Round 13 – Melbourne V Collingwood

Great Game, Wrong Result

Liam Chambers

Good start for the Dees with both sides even at quarter time

Arguably the most important game of our season is the Round 13 clash against Collingwood. It’s definitely the most passionate. This time last year we were at the start of a downward spiral where we only won four of our last twelve games. The Pies beat us by thirty eight points on that occasion; our only consolation being Collingwood also failed to make finals that year.

This year has been a bit of a rollercoaster for us, with wins over Fremantle, Brisbane and Sydney, after a disastrous five losses in a row to start the season. Despite last week’s defeat at the hands of St Kilda, we have been playing some impressive footy lately. Also, the underdog status suits us well, and I was expecting a performance along the lines of our rampaging final quarter victory in Round 10 over the reigning premiers.

Tom Sparrow has kicked some great goals from the 50m arc, and he did it again to give the Demons their first major on the scoreboard. Melbourne was playing competitive footy and looked impressive, tackling hard and restricting the Pies from playing their favoured transitioning game.

In fact it was nearly twenty minutes into the first quarter before Collingwood registered their first goal, after Daniel McStay received a handpass in the pocket and kicked from 40m, sending the ball through the uprights.

With just under four minutes to go, Jamie Elliot wrong footed the Dees’ defence and took an uncontested mark in the pocket. With his 2025 record of successfully converting set shot opportunities, it was a foregone conclusion that Elliot would hit the target from 35m.

Melbourne’s response was immediate. Having won the hitout, they were straight back down the ground where Koltyn Tholstrup was award a free kick for his tackle on Harry Perryman. The young forward then went back and made sure with his 45m set shot.

Collingwood gain the advantage with a little help from their friends (in yellow)

With the Demons languishing behind Collingwood in the kicking efficiency stats, Kozzie Pickett’s soccering kick off the ground from 45m out looked more an action of hope than intention, but when the sherrin crossed the line, we all knew that he meant to do it. Unfortunately, the scores were back to even steven when Beau McCreery’s running kick from 52m also found the space between the posts.

Collingwood fans were expecting their team to be several goals ahead by this late stage in the second term, but twenty minutes were gone before they managed to kick a second major. Steele Sidebottom’s kick from just inside the 50m line, made it a four point game in favour of the Pies. Then two minutes from half time, that annoying rule about not moving off the mark (except when it favours the Dees) gave William Hayes a relatively easy set shot in front of goal.

Not to worry though, as Kozzie responded by scooping up the bouncing ball, then turning and snapping from 30m out to notch up his second of the quarter.

The Umpires were fast proving themselves to be Collingwood fans when Jake Melksham was penalised for being pushed into Jeremy Howe by Darcy Moore; it was beginning to look like serial favouritism. Just saying…  

Then, of course, Collingwood got the ball back up to their end of the ground and Tim Membrey marked it inside 50. His kick after the siren went through to make it an eight point game at the main break.

Demons win the quarter by a single point.

The Pies had the perfect start to the second half when Brody Mihocek marked in the pocket and converted the difficult 35m set shot. When Ned Long snapped a goal from 15m, it seemed that Melbourne’s hopes of causing a major upset was dead, buried and cremated.

The Demons of Rounds 2 to 5 would have by now been packing their bags and heading for the exits, after trailing by twenty points to the competition leaders. The Demons of Round 13 however are made of much sterner stuff and decided to ignore the negative vibes buzzing around their heads, instead choosing to get straight back into the game.

Having won the hitout, Christian Petracca and Clayton Oliver combined perfectly to get the ball inside 50, where Jake Melksham ran out to take the mark. His set shot was clean, and it was back to fourteen points. Next it was Bailey Fritsch’s turn to mark the ball in a scoring position. He was thrown to the ground after the mark and awarded a 50m penalty (the good kind, as it favoured us).

