The Melbourne Football Club holds a strong place in my heart and unfortunately, I fear it always will. See the problem is they are awful. Not just in the sense they are currently playing horrendously, awful football but also, they are a terrible club.

I have been trying to convince myself otherwise but on Saturday the fiction was over.

Here was a day the demons should have showed their club spirit, the week one of their greats and the man who saved the club passed away.

Instead we saw an insipid performance from a team with more passengers than an A380.

But the funny thing was (it wasn’t actually funny) is that Saturday’s performance is not the worst I’ve seen. It was fairly standard for a Melbourne supporter. It seems the number one factor in how Melbourne play is how much the opposition want to work. If the other team want to win, they will.

Last year, Melbourne turned in the sort of poor performances that made me feel like I was watching a Nicolas Cage movie marathon.

While much of the focus was on the 186-point destruction at the hands of Geelong last year, which lead to Dean Bailey’s sacking, the signs had already been there in previous rounds.

The week before that famous loss, I had watched them play Hawthorn in an eventual 54-point drubbing. After half time, I started watching for Melbourne players running at full pace. It was almost three-quarter time till I saw one and that was to the interchange bench after a Hawthorn goal. Hawthorn could have beaten Melbourne by as much as Geelong but they went down a gear a few time. Geelong did not.

Anyone who watches Melbourne regularly knows all this. Melbourne players wait for the game to come to them. Jack Watts is a great example: he hesitates, he waits and he doesn’t seize the initiative.

But picking on Watts is looking at a result rather than the root cause. Watts wasn’t an awful player in junior footy, in fact he was the opposite. There is something deeper at work here and focusing on individual players means you can’t see the woods for the trees.

Common wisdom says that when you look at the high draft picks Melbourne have had and the resulting poor results that the Demons have drafted poorly.

But is this true? More could be said about how badly these players have been developed. Melbourne has drafted arguably the most talented youngsters in the country over the last five to six years. The question is, “What happened?”

Looking at Saturday’s performance, much has been made of the fact that James Magner, a 24-year-old rookie who came up through the VFL, was Melbourne’s best on the ground.

This speaks volumes about his development. Think about this for a second.

Melbourne has drafted the most talented players in the land for the past five years at an under 18 level. They have developed them through senior training, weight programs, nutritional assistance and AFL games. Then a player from the VFL who nominated for the draft when he was 17 in 2005 and every draft since and was still not drafted walks in and is instantly their best player.

This is staggering.

Are we to believe that every single player Melbourne has drafted has been a poor choice? Or is it nothing to do with the draft but the system these players have found themselves in?

For James Magner, not being in the development system at Melbourne seems to have helped him. He came up through Sandringham and Frankston in the VFL. In his spare time, he worked construction jobs.

The VFL is a tough competition. Players cannot get comfortable and they are all fighting either to stay in the side or be promoted to the AFL. It is also a very physical competition.

This is the polar opposite of the Melbourne senior team. Poor play has been tolerated with a view that players are ‘developing’ and it has ended up hurting the players. In Melbourne, only perceived potential talent was needed to be selected.

There have been no consequences in the Melbourne team for a long time now and you can see it in the way players give up during games if things get tough, yet are still selected the next week.

Davey and Green and in the past Bruce and Miller, allegedly ‘leaders’ of the club, are the obvious examples. They have never learnt resilience and can be taken out of a game a little too easily. In fact, selection has come a bit too easy. Because of Melbourne’s lack of success, there was a fear to drop them.

But it’s been a false economy to continue playing these players because the club is worried that if they dropped them Melbourne would get smashed. They are getting smashed anyway.

There have also been examples of players just never really developing physically at Melbourne. Cameron Bruce in his time went from a skinny rookie to a skinny veteran and his skills got worse. Of the current crop, Cale Morton looks like he has only a passing acquaintance with a weight program.

One thing that strikes you when Melbourne plays Geelong or Collingwood is how much smaller the Melbourne players are. This can’t all be drafting; it’s the development of these players over time.

Melbourne has bought in Neil Craig and Dave Misson, who both have strong backgrounds in sport science and fitness programs but it will take time to embedded this culture into the current playing group.

A dysfunctional development system explains why Scully was so keen to get out, he was willing to go to an expansion team in Western Sydney rather than stay; the money was a bonus. It also challenges the idea that priority picks will help a team. If the system that the talented young players are entering is no good, then all the talent in the world won’t help.

For Melbourne, the exit of Scully has led to two first round priority picks in the next draft, a draft that is rated as strong. Yet if the systemic issues of player development are not fixed at the club, you are effectively pouring talent into a bucket with a hole in it.

Let’s hope Demons fans are patient: fixing this problem will take some time.