Nigel Dawe

I wasn’t going to write just yet, I was going to hold off for a while and see how the next few weeks pan out; and then I thought – ‘No, you know what, while things are rolling the way they are, 9-from-9 to start the season – now is absolutely the time to capture something of this very moment!’

To add another precursor of sorts, I’m not saying for an instant the Dees are any certainty to etch their name in diamond-encrusted platinum by going through a season undefeated (a ‘feat’ as yet unrealised, in over 120-years of the VFL/ AFL competition).

But for just a second, for one almighty miniscule fraction of old man time’s most precious commodity, let’s consider the potential of such a prospect. In the emboldened spirit of William Ellery Channing, who once roared: “Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.” Why not dare, to at least unpack or remotely engage with what such an achievement might potentially look or even feel like. At the end of the day, you only ever hit what you aim for.

While there is no precedent in our code (at its most elite level) for a team that has gone from start to finish without feeling the cold slap of defeat at some stage; there are examples of ‘perfect’ seasons in other codes. In American Football for example, the Miami Dolphins ‘sailed’ through their season of 1972 taking all before them, achieving what no other side has done, before or since in that sport – and that is win – one week at a time, for each and every week of a given season. 

Arsenal, likewise in the English Premier League, won (well didn’t lose, they drew against some teams) by going ‘undefeated’ in all 38 of their games in season 2003-04, a feat which also earned them the title ‘The Invincibles’ and a special (never before given) gold-plated version of the Premier League trophy.

While our red and blue ‘crusaders’ of season 2021 have plenty more ‘immediate’ and pressing considerations to factor in to their collective focus for the year, like getting into September safely first; one nice ‘aside’ along the way, is the potential for achieving the ‘unprecedented’, and stamp their name for all-time on the very cliff face of the game itself.

It’s not unreasonable to consider a perfect season, it might be highly unlikely, even borderline ludicrous: but if the Dolphins of ’72, or if Arsenal of ’03/04 had thought leading in to round 10 of their respective undefeated seasons – ‘We couldn’t possibly do this, could we?’ Then guess what…? A loss would’ve certainly met them, with full ferocity ‘half-way’ along the rocky road of their own self-doubts.

At the original stadium of Olympia, the ancient Greeks had an altar set up in clear sight of all, but essentially it was for the competing athletes, in honour of ‘Kairos’, their mighty little god of luck and opportunity. Often depicted with arrows drawn and wings on his feet, because back then, as now – luck and opportunity have to be ‘taken’ on the fly, and seized without second thought or hesitation.

As such, right now is the ‘opportune’ time for the Melbourne Football Club to take its chances and play with absolute abandon; go out of your way boys – make it 10-in-a-row… we have nothing to lose or fear, except for loss and fear itself. In the purest spirit of one of the ancient world’s most popular sayings, which hasn’t lost any of its fitting gloss, since the ferocious old days of the Colosseum itself…

‘Fortune favours the brave.’

Nigel Dawe

The great Norm Smith, and ever-reigning coach of the Century, once snarled: “Winning isn’t everything, but it’s a bloody sight better than what comes next!” And, having stuck by our boys in the red and blue for the best part of the last four decades, I can vouch for Smithy’s comment, in a way that he couldn’t have remotely imagined when he said it at the time.

And so, without getting swept away by the first two absolutely fantastic ‘loss-less’ months of season ’21, and not to downplay or feign indifference to such a non-mean feat (because 8-in-a-row is sterling stuff) we have a long way to go; but what a trip we’ve been afforded thus far. One that’s starting to push our current crop of players into the realm of club record territory.

You’d have to have just come back from a trip to Mars to have not heard our best start to a season was back in 1956 – an ‘Olympic’ and truly halcyon year in which the Norm Smith-led, Barassi, Beckwith and Co gladiators notched wins in all of their first 13 matches, eventually going down to the Bulldogs in Round 14 by 13 points.

But one incredible ‘accompaniment’ to this statistical morsel, is the fact Melbourne also won the last six matches of season 1955, to create the most successful winning streak in the club’s history (19-games straight). The attached visual of ‘The Demon Comet’ and Beckwith with the ball-on-a-string appeared in The Age, 11 ‘supersonic’ games into that majestic season of 1956.

Having said that, the Cats of 1952-53 are the game’s true ‘astronauts’, albeit golden boys when it comes to stringing the W’s together in the win-loss column of ladder histrionics. This incredible dark blue-hooped bunch from Corio Bay fronted up for 23-games straight, without a loss. Next on the all-time list are those Bomber boys of 2000 (and how could we forget), but they amassed a mammoth 20-games straight from Round 1 through to Round 20 (dropping just that solitary outing for the entire year) – the most successful season of any side in the history of the game.

To paraphrase our more than canny current coach, Simon Goodwin, and his chief playmakers – Petracca and T-Mac from after the match last week: ‘To a person at the club, it’s about taking a 0-0 games won approach into each and every game – there is no next week or last week, winning streak or even Shit Creek, there is just an all-important right here and NOW, to be met, overcome and WON!’