Now it was a seven point game. The Dees’ momentum was temporarily halted when Bobby Hills legs taken in a tackle inside 50, and the medium forward didn’t waste his opportunity

With just over a minute left on the clock, Harrison Petty was “surprisingly awarded a free kick” in front of goal after being held while attempting the mark. His set shot was on target, and we were back in the competition.

So close

When Bailey Fritsch opened the scoring, four minutes into the final quarter, Collingwood and Melbourne fans alike were wondering if they were dreaming.

Ed Langdon had been making a terrific contribution to the Demons’ game, shadowing Nick Daicos all afternoon. Somehow the Umpires had missed what a great job Ed was doing in restricting Collingwood’s best player in the first half, but were certainly making up for it in the second. Langdon was admittedly in the wrong, but Daicos was awarded a very generous 50m penalty, ensuring the goal was a fait accompli.

Despite the setback, Bailey Fritsch quickly returned the margin to a single point when he snapped from the top of the square, after Jake Melksham had punched the ball directly into his path. Then it got even better when Kozzie collected the bouncing ball and snapped from the pocket, landing the ball into the square and across the line.

Just when it looked like we were on the verge of an upset for the ages, Daniel McStay took a contested mark and converted from 20m, effectively ending the fairytale.

It was a fantastic performance from Melbourne and every fan will be proud of the players for the effort and determination they showed against a side that will probably win their second premiership in two years.

Next, we travel to Adelaide where we face the unpredictable Power. It won’t be easy but if we show the same commitment against Port, then I sense another victory is on the cards for Melbourne.

Go the Mighty Dees!!!

Melbourne v Collingwood – Rivalry in red, blue, black and white.

Nigel Dawe

According to Western folklore, the word ‘rival’ stems from the old Roman word ‘rivus’ (meaning stream, river, or water source) and by extension ‘rivalis’ meant “one who uses the same stream as another [for sustenance and survival].” In the same vein, some of the oldest definitions in English for the word and notion ‘rival’, denote it as “having the same pretensions or claims, holding the position of rivals… To stand in or enter into competition with another; to strive to equal or emulate.”

Which could not more encapsulate what the Collingwood Football Club has meant to the Melbourne Football Club since having first met ‘in earnest’ on the 19th of June in round 6 of season 1897. That day Melbourne came away 7-point victors, but that initial success was far from how things would pan out across the years.

As such, our record against the Magpies is the worst of any team we have played. In the 246 official encounters against Collingwood, the MFC have left the ground only 85 times with a ‘W’ in their win/loss column. But fascinatingly, and this is where the necessary friction and deep factional divides are required for a rivalry to take flame; Melbourne have the best record against Collingwood when it matters most – that being in the beautiful month of September.

Of the 23 times we’ve played Collingwood in a final, the Demons have won on 16 occasions and drawn once. That draw (in 1928, the first in a finals match, let alone in a Preliminary Final) signaled, albeit demarcated a point (and pardon the pun) of no return in the rift that still healthily exists between the two clubs.

That day, which was defined by scribes as being gale force to downright dangerous (with scraps of paper and debris of all kinds swirling about and above the MCG) ended in a draw that should’ve resulted in a one-point win to Melbourne. Incredibly, a point was awarded to Collingwood’s Bruce Andrew after the 3-quarter time siren. In his later years, Andrew embellished his version of events with the stipulation that the point was never awarded, but that’s the nature of research-based evidence, it does eventually catch up to what is said with regards to what actually takes place.

In itself it ‘wasn’t much’, but if that solitary point hadn’t been awarded in 1928, then Collingwood’s famous ‘Machine’ that won a record setting 4-premierships in row, from 1927 to 1930 would never have occurred. The following week, history shows that Collingwood won by 4-points, going on to then beat Richmond in the Grand Final. But luckily for the rest of the competition, Melbourne had also won the 1926 Grand Final against the ‘Pies, ensuring that we didn’t have to hear all about their potential 5-peat for the next hundred years.

