So how could any modern-day, dyed in the wool Melbourne fan be anything but completely and utterly Dee-lighted with a Christmas stocking that is so jam-packed with such soul-soothing content as this!?

Nigel Dawe

Firstly an MFC membership package (for the 33rd year in a row – the great ‘Sugar’ Healy’s old number, not to mention our little soaring Grand Final forward ‘Wizard’ Farmer, now there’s a sign or two for you…) followed by a book about our immortal Dublin’s Jim, and then to ‘top it all off’ a shirt for the ages that stirringly says: ‘Keep your eye on the red and the blue” with a menacing pitchfork too – you have to admit, it is absolutely – die and happily go to heaven stuff!

Just to set the record straight, in no other realm of my existence do I believe in omens, superstitions, signs or anything that insinuates anything remotely reflective of divine interventional givens, but I am willing to stake my [beyond next season] credibility on the fact – that years that end in ‘9 have proven more than club defining ones in our team’s history.

Take ‘1939’ (which even finds its way into the ‘extended’ version, albeit the now long lost verse of our club’s theme song) – “well the team played fine in the year ’39” – that being a full 6 years after the game’s first ‘super-coach’ Checker Hughes famously asked, if not fumingly insisted of his then budding ‘Fuchsias’ at half time of a game to: “Lift your heads and start playing like DEMONS!” and peerlessly fearless Demons they would more than go on to become, taking out a three-peat of premierships in ’39-40-41. The fact Percy Beames was best on ground in all three of those Grand Final wins is a feat surely destined to never be emulated by anyone ever again.

Not to mention ‘1959’, the year our revered Demons cemented themselves in the game’s most elevated echelons as one of the greatest teams of all-time, forget about the adage of ‘one year to the next’, this was a coach of the century led ornament to the game, a side that could’ve actually claimed seven premierships in a row if not for the Grand Final losses of ’54 and ’58.

So without putting too much undue pressure on Simon Goodwin to follow in such ‘how fine are the years ending in 9’ suit, I reckon – and harshly mark and frog-march me away if I’m wrong – that our modern-day airs to the tenacity and spirit of Tommy Wills out there in the red and the blue are due for one hell of an almighty season. And just quietly, look out for the son of Todd, to further etch the Viney name in gold at the MCG with a Brownlow.

Ah, for better or worse – season 2019… here we come!