Nigel Dawe

FOLLOWING a side like Melbourne, or any team in any competition throughout the world for that matter, isn’t or shouldn’t ever be determined by any manic cravings for success.

Don’t get me wrong: winning week in, week out – all the way to that last Saturday in September would be nice, but it’s never going to happen. And even if it did, there’d be a monotony factor to it that’d lead you to a level of personal smugness, that would just result in watching every game all by yourself.

That said, when things turn grim you quite often find yourself close to, if not outright, on your own anyway. Numbers drop off and enthusiasms wane, taking all traces of optimism with it, it’s almost as much a law of nature as Darwin’s fabled views concerning the fittest, and their subsequent survival.

Maybe I didn’t get the quit now it’s all too tough gene, but when things I care about struggle or start to suffer, that’s when I up my ante, disappearing or deserting from the fray are just simply not options that have ever been on my table. Thus, 2025 won’t go down as anywhere near the grandest in our club’s history, but it certainly won’t go down as its worst (finishing 14th or 5th last in the competition).

Seeing Max Gawn – the ruck giant who debuted in round 11 of 2011 that has since taken his number 11 to such stellar heights, collecting his 8th All Australian blazer, was a delight to behold. Already our 2021 premiership captain can be mentioned in the same breath as Warne-Smith, Barassi, Smith, Mueller, Flower and Stynes as being among the greatest to have ever graced the Demons fold.

Sadly, we also saw the departure of Simon Goodwin, after 202 games as head coach, the fourth highest by any individual in the club’s history. Behind only Norm Smith, ‘Checker’ Hughes and Neale Daniher; he will forever reside in the highest echelons of fondness and esteem in the club’s overall history. “Premiership coach” is something that can never be stripped from a person’s grasp, or taken from their list of accomplishments.

Two other figures that deserve eternal praise, and who will depart as 200-gamers and premiership heroes are Christian Petracca and Clayton Oliver. All the very best gentlemen, thank you for the memories and the sheer delight you gave us during your time in the red and blue.

Congratulations also to our gallant AFLW team who almost did the unthinkable, and beat the rampaging Kangaroos in a preliminary final. Your efforts at the pointiest end of the season did yourselves and the team very proud. Good luck to coach Mick Stinear who leaves the club after being at the helm since 2017, not to mention landing the club its inaugural premiership in 2022.

And so, we now look towards a new era, a new chapter that will introduce the club’s 35th senior coach in Steven King. Aptly, emblazoned deep in the inner sanctum of our change room walls (which I saw after our 20-point win against Richmond back in the ANZAC Day clash this season) next to a giant red and blue heart motif, that read: “We hold the pen”. And that – the players, staff and each of us – still do.

We, to a person, have the privilege of contributing and being a part of the oldest club in the land. As if to herald the significance and weight of such a sentiment, Henry David Thoreau once said, “All questions rely on the present for their solution. Time measures nothing but itself.”

Good bye 2025…And on behalf of everyone at NSW Demons, have a wonderful, safe and secure festive season, and be sure to truly savour the presence and connection that you share with each of your friends and loved ones.

Go 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.

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.

Happy 90th birthday Demons and let us not forget the incomparable Ivor Warne Smith

Nigel Dawe

NOT for the first time this decade, have I been dismayed by the temporal provisional nature of the manner in which modern day scribes and all-referring record purveyors herald the deeds of players who grace our fields.

The first was the way in which Dusty Martin was wrapped in platinum for being the inaugural player to B.O.G in three grand finals (not taking anything away from his incredible efforts in those three big dances) but it came at the direct expense of Percy Beames’ three grand final B.O.G efforts in a row (1939-40-41) – efforts I might add, that were not referenced in any way at the time (or since).

All this week I’ve been tormented by the same aversion by those ‘in the know’ when it comes to the actual facts behind the records we hold up and celebrate as such. While Darcy Moore’s 10 grabs in defence were stellar last week, they were not by any means ‘the greatest’, albeit anywhere near the output of Ivor Warne-Smith in the 1925 preliminary final (which was ironically against the magpies).

In what has clearly long since, and very sadly drifted into history, the future dual Brownlow medallist and all-time Melbourne great, Warne-Smith pulled in an almost unfathomable tally of 9 marks (in defence) in 11 absolute lightning-like minutes of the 3rd quarter of that prelim final (all whilst plugging the gaps caused by the side being reduced to 15 men). A match Melbourne would gallantly go on to lose by 37-points.

Incredibly, it is not known how many other marks Warne-Smith took that day nearly a century ago at the ‘G, but you’d hazard a guess it was considerably more than the nine he took in that confined blistering spell; the recording of individual statistics for things like possessions and all manner of other performance related metrics were absolute decades away from being outright captured, let alone even vaguely ‘looked for’.