And there’s the rub, rivalries aren’t concocted or manufactured overnight, and if they are – then they simply aren’t! True rivalries are built piece by piece and rivet by meticulous rivet, from the ground up, on a traded blow-for-blow basis; they evolve, take emotional shape and are constructed upon their own comparative, and collective accord. Parts equally equal the whole, as the whole more than equals its parts. That Norm Smith grew up following Collingwood, as did Christian Petracca, gives an insight into the personal and at times conflictual nature of playing for a club and being loyal to it, in a sport as traditional, and as time-honoured as ours.

No discussion of a Melbourne-Collingwood rivalry could exclude the ‘upset of the century’, that being the 1958 Grand Final, the unlosable one really, for Melbourne, and the one that would’ve earned us the mantle of winning an eventual 6 flags in a row (from 1955-60). But such is the nature and the brutal meanderings of rivalry; full credit to a young Magpies side who had suffered 9 losses and a draw in their previous 10 encounters with Melbourne leading up to that big dance, a dance they would win by an ‘all-or-nothing’ 18-points.

History shows that Collingwood bashed and crashed their way to defending their 4-peat of premierships that day, but it also created a fire-brand resolve in the Melbourne side that saw it train over the summer months of ’58 and early ’59, for the first time in its history. The Demons of course came storming back to win the next two pennants, but to a player, those two premierships never erased the disappointment of losing the ultimate of battles with destiny itself in 1958. Up to the day Ron Barassi died, he would mention that if he could do just one thing over again – it’d be to play that 1958 Grand Final, and win! He even suggested that at some stage he might get the chance to do so, up in heaven.

When it comes to the greatest individual performance by a player in a red and blue guernsey against Collingwood, it would have to go ‘hands-down’ to our first dual Brownlow Medallist – Ivor Warne-Smith. In the dying stages of the Preliminary Final of 1925, Warne-Smith (who unbeknownst to trainers and officials, had sustained broken ribs the previous week against the Cats) with just 15 players on the field (through injury), he took 9 marks in an 11-minute spell during the dying stages of the match, a match that saw Melbourne soundly defeated, which makes his ‘efforts’ all the more admirable, if not outright extraordinary – that he refused to give in, even when all hope of victory was lost.

The celebrated Frenchman Victor Hugo once said of his beloved Paris, “He who contemplates the depth of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.” And when it comes to ‘unpacking’ the Demons – Magpie rivalry it feels very much the same, there is just so much you could touch upon that still wouldn’t suffice for scraping the surface of such an enthralling topic.

That half of Norm Smith’s 10 premierships (as both a player and a coach of Melbourne between the late 1930s to the mid-1960s) came against Collingwood as a direct opponent, goes some way to explaining what ‘part’ this black and white-hued club played in the mind, not to mention the legacy of our game’s greatest ‘coach of the century’. Fittingly, Smith would often respectfully bellow: “You’re not a footballer until you’ve played Collingwood at Victoria Park. If you could hold your head high after a match there…you were a man.”

And with that said, my favourite image of this wonderful rivalry, and the above sentiment of Norm Smith’s, is of Ian ‘Tiger’ Ridley in the 1956 Grand Final (a game which saw hundreds, if not thousands stream onto the ground after having stormed the gates to see the two mightiest teams compete for the ultimate prize). But Ridley is literally looking up to the heavens, with his head held high, exhausted – seemingly imploring the gods and himself to get the job done, all while being held aloft by his Collingwood foe, without whom the spirit and pure impetus of competition would not exist.

And so, may these two ‘rival’ teams long have each other in their sights, bringing out the best in themselves, and all that the game means to those of us who revere it.

It’s that time of the year again…

Nigel Dawe

Just before season 2025 gets underway, instead of rambling on with your wishful, one-eyed run-of-the-mill hypothetical blurb (though I will say, to emphasize a wonderful omen of sorts – there was a four-year gap between our previous two premierships of 1960 and 1964).

