Never in doubt

For survivors of the #fistedforever era, Maximum Sizzle 500 didn't need an all-time classic comeback to be considered our wildest milestone game of all time. Sure, it sounds like an IndyCar race, and only happened because Daniel Turner's hand exploded, but consider the career paths of last men standing from the Bailey era, Max Gawn and Tom McDonald, and how unusual it was for them to arrive at 250 games simultaneously.

We put on an idea performance to celebrate these great warriors of the club. It was half fitting tribute to the shambles Melbourne has been in for most of their careers, and half 25/09/2021 style joyous stomping of demoralised opposition. At 1-44, I was thinking about climbing inside the dishwasher, but once you know what happened, what more appropriate game could you ask for? 

If we hadn't pulled off our most numerically spectacular comeback since Freo '08 (even in an empty stadium, Geelong '21 is more important because of what it led to), you'd be hearing more about players turning their arrivals into an NBA-style fashion parade. Only deranged people would think we conceded the first seven goals because players spent more time thinking about what to wear than beating Carlton, but there's a lot of hours in the week that need content, and a lot of people working with article view KPIs. I'm too old to know why Kysaiah Pickett turning up in a jumper that probably cost $700 but made him look like a Wiggle is important, but hopefully it's because players want to wear the Zurich logo as little as possible in protest at their treatment of Angus Brayshaw. We'll see if this gimmick has legs, but for the avoidance of doubt, Zurich can go piss up a Swiss alp.

Our recent history against Carlton has been full of narrow losses, but *cue ominous music* there have also been a couple of near-misses in similar circumstances to this game. In 2020, we were 42-0 up and held on to win by a point, and in 2024, they started 36-0 and likewise hung on like grim death for a one point victory. The fact that we romped home to win the tiebreaker by four goals is a reason to confer the coveted PISS FUNNY status on Sunday, especially with the shots of Carlton fans abandoning their seats and piling out of the MCG as if it was on fire.

The elephant in the room is that you don't get the glory of mowing down a seven goal start without conceding the seven goals to begin with. It's the second week in a row we've failed to turn up at the start of a game, and young players/new coach etc.. etc.. this can't go on. I can take losing (and indeed expect it), but there'll be a week where the other side doesn't conserve themselves (Freo) or take a comedy pratfall into a hole full of toxic waste (Carlton) and will beat us by 120. After 18 months of being shit and boring at the end of the Goodwin era I'm all for the idea of going down swinging now, but there's a dead set rooting in our future if we carry on like this. Can't play Carlton every week.

We'll get to the ball-bursting excitement of the second half later, but our start was so bad that it didn't qualify for the usual 'mass panic' metaphors of people escaping a burning building, or trying to get off a sinking ship. Maybe they'd worked themselves into a frenzy for the milestones, or were trying too hard to correct the half-arsed start that killed us last week, but there was nothing close to system on display. In front of the second biggest home and away crowd between the teams (surely a combination of milestone fever and Carlton fans thinking they were going to see a win), the blundering insanity of the early stages looked like a superclash between University 1914 and Fitzroy 1996. I didn't watch West Coast vs Port Adelaide because why would any neutral, but it can't have been as bad as anything here. 

At first, Carlton was equally inept, but with the advantage of planting the ball in their forward line, leaving us with NFI how to safely get it out. After some of the thankless defensive jobs he's been given over the years McSizzle would've felt right at home desperately trying to clear the ball only for it to come straight back. For the first few minutes he, Lever, and Petty (who responded to last week's controversy by going for the Yordan Letchkov look) did a fair job holding back the tide before things went temporarily tits up.

After we'd given them about six good chances at the opening goal, Carlton finally got one via a pass from somebody whose protective goggles looked like George Costanza accidentally buying ladies' glasses. Then they got another when Cripps said "fuck yo tag" to Tholstrup, both figuratively, and literally, after it was kicked, before going on to do bugger all when the game was on the line to the point where excitable people are now trying to trade him. Bit harsh, but I suppose anything's on the table after a fiasco like this.

For now, they were still flying high, while we were straight back to being pinned in defence and conceded first career goals to two different players. Meanwhile, our first gamer started with a nice mark then nearly handballed over the boundary line. To prove that well-known players could also take advantage of us, Harry McKay recovered from kicking his first shot OOF to convert from their sixth inside 50 mark of the quarter. Meanwhile we were on nil, and had scored a point. Which was, I suppose, better than that 2024 game.

This week we didn't even get a token goal to break up the savagery and went into quarter time 38-1 down. Bring on night games or winter gloom ASAP, because we've been outscored 13.9 - 1.2 in the last two opening terms while kicking into the sun. You didn't need to know we've only come back from larger first quarter deficits three times in history to understand the eyeball-level shit this left us in. On that note, how the hell did we trail Hawthorn by 39 points, concede the first goal of the second quarter, lead at half time and go on to win by 45? VFL360 would've been declaring the Hawks finished as a club after that, shortly before they went on to win a dozen flags.