Which is an approach and a convictional resolve that surely stirs not just the spirit, but the supreme example of Norm Smith to life, having once echoed: “Clubs must try to build a winning tradition, and develop to the highest degree a fierce pride in their team. If a club’s not a proud one, it has little chance of success.”

So, here’s to the pride required to rise, and prove to one’s self and the entire football world – that the team of the red and the blue have what it takes, to keep winning – one week at a time, for a long time to come.

Nigel Dawe

Neither a monkey or even a dust mite on our backs this year!

I don’t know if you’d call it hard core, committed, neurotic, fanatical or just ridiculous, maybe it’s a swirling, churning one-eyed combination of all five, but ever since I was a kid I have ‘occupied’ myself during the final credits of every film with trying to recognise or fleetingly pick out any famous Melbourne Demon last names.

As such, I don’t think I’ve ever spotted a ‘Barassi’ or a ‘Warne-Smith’ represented in any capacity of a matinee film; however, the other day after having sat through near on 3 hours of ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ with my 7-year-old daughter, I spied (and I’m not making this up) a ‘Lyon Beckwith’ in the film’s credits!

Not sure about you, but having a first name after perhaps the best player we’ve had at the club in the past 50 years and a last name after a two-time premiership captain from the ‘50s, would have to be an absolutely one-off celluloid occurrence, not to mention a red and blue referential miracle.
Needless to say, with me there is no pre-season, post-season or outright season in itself when it comes to the Melbourne Demons figuring, or pardon the pun ‘featuring’ in some daily way in my heart and mind. But that said, this pre-season is shaping as one of the most promising and talent crackling affairs that I can ever personally recall.

Our bounding, fit and seemingly balanced mix of players aside, it’s the cast that we’ve managed to assemble (almost by stealth) in our coaching and administrative quarters, that has me daring to believe and now menacingly murmur – “Yes, this will be our year!”

At some point over the passing of seasons, I remember hearing and retaining a comment made by the great (now in his 95th year) dual-premiership captain – Noel McMahen along the lines, “not until you fill the four heads [being Chadwick, Warne-Smith, Norm Smith and Cardwell] in the famous ‘Architects of Five Premierships’ photo, will you see anything like the success of what we saw in the ’50s and ’60s.”

Without lumbering the calamitous weight of expectation on the shoulders of our current ‘equivalents’, I’m looking so forward to seeing the collective effects generated by Alan Richardson, Mark Williams, Simon Goodwin and Gary Pert, add on a seasoned Adem Yze for good measure, and you have that aforementioned photo recreated, and then some.

While there’s quite a lot of talk around the traps about our club having the longest current premiership drought (57 years of silver-less Septembers to be precise) I don’t see this as being either a monkey or even a dust mite on the back of anyone associated with the club.

Football is a game played in a stand-alone, year-by-year fashion by players that live and die (without sounding too gladiatorial) by their exploits in ‘real-time’, such things as ‘seasons without a premiership’ are light years away from the realm of any footballer’s direct sphere of influence or control. That our oldest current player in Nathan Jones was born in 1988, puts into perspective the illogical chronological conundrum of holding anyone physically accountable for an overall inter-generational lack of success.

As for ‘premiership windows’, I always cringe when I hear this modern-day dupe of a phrase, for mine, like the best of budding cat burglars – every year is a premiership ‘window’ to be scrambled into in red-hot pursuit of the ultimate loot. If you don’t agree, then refer to the ‘Baby Bombers’ of ’93 or the marauding Hawks of ’08, to name just two supreme groups that came from the clouds to pull off the ultimate of ‘steals’.

I’d love someone to have mentioned such a ‘cute’ inanimate concept like a ‘premiership window’ to the game’s brimstone coaches of by-gone eras like Norm Smith or Checker Hughes; the notion of not having the troops committed or competent enough to win the competition in any given season would’ve absolutely confounded them.

Similarly, in the words and rollicking ‘Ocean’s 11’ spirit of perhaps world sport’s most celebrated and successful coaches of all-time, Vince Lombardi once ‘unpacked’ his approach to such things, by matter-of-factly saying, in his very concise ex-school teacher way (and something that could now well suffice for a rallying catchphrase for our primed Dees of ’21):
“Want it; desire it; earn it; take it.”

Percy Beames

Nigel Dawe

The celebrated German thinker Georg Hegel once said: “Philosophy is a gallery of heroes of thought” and if he’d have grown up in Victoria at any time after 1858, then I dare say he may well have come up with the equally fitting line: “Footy is a gallery of heroes of sport.”

But humour aside and that said, I was prompted on a serious note to draft up something today to honour not just this season’s, but the game’s outright forgotten Demon, and inaugural triple Grand Final blitzing trail-blazer.

Not to take anything away from Dustin Martin, because his performance the other night in Brisbane was something all footy fans may well never forget; I say ‘may well’ because that is exactly the fate that awaited our fleet-footed boy from Ballarat, Percy Beames – the game’s first three-time Grand Final best on ground performer (in the consecutive Melbourne winning teams of 1939-40-41).

