Aug 05, 2012

AFL

Worst. Season. Ever. The 2012 Melbourne Demons

Is this the worst season ever? Fitzroy fans might say no and I’ve never met a University fan so I have no idea how badly they felt. But barring a merger or death of a club this must be the worst season going around.

On the field it has been an absolute disaster but that on its own isn’t enough. After all Melbourne has been so bad for the last five or so years (it feels like 100) that they are actually ruining my love of AFL.

While watching Geelong and the Hawks on Friday and Adelaide and Essendon on Sunday, I thought to myself, “This is actually an amazing sport.”

I also watched Melbourne tackle the Suns. Amazingly many people said this was a game Melbourne must win.

The Suns? Must win? How do you even get here?

Even worse, as the game kicked off I thought, “This is like our Grand Final.” I then punched myself. Hard.

My line in the sand has become showing a second year expansion team that we are the better team.

Show them we did but really, who cares? If we’d lost, it wouldn’t even be the lowest Melbourne moment of the last year.

Let’s look at the evidence.

First, the season began without Tom Scully. Our prized number one recruit had left us for an expansion team in Western Sydney. This is like your hot new girlfriend leaving you for the work experience kid.

Even worse, this was after the club had paraded him and Trengove around post-draft like they were Dwyane Wade and LeBron James.

As the season got going, it was revealed Liam Jurrah, a rare highlight at Melbourne, had been arrested for assault during a fight between different family groups from his home.

Then in March, Melbourne President Jim Stynes passed away after a long battle with cancer. As a player and President, Jim had come to represent all that was good with Melbourne. He had led a debt demolition that returned the club to financial respectability.

This was a major emotional blow to all the fans during a season that already seemed in trouble.

The Melbourne Football Club was given no time to grieve however. Straight after Stynes death, new coach Mark Neeld was accused by Grant Thomas of treating indigenous players differently.

A serious accusation became a farce as Melbourne demanded to know who was the source, only for it to be revealed as the AFL’s indigenous officer Jason Mifsud. It also came to light the accusation wasn’t true.

The final sting in the tale was accusations Melbourne indigenous player, Aaron Davey, was the source of the rumour, something he denied forcefully.

The media response surely makes it one of the toughest initiations into the AFL for a senior coach.

Luckily Melbourne had about three days to recover before the next crisis emerged.

Melbourne was forced to axe major sponsor EnergyWatch, after it was revealed their Chief Executive Ben Polis had made sexist and racist jokes on Facebook.

The revelation and subsequent cutting of ties had a multi million-dollar impact on the club. While new sponsors have been found, it was embarrassing that the club’s due diligence seemed not even to include a basic Google search.

Since then, revelations about how EnergyWatch conducted business has only compounded the issue.

While all this was going on, the team itself was showing that the depths plumbed last year were nothing. The skill level was so bad, it had to be seen to be believed.

Luckily for Melbourne, the big offseason signing, Mitch Clark was playing the sort of footy that makes you want to consider not heading up the mountain for a week of skiing.

Then he got injured for the rest of the season. I mean come on! The only bright spot in a turgid season snuffed out in the blink of an eye.

I really though that would be it, it couldn’t get any worse now; we had nothing else to really care about.

But then Brock McLean thought it would be good to bring up the issue of tanking.

He claimed the reason he left the club was because he was sick of tanking. If that’s really the reason he left, he must have also started tanking a few years earlier based on his individual form.

I’m hardly going to defend the tanking claims, I was sure at the time we we’re not playing hard. Yet everything I saw from Bailey in the season after made me think we may not have been deliberate. We got worse in years afterwards in many ways.

Andrew Demetriou has said any club found guilty of tanking would be severely punished. Well Andrew, I hope you consider all the footy Melbourne supporters have been forced to watch since that season as time served when it comes to sentencing.

As for Brock McLean, like the Japanese soldier who didn’t know the war had ended for 30 more years, Brock has continued tanking even after leaving Melbourne.

So as I look ahead, I’m comforted that things cannot get worse after the Worst Season Ever.

Except, that’s what I said last year.