Everyone's carrying on like Carlton was always going to stuff this up, but when they kicked the first after quarter time I'd have needed CIA Mind Control techniques to be convinced we were a chance of winning. As it turns out, that was actually the Blues wrapping up for the day. It was back to the normal, 50/50 game you expected. The only problem was that we looked spooked and slaughtered a bunch of decent chances to get on the board. There was:

• van Rooyen delivering a lovely kick to Langford in the square, only for him to fumble it through and leave us open to "they've doubled their score LOL ROFL" mockery.
• Mihocek dropping a mark on the lead after his opponent had given up on the chance, then later missing a set shot from right in front
• Pickett (L) putting down a mark directly in front...

... before finally, Langford made up for his earlier spill with 90 seconds left to avoid our first goalless half since as pointed out by kindly anonymous commentator, the 2018 Preliminary Final. Please enjoy the following discredited whinging about an earlier game. that shitbox twilight game against Adelaide in 2009. And if anyone too young to remember that game needs a reminder of what misery really looks like, we were still only 1.6 at three quarter time, ended on 4.10, somehow only lost by 17 points, and only 14,000 people turned up in Round 5. Also, Jared Rivers got fined $2600 for umpire contact, which seems harsh compared to the $1k fines much better paid players get for crashing into umps today.

So, we were seven goals down approaching half time and had just kicked our first goal of the day after nearly an hour of shambles. Imagine this was a home game and Let Me Entertain You played? There should've been a separate vote for what to play in these circumstances. I'll have this thanks. Alternatively, play nothing. Although the concept has had some effect on me, this morning the chemist was playing - for unexplained reasons - Rock The Casbah and it made me pine for JVR goals. Seems unlikely that a song about air strikes in the Middle East would be so popular at the moment but I'm hoping van Rooyen will be inspired by the chance to hear it again and kick six next Sunday.

Now that an unholy beating seemed to be off the agenda, the question was whether we could come out of this with any credit. Final answer - my word yes. But at the time, a four goal loss would've been enough for "if it wasn't for the first quarter..." disclaimers to prevent uncontrolled descent into self-loathing. I didn't expect the opposition to implode after half time when they'd just had a 17 day break. It's one thing if they'd gone off the boil after such a long break and started badly, but when you play a first quarter and a bit like that and should be well rested, against a team that played in hot weather on the other side of the country six days earlier, logic says you should win somewhere between 'easily' and 'by shitloads'. I'm getting the feeling logic no longer applies at Carlton.

Meanwhile, we'd lost Jiath to injury (though the second half suggests he may not have been all that important to the system), and there was a brief suggestion Pickett (L) wouldn't be coming back either, so that all pointed to a slopfest. For a while it looked like the biggest highlight of the second half would be Nick Dal Santo mixing up commodities by complaining about the price of electricity. Why not try running the gas off the electricity and the electricity off the gas?

It took a few minutes for Langdon to get the first, from exactly the same spot (obviously not at the same ground, no need to write in) as last week, which we nearly gave straight back. Then 45 seconds later we did, which continued to point to an "it could've been worse, but maybe try not going seven goals down to begin with" result. Chandler and Mihocek brought the margin back to four goals, and I started to become moderately invested, until they got one back through Buckets McGovern's brother. 

They missed a couple of chances to kill us off after that, but left the door open for three goals at the end of the quarter. The margin was back to 12, and after being scathing about all the commentary waffle around a potential Carlton collapse earlier in the quarter, I was starting to get interested in the idea. Now, the clamp they had on our ball movement in the first quarter was fully released, and you could see us scoring freely. 

The face of our 'game of two halves' performance was Pickett (K), who tried hard to get something going in the first half but couldn't find a target if they were holding up a flare illuminated by the light of a nuclear bomb. Then, when things opened up he went off his nut. Usually, I take disposal efficiency seriously (more so than hitouts and inside 50s anyway), but this was a case where it says nothing about a player's overall performance. There's no stat to account for the centre clearance where he gathered the ball, fell over in something resembling a combat roll, before getting back up and carrying on like nothing strange had happened. Carlton fans might be inclined to ask where their players were in all this, but let's just assume he'd have escaped their clutches anyway because he's great.

Things went from interesting to very interesting at the start of the last quarter when Paddy Cross kicked a lovely snap to cut the margin to six points. Sure, Culley's handball in the build-up was of the "quick hands" variety, but it was a good finish and reward to the coaches for whatever they took from a statistically average performance in an ordinary VFL result that encouraged them to give him a game. Who knows where his career goes from here, but what a game to debut in after being plucked from obscurity on list deadline day. You play alongside two club legends, one a Hall of Fame certainty, in their milestone game, in front of a big crowd, then kick an important goal as part of a blockbuster comeback. Even if his career never gets any better (and we obviously hope it will), that's a memory you'd still be buzzing about in 2076.