I thought I’d whet our red and blue appetite with a half-a-century old blast from the coach of the century himself – Norm Smith. During the off-season I got hold of an original (long lost) 1965 newspaper article that featured our master coach’s views on what he considered to be the complete player, among countless other fascinating, albeit highly insightful, footy related things. In the very least, it is a reminder of what not only drew, but drove, and subsequently made the Melbourne Demons of the 1950s and 60s the most successful side our game has ever known.

The Complete Player… By Norm Smith (The Sun, Monday, August 2, 1965)

It is not easy to pinpoint the qualities that make a man the complete footballer because footballers, thank goodness, don’t come from the same mould. Footballers have different ways of performing their skills, and any coach who tries to make his players conform to one set method is being foolish.

One of the reasons for our success at Melbourne is that we allow players to be individualists. We allow them to play in their own styles so long as they incorporate their efforts into our overall strategy. Barassi, Tunbridge, Vagg, Mithen, Mann come from different moulds and we didn’t attempt to change them.

In most sports, certainly in tennis and cricket, as well as football, I think it’s probably best for young players, after learning the fundamentals, to develop naturally without being over-coached. All I have shown my son, for instance, is how to hold a ball, how to keep his eye on it, how to drop it.

What every League player must have is courage. Every man’s a squib at heart, and I like to tell my players that courage isn’t the absence of fear, but the mastery of it.

Sometimes you can help a youngster to find courage. You build up his confidence in subtle ways until he surprises himself. But if you have the most brilliant recruit of all time and you can’t help him to gain confidence it is better to unload him.

Ken Melville is my No.1 player for courage. He was our vice-captain in 1955-56 and although he lacked physical strength – he was 11.5 st, and 5ft. 10 – he did more courageous things on the ground than any other player I have seen. I don’t mean he went round knocking blokes down. Ken inspired his mates by taking marks while running into difficult positions.
Courage was something he taught himself, and yet he was such a gentle man, and, as you know, became a Presbyterian minister.

These days people are surprised why so many good players in the Reserves never quite reach the first team. The fact is that physical attributes count for a lot in Australian football. A man can be an outstanding rover in the seconds, but lack just that fraction of pace or strength to be able to cope with the greater tempo in League football.

Players who come to Melbourne are thrown into a melting pot. They are told they will have to accept direction and take their chances when they come, irrespective of their personal preferences. I remember Roy Dowsing came to us in 1939 after he had kicked 160 goals in the Caulfield-Oakleigh League. Melbourne took one look at him and thought what an excellent rover and wing man he’d make. And he did.

Alan La Fontaine kicked 180 goals in the amateurs and became a wonderful centreman, and Jack Mueller, who was a centre half-back, became a ruckman and forward pocket.

Even Ron Barassi went through a stage where we didn’t know what to do with him. He wasn’t a success at full-forward or on a half-forward flank, and it wasn’t until Peter Marquis was out injured that we put Barassi on the ball – and saw the start of a legend.

When we are recruiting, we look for basic potential – whether a player has speed, marking and kicking ability and so on. But I tend to study more closely those who are not outstanding in their skills, because I reckon if they’ve been recommended to me they must have some other hidden qualities, such as strength and courage…

One of the questions often put to me is whether the players of today compare favourably with those of the past. I think they do. Some people make the mistake of comparing champions like Nash, Bunton and Reynolds with the average players of today. It is more reasonable to compare the average players.

Certainly, many players of the 30s wouldn’t have measured up to the pace we have today, although I concede that with intensive training they would have been just as fast. Because of the pace, our fellows today have not perfected the skills of the old-timers. Yet often on training nights, when the pressure is off, you see players make beautiful stab kicks and high marks.

For quite a while one of my contentions has been the rules must be modified to bring these skills back into the game. There is too much negative, frustrating play in football today. We, at Melbourne, are as guilty as anyone else, I suppose. We kick wide because it is realistic to do this. And we drive the ball down the ground unscientifically simply to make ground. Too many Rugby features are coming into our game.