I must admit I have a chronic red and blue tinged soft spot for Warne-Smith, to the point he is my all-time favourite footballer. The fact he was a returned Gallipoli soldier (who also lost a lung after being gassed in the trenches of France) before he played his first game for Melbourne, is something I consider so astonishing, that it will never be eclipsed.

Can you imagine the recruiter’s report in this day and age – “Candidate is missing one entire lung through active war service!?” The poor guy wouldn’t even get the nod for a time trial, let alone onto a team list to prove the science wrong through his own ticker and tenacity.

Another intriguing, albeit hugely endearing facet of this indestructible man is the fact he worked most game days shovelling coal for the railways very early in the morning, after which he’d enjoy a schooner or two with mates before heading off to the football to play in such a way that he is still considered one of, if not the greatest players to ever wear the red and blue.

If all the above weren’t deft defying enough, how’s the fact Ivor turned his back on the bright lights of Melbourne (after one season in 1919) and went to Tasmania for a period of 5-years in his early 20s (which are arguably any players ‘best years’ when it comes to footy) and became an apple farmer, which is something I admire.

Warne-Smith then resumed his career with Melbourne in 1925, within 12-months he had won his first Brownlow medal, but back then there was only one vote awarded by a field umpire for each game, which somehow makes the award seemingly much harder to win. The 3-2-1 method wasn’t to be introduced until after Warne-Smith claimed his second medal in 1928.

And finally, happy 90th birthday to our mascot-moniker of the demons, this weekend (being round 11) marks, at three-quarter time, the precise occasion that ‘Checker’ Hughes glared at his trailing troops back in 1933 and implored them: “Lift your heads and start playing like demons!”

Prior to this, our side were known variously through the years as the Invincible Whites (cricketers being the first to play the game) the Metropolitans, Reds, Redlegs, Fuchsias and then of course the mighty fear-inducing foot soldiers of Lucifer himself – the Demons.

September…. My favourite month of the year

Nigel Dawe

Before commencing this piece, I made a point of closing my eyes and taking a deep breath through my nose… and you can smell it… September that is – oh, so sweet September! There is nothing that stirs my inner 12-year-old to life than the thought of the Melbourne Demons headed to the finals.

Ironically, a book I was recently gifted by my sister called ‘Footy Banners’ sits at my elbow, and it has a snap on its cover which I figure in as a dot. It is the 1989 State of Origin at the MCG with the Vics streaming through their banner, and way up in the background between the major and the behind post (above the ‘M’ of the second Myer sign to the left) I’m there taking it all in as a then wide-eyed 12-year-old seeing his very first game at the ‘G.

As for that beautiful, mad 9th month of the year we call September (doubly so, seeing ‘sept’ stood for the numeral seven in ancient Rome) originally there were only 10 months in a calendar year. January and February weren’t added until quite some time later, and when they finally were, no one bothered to correct the other month names to reflect the ‘addition’.

Ancient history aside, our team is about to embark on its 41st September campaign, to hopefully net a 14th premiership, and if we do, it will be the 37th time in VFL/AFL history that a team has gone all the way after finishing the regular season in second place. Incredibly the Melbourne Demons have played in 90 finals matches, the exact same as the South Melbourne/ Sydney Swans. The ledger changes when you factor in the win/loss record though, the Demons having won 54 games to the Swans overall 40.

That’s the backstory, the one surging towards us concerns our third ever final against the red and white wearing Swans. For two foundation clubs, it is incredible that we’ve only met so few times. Who could forget the last time though? It was the second week of the finals in that magical year of 1987, a day in which our Demons left the field 76-point victors with Robbie Flower having kicked a game high four goals.

The first and only other time our two sides have met in September was way back in the preliminary final of 1936. That day we were beaten to the tune of 26-points by a then all-conquering team that won the flag three years prior, and were known as the ‘foreign legion’ because of the sheer number of players they had ‘acquired’ from abroad to bolster their ranks.

Back to the present day, and good luck Dees for our upcoming 91st finals match against the Swans, a wonderful omen – that being Jimmy Stynes Brownlow winning year. And let’s hope Simon Goodwin’s incredible post-season record continues, which currently reflects an 83% winning return.

Even the great Norm Smith claimed a 69% winning average in finals (mind you that was for 23-games in 11 different finals campaigns, compared to Simon’s six-games in his two post-seasons so far).

And ‘finally’, come what may, keep a quiet eye on the Geelong-Collingwood match, as there is an absolute potential hidden treat. Should our arch combatants in the black and white go down to the more favoured Cats, it will be their 100th loss in a final, making them the first team in the history of the league to notch up such a ‘wobble-some’ feat.