After a good run with unique first names like Kysaiah, Koltyn, and Latrelle, we've already had a Paddy. (Yes, and the Irish people. Not that we trade in stereotypes about... oh, they're doing the dancing again), who also captain/coached Carlton, so who knows whether he'd have been rolling over in his grave over this or not. I was climbing out of mine, having watched the first three quarters sick as a dog but now not feeling any pain at all. The post-siren elation lasted until about 7pm when it all went downhill again, but it was a nice break while it lasted.

Then, just as it looked like Carlton were totally broken and on the verge of collapse, they seemed to steady with two goals and I was back to "Thanks for the comeback, can we not be so shit at the start next time?" sentiment. This turned out to be classic last gasp stuff, because for the rest of the game we went around doing whatever, whenever, wherever, and they couldn't get near us. The centre bounces were the best example of the shift in dominance. Earlier we got nothing from them, now Gawn was getting first touch to everything, Pickett ran riot, Sparrow played his best game in years, and Jack Steele had as many tackles in a game for us as anyone not called Jack Viney. 

That was good, but we still had to come from 20 points down in the last quarter. Which we did, so hooray for that, but it wasn't a given at the time. Official party time commenced with a 'contentious' holding the ball free kick, which morally I don't think should be paid, but by the rules, Carlton Player was caught trying to bustle his way out of traffic instead of disposing of the ball so stiff shit. Fritsch kicked a snap, and by the time Chandler got another holding the ball free (cue some angst in the crowd, surprisingly not exploited by the host broadcaster with NuffyCam cuts to people doing their block), it was back to a point.

Now the game was at a "it's the hope that kills you" stage, and the more pessimistic amongst us probably expected Carlton to pull some ridiculous, barely deserved win out of their arse. Nobody told their players this, and they spent the rest of the game first looking absolutely terrified of what was to come on-field, then off it.

You all know what happens from here, but for the historical record the final outburst of violence included Langford completely wrong-footing an opponent (who was later scalded for not remembering what foot Langford kicks with, which is the analysis version of the tribunal suspending players for not changing direction to avoid a collision in the 0.01 seconds allowed) to put us in front with a snap, then Pickett (K) smashing through an absolute roof-lifter which words will not do justice to so let's all enjoy ourselves by watching it again. Apologies for the interference with this clip which makes it sound like an idiot is yelling over the top.

If you're seeing this face ... it's already too late 😛#AFLBluesDees | #DemonSpirit pic.twitter.com/wZM0PNrWS0

— Melbourne Demons (@melbournefc) March 29, 2026

That is some sort of finish, but credit also to Sharp for the pressure that caused the ball to wind up with him in the first place. There were many benefits to the sub rule being abolished, but it may have saved Harry's career.

Now we were 11 in front, which has proved a cursed position for us before. Never mind, because here's Pickett again, setting up Fritsch for what became the sealer thanks to McKay flubbing a set shot at the other end immediately after. About 10,000 Blues fans missed this let down because they'd charged out of the ground as one after the Fritsch goal. I'm not saying you should never storm out in anger, but for me it would be more humiliating to go in that sort of group than to slink off alone. Gags about the size of our fanbase from opposition fans can be sent to PO Box GAGF, Tehran, Iran.

We were promised more fun this year, and I'd rather it not take the form of running down seven goal leads again but you can't deny this was good stuff. The fact that it wasn't even close in the end makes the result even funnier.

I don't make a habit of feeling bad for opposition coaches, but watching Michael Voss on the sidelines in the second half was like seeing somebody appearing at a Stalinist show trial. We know what it's like when a coach has hit the point of no return and would quit if it didn't cost him millions of dollars, but the difference is that ours delivered a flag first, and hadn't come back from the brink of being sacked multiple times in recent years. I imagine he'd have struggled to put on a brave face when saying hello to the receptionist on his way into Princes Park after this. The only person who had a worse Monday was Dezi Freeman, and he doesn't have to back up and do it all again five days later.

We don't play the Blues again this year so my interest in who's coaching them by Round 24 is zero, but imagine being a three time premiership player, Brownlow Medal winner, Hall of Famer etc... etc... and putting up with these absolute nuffy fans. The worst we got was some nuffy doing a wildly misfiring gag about waiting for Goodwin in the carpark and Chris From Camberwell going 101% helium on SEN. 