I think for a start we should award a free kick when the ball is kicked out of bounds in the vicinity of the goal. It might be said that this would be unfair on the attacking team, but there are 21 yards of space to shoot at – the biggest scoring area in the world – and players who miss don’t deserve much sympathy.

To conclude, I’d like to touch on our six premierships over the past decade and suggestions that we are lucky by playing the finals on our own ground. The only time I had much doubt about any of those premierships was in 1957. At the end of 1956 we had farewelled Cordner, McMahon, Melville, Spencer, McGivern and Lane. We lost the first semi-final, but we still took the flag – our third in a row. It was one of my greatest thills.

Last year we were said to be fortunate, although I maintained we were as good as Geelong and we knew that we had beaten Geelong about 12 times over the past 15 or 16 games. The critics who claim we have a big advantage playing the finals on the MCG should remember that the ground to us is merely a place where we do hard work. The other sides must get a greater lift than we do in playing in the MCG atmosphere. This has been one of the factors helping Richmond. As for the crowd it is usually anti-Melbourne round most of the outer.

I am supposed to know all about the wind pockets at the MCG, but I don’t think anyone does. Kevin Murray once asked me which way he should kick when he was captaining an interstate team on the MCG and I told him: “I wouldn’t have any idea.” The winds at the MCG are unpredictable.

There are several good reasons why Melbourne has won six premierships since 1955, but I don’t think our familiarity with the ground could be included as one of them.

THE END

By Nigel Dawe

Leadership is a funny thing, in this ultra construed era of ours, it appears to have taken on a somewhat quasi-here-there-and-everywhere kind of prevalence.

But true leadership is somehow forged only through, or because of – hardship, not to mention trial and the gravest of tribulations; it is a quality that often ‘leads’ to triumph, after having endured the tests and red-hot throes of defeat, and rarely, albeit almost never, the other way around.

The Melbourne Football Club recently lost one of its all-time greats and captain – John Beckwith, on-field leader for the premierships of 1957 and 1959, not to mention ‘the upset of the century’ in 1958. John is also credited as having been the first captain to ever receive a premiership cup on Grand Final day, after they were inaugurated in 1959.

Intriguingly, Beckwith’s first season in senior ranks (1951) saw Melbourne win on only one solitary occasion, and in another game that year against the Bulldogs they were walloped by 30 goals!

So, John knew first-hand the grave questions only defeat can pose, before it sometimes propels a chosen few to victory beyond all imagination. Needless to say, Beckwith was named Best First Year Player, before going on to forge a career as one of the best defenders to have ever donned a red and blue guernsey.

With Beckwith’s passing, Max Gawn becomes the lone living Melbourne player to have captained the club to a premiership. And like Gawn, who seems to have that elusive ability, albeit aura to rouse the spirit and fortunes of team mates to do the miraculous.

Beckwith famously leapt up at half-time of the Second Semi-Final (being 48-points down) against Essendon in 1957, and started singing ‘It’s a grand old flag’. The team didn’t win that day, but they did go on to resoundingly beat the Bombers by over 10-goals a few weeks later.

John Beckwith was only 24 years of age when he took on the role as captain of what would be the greatest dynasty that any side in the history of the game would go on to enjoy. Having played in each of the 7 Grand Finals between 1954 to 1960 for 5 premierships (two as captain) – is a record that seems destined to never be rivalled, let alone ever beaten.

There is a famous image of Beckwith on the MCG after one of their Grand Final wins, sharing a cold ale with his coach Norm Smith – whereby you just can’t help but ponder – what sublime, never to be repeated recipe this team created for the elixir of ultimate success.

Sadly, our side wasn’t able to win for ‘Becky’ last weekend up in Alice Springs, the players were all wearing black armbands in honour of the boy from Black Rock who wore the number 30 guernsey for Melbourne on 176 miraculous occasions.

As upsetting as it was that our modern-day batch of Demons couldn’t win for one of its all-time greats, it might prove eerily appropriate, that from the searing clutches of this defeat, our team could eventually rise again to the heights of success, as Beckwith and his fellow Demons did all those years ago.