I’m not sure if it’s a simple case of oversight or just plain over-exuberance on the part of the footy community to extol the performances and virtues of a contemporary player (and ours wouldn’t be the first generation to fall into the same wide-eyed and appreciative trap) but I can’t imagine the same snub of a player’s efforts (irrespective of how long ago they ‘took place’) occurring in a sport like American baseball. That country’s ‘national sport’ is unlike any other in terms of the reverence they ensure is afforded ‘recollecting’ the memory and exploits – to a fact and stat, of their greats.

Not that it’s ever a safe or even a wise thing to compare the performances of players from different eras, though it is a fascinating undertaking: one not unlike wading into a thick smoke-filled house lined with a thousand haphazardly placed mirrors. But where the blur clears somewhat, enough to gain a glimpse of clarity for the purposes of an informed opinion, is in the basic tale that the stats tell.

Of the three Grand Finals Percy Beames and Dusty Martin left every other player in their tenacious wake, it’s worth first mentioning that Beams scored a total of 12 goals (as a rover) to Martin’s 10 goals (having played on the half-forward line in two of his three Grand Finals).

Again, this article is not about proving who performed better or is more earning of ultimate bragging rights, but the incredible ‘given’ of Beames’ big dance outings, was the fact he lined up against the white-hot calibre of captain and Brownlow medallist of both teams in 1939 (Harry Collier) and 1941 (Dick Reynolds). The 1941 heroics of Beames are made all the more extraordinary when you consider that Reynolds was an absolute all-time great, not to mention a triple-Brownlow winning trojan!

Then factor in Richmond’s Captain Blood, who literally prowled the turf for opposition scalps in the ‘hit-out’ of 1940, and you have the gleaming stage upon which Beames rose to stamp his authority on the toughest game of all, three times-in-a-row.

So as to clearly establish the standing and place that Percy Beames occupies at the club (he was the first Melbourne player to reach 200 games, as well as being a handy cricketer, and the only player in the entire post 1897/VFL-era to captain both the MCC and the MFC) you have to look no further than the fact there is a ‘Percy Beames Bar’ in the members section of the MCG. I don’t know about you, but that would have to take the cake, albeit eternally warm the grand old spirit of any former great!

Red in the Shade of Invincible White

Nigel Dawe

Well, put it down as a sign, or dare I say a ‘symptom’ of the times, a game canceled at the 11th hour because of an occurrence of the Corona virus (on that note and most importantly, sincere best wishes to the entire Essendon Football Club and that everything pans out okay for all at Windy Hill).  But the more things change, the more they stay the same, albeit return to a point where they began. And so, it occurred to me, Australia’s national game both symbolically and literally looped a full 16 decades back in time to its origins last Sunday.

That being an intra-club match on the MCG between the gents of the Melbourne Football Club. If our boys were wearing all white (which was the club’s original playing attire, keeping in mind they were to a person – cricketers, that merely wanted to keep themselves fit during the winter months) then the journey back to our beginnings would’ve been made complete.

Thus the team’s first nickname ‘The Invincible Whites’, and if you think that’s a little tame or perhaps quaint in some way, then reconsider, because apparently the matches back then were of a highly competitive and take no prisoners nature (rather like our spirited ‘hit-out’ on the weekend) only no-one had to replace their torn shirt four times in the course of ‘play’ like one of our pioneers did in the early days.

I can’t help thinking how the ghost of Tommy Wills was in some way watching or pacing the boundary line, perhaps wishing he were able to once again physically enter the fray.

So, without an official game last week, I dug out my hen’s tooth copy of my favourite Melbourne match, which might come as quite the surprise to some fans, as it’s not even a first grade game, but it’s one that has enabled me to say – “yep, I’ve actually seen a Demons team win a big dance on the last Saturday of September at the MCG.”

It was of course the Greg Healy-led reserves grade Premiership of 1993, and if you haven’t ever seen this match, it is an absolute spirit-churning corker for the ages. Not only did Melbourne kick the first 9 goals of the game, it was an outing that was almost clinically executed from start to finish by our boys, some of whom played their last game in the red and blue. Darren Bennett was one such trooper, who kicked 3 absolute sound barrier breaking big ones (all in the first quarter) before he headed to the States to teach them a thing or two about punting like you really mean it!

My highlight (and it may be out of sync with the central tenets or tone of the modern game, and I’m certainly not condoning violence, but ‘flying the flag’ for your club in a Grand Final is an exempt-able matter as far as I’m concerned) was the Graeme Yeats instigated goal-square melee at the city end just before half-time.

To say it made last week’s Bulldogs-Giants tangle look like a meek night on Dancing With the Stars, would be an understatement. But the real throw-back for me was the ‘delighted’ reaction of the commentators (Drew Morphett, Bernie ‘Super Boot’ Quinlan and Dennis Cometti) whom each dissected the fracas with an analytical-tilt you wouldn’t see anywhere beyond the labs that are now trying to concoct a cure for Covid! They even managed to somehow get it shown later in the match in slow motion (“for those that may have missed it!”).

Different times, yes, but to this day it remains a game and a club for those willing and wanting to test themselves and have a red hot go, as Norm Smith himself once said: “League football is 70 percent guts. Split the other 30 percent any way you like.”