I'd be more scathing of the fans filming themselves screaming at f'ing players to take off the f'ing jumper if our more knobbish element hadn't done the same last year, but the old "you don't deserve to wear the jumper" angle is a bit weird coming from cockroaches over the fence whose main contribution is buying a membership and a hat. I'm well beyond berating professional athletes at the best of times, but let's keep it realistic. If it turns out the voices in the video were Sticks Kernahan and Jezza they might have the authority to decide who's worthy of the jumper, but otherwise that sort of carry-on is strictly for defeated men who are going to vote One Nation in protest at no longer being allowed to play Kevin Bloody Wilson albums in front of the kids.

We'll assume the abuse wasn't coming from the Carlton Past Players' Association, but one of the competing clubs had a lot of exes enjoying a lovely time. Certainly before the game, and after half time anyway. The added bonus to the milestones was some great historical content (and I'm clearly biased, but for mine the Gawn/McDonald chat was the best digital media we've ever done), including a wide variety of well-known faces going off their collective tits at the end.

An iconic crew ❤️ 💙 Former Demons reunited for a memorable day at the 'G celebrating #TMAX500 pic.twitter.com/ixKoJPIzcn

— Melbourne Demons (@melbournefc) March 30, 2026 

Meanwhile, thoughts and prayers for this lady, who clearly didn't expect to be seated next to a dozen ex-MFC players on the cans as her team sank without a trace. She might be trying to hear post-goal analysis on the radio, but is more likely blocking out the noise of a returning Jayden Hunt going boonta.

The AFLPA would've had their emergency counselling team storming towards the MCG at half time, but the end result was great, and a GIF of Excited Jack Watts at the end would be in handy for dozens of scenarios. 

The key phrase in footy is 'All's well that ends well', even if there's still plenty of work in our future. But for the purposes of handing the Big Embarrassing Collapse baton over to another team, and collecting four premiership points, it's job done and thank you very much for the opposition for carking just when the script said to.

2026 Allen Jakovich Medal votes
5 - Kysaiah Pickett
4 - Max Gawn
3 - Tom Sparrow
2 - Bayley Fritsch
1 - Jake Lever

Apologies to Chandler, McDonald and Steele.

Leaderboard
The pre-season favourite arrives and instantly jumps into second place, but still finds himself nearly three BOG behind Gawn. Plenty of time for them to duke it out, and we'd welcome any third party candidates who want to have a ping at the title. Lever is first on the board for the defenders, while we still wait for somebody to open the finally renamed (*CLICKBAIT ALERT* You'll have to read the linked article to find out, or wait however many weeks for an eligible player to poll)

14 - Max Gawn (LEADER: Jim Stynes Medal for Ruckman of the Year)
5 - Kysaiah Pickett
4 - Jack Steele, Jacob van Rooyen
3 - Tom Sparrow, Koltyn Tholstrup, Caleb Windsor
2 - Bayley Fritsch, Ed Langdon, Brody Mihocek
1 - Kade Chandler, Jai Culley, Jake Lever (LEADER: Marcus Seecamp Medal for Defender of the Year)

Next week
At about 4pm we were looking at a four digit crowd for Gold Coast on Easter Sunday, without the drawcard of celebrity hamstring victim Christian Petracca coming back to tear us a new one. On Monday morning, Steven King was on the radio saying fans had to come and make the MCG a "cauldron", which will not be compatible with the tightarse MCC shutting Level 4 of both the Southern and Ponsford stands. I'll reluctantly accept one of them given the prospective crowd and a public holiday, but both will make us look shit. You can, however, get a photo with the Easter Bunny at Gate 2, which is bloody generous considering its schedule that day.

I'd love to base prospective changes off VFL form, but after one game in a competition with an even number of teams Casey had a bye. I'm not saying the competition is a farce but... no, that's exactly what I'm saying. Assuming their game goes ahead this week and is not postponed due to a random state game or fuel rationing, I'd like Latrelle Pickett to get the chance to get hands on ball at a lower level. He showed a bit in the second half here, but it doesn't hurt to rotate. 

Based on the same King interview I doubt Heath's getting a game because the prospect of him playing alongside Gawn was described as "at some point this season", but it's not going to stop me calling for it. Otherwise, Rivers comes back for Jiath, Cross gets another go, and we hope for the best. I don't think we'll win, but nor did I think that about five minutes into the second quarter here so you never know.

IN: Rivers, Heath
OUT: Jiath (inj), L. Pickett (omit)
LUCKY: Cross
UNLUCKY: Nil because the VFL is run worse than an illegal tobacco shop post-arson attack.

Aaron Davey Medal for Goal of the Year
Apologies to Cross, Chandler, and Langford, but you can't go past Pickett, K unleashing full misery on Blues fans with that goal from outside 50. Context is always important, so this replaces Pickett, L vs St Kilda as the clubhouse leader for the GOTY.

Final thoughts
Eventually, this season we're going to get the conditions and opposition to play four quarters and something really big is going to happen. At the same time, keep the lid tightly on and recognise the limitations of where we're at. But I'll never say no to the chance of laughing at the misfortune of others.