Rest in Peace John Beckwith, one of the very last links and vital cogs to the game’s greatest dynasty has passed on, but you have left a legacy and an example of true greatness that will last and shine brightly for as ever long as the game is played.

Jim Stynes – 23 April 1966 – 20 March 2012

Nigel Dawe

AS the years go by it gets harder to accept that Jim Stynes is gone, doubly so that it has now been 12-years exactly since this shining light, if not absolute shooting star of an individual passed away, decades too soon – we all might add.

Akin to one of my favourite literary heroes, Albert Camus, who like Jim, died in his mid-40s, you have to wonder what wonderful things were still in store, not just for them as individuals, but for all who knew and loved them, albeit directly benefited from what they did so selflessly, and prodigiously.

But there’s the rub, and as the old saying goes, “It’s not the years in your life, it’s the life in your years” and what Jim managed to pack into his allotment of ‘annual grants’, fully amounts to the grand sum of at least 10 people.

As the Algerian-born Camus (who also made a name for himself in a distant land) once said, which could aptly encapsulate Jim’s own approach to life, “Everything which is alive is ours. All we need to do to become conscious of our task is to open our eyes…What we are, what we have to be, are enough to fill our lives and occupy our strength.”

To say that Jim was a hero of mine is an absolute understatement, and as such, it’s an incredible accompaniment, if not ‘feature’ of my own life that his run of consecutive first grade games for Melbourne kicked off when I was in year 5 of primary school in 1987, and came to an end in my fourth year of university, 11 years later. It’s still mind-boggling to think that he was a playing member of the team I barracked for in every match throughout this period, or 244-games to be precise, an AFL record that will surely never be beaten.

From the start of his career, Jim was a favourite of mine (I was also a ruckman for the teams I played in as a junior) his passion, aggression and approach to the game was something that truly inspired me, and when he won his Brownlow Medal in 1991, I didn’t sleep for a whole week afterwards, I was that excited. To think he’d never picked up an AFL ball until he was 18, and then went on to win the game’s highest award 7-years later, isn’t just an improbable case of ‘selling ice to the eskimos’, it’s more a case of creating a 10-metre-high ice sculpture with a pair of tweezers, in the middle of the Sahara Desert!

Not to mention ruckmen of this era were no lightweights, they all looked far more like menacing villains out of a Bond film. That was until Stynes changed ‘the face’ of this role in every sense; the fact he could run all day and not miss a beat, revolutionised not just the possibilities, but the expectation of what ruckmen ’could do’, right up to this very day. To see any of the modern-day ruckmen go about their business and ply their trade, is to see the pure, polished spectre of Stynes in each of their separate moves and manoeuvres.

One of my favourite memories of Jim Stynes (as a player) was ironically the 1988 Grand Final, a game remembered by most of us, for all the wrong reasons (having lost the match by a then record 90-odd points to Hawthorn). But Jim played his heart out that day, he was the clear best player for Melbourne by an Irish country mile; there’s just something about those that never take a backward step or refuse to submit, and it’s something you never quite see in full, until you observe someone still applying this approach, when all hope is lost.

As if I somehow knew from the beginning that Jim would go on to be not just a great of the Melbourne Football Club, but the entire game itself, I kept a folder of newspaper cuttings and magazine articles related to him. A folder I still dip into from time to time, to remind me of how being the best version of your own self requires giving all you have (and then some) to what you do, because as Jim well knew – it is the only way ‘to reach’ the land of your wildest dreams.

Relatedly, Jim’s fellow Dublin-born, Oscar Wilde once said, “The aim of life is self-development. To realise one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.” And as if he were following Wilde’s directive to the very letter, Jim Stynes required only 45-years to perfect a nature so impressive and rare, that we may never see the likes of it again.

May you rest in peace Jim Stynes, and thank you for blessing our lives with the gifts you bestowed upon us, you will never be forgotten.