to happen - will get access to the best 44 players from the combined lists and a shitload of cash. He claims that none of this is set in stone and that the other clubs already knocked back a lot of the proposed conditions for the Fitzroy/North Melbourne merger, so why should fans vote on the assumption that they'll be looked after. "Is this another John Elliott Stand fiasco?" he asks, helpfully including one of our favourite words.

His demands for a written guarantee are not spicy enough to really fire the crowd up, so he gets the closest thing to polite applause all night. Coleman says the financial package it's been endorsed by the AFL and other clubs, but only accepts that it's in writing when really pushed for an answer. On the lists he says they'd "naturally" have to keep the best 44 within the salary cap "but would be able to trade from it". 

The supplementary question of why the written guarantee was "excluded from the explanatory note" is too boring for him to bother answering and he sits there refusing to comment until we head back to the studio. Looks like Daicos stayed to the end and didn't go home early to get cracking on delivering Collingwood a genetic jackpot. and sits there refusing to answer, as we head back to the studio and confirm that Daicos stayed to the end instead of heading home early to get cracking on delivering Collingwood the genetic jackpot.

* We end the video without official results from either side, or any serious confirmation that the Melbourne meeting still exists, but you'd have to know where this was going from the scenes at Hawthorn. Lane says "It's an hour and a half of getting nowhere as far as Melbourne is concerned", which is well under our usual average of a decade.

"That'll give you a chance to get to the Camberwell Civic Centre. Or do you have another engagement?" says Lane to Matthews, leaving Leigh trying to plaster on another fake smile as he says he'll "avoid it by a long way". Tim points out that he really does have another engagement, at which point Leigh remembers he's got to go on Talking Footy and fumbles over whether or not he should plug Channel 7 on Optus.

This was such a momentous night that Lane has to remind you not to forget about the Preliminary Finals and we're done. See you later for Talking Footy, Sports Tonight, or Totally Fucked Up.

* For the sake of completeness we must print the final results, even if ours are as credible as a referendum to annex Crimea. The final tally was 4679 to 4229 in favour - with the live vote on the night going 1455 - 497 against, so you can imagine where it was going if everyone who turned up got to vote. But they didn't, and we're left with the "you voted your club out of existence" baseball bat available to batter us for the rest of time. Gutnick flagged a legal challenge to void the result, but like most things in his time as President he soon lost interest and moved on.

The death blow came from the other side, as Hawthorn fans voted 5241 - 2841 against the merger and the Mawks were finished thank god. I started to regain my earlier interest in mid-1997, then turned back into a footy nuffy again during the back from the dead 1998 season and here we are today. It's hard to see any clubs ever going through a process like this again, but if it does happen and we're involved I reserve the right to PUNCH ON.

And now, some music to play over the credits: