THE R WORD

by Whispering Jack

Earlier this week, I attended a drawing room meeting at the home of a Melbourne Football Club Board member. The object was to whip up support for the club's Debt Demolition strategy and in particular for its major fundraising function to be held early next month. MFC Chairman Jimmy Stynes was the only speaker and he made a brief and impressive presentation about how he came to be in his current position, about the Board he put together, about the coach and the team and his aspirations for the future.

There were questions afterwards and, though Jimmy obviously had pressing business elsewhere (it turned out to be Paul McNamee’s last night as his CEO), he stayed on for a short while to take part in the host's refreshments with the gathering. It was during this time, that he was asked the question whether the club was going to draft Jack Watts, one of the heroes of the Victoria Metro's Under 18 National Championship winning team to which he responded that this was not his decision, that it was within the jurisdiction of the club's football department and more particularly its recruiting people in whom he placed his implicit faith.

I was thinking of that particular response this morning when I read Caroline Wilson's article in the Age about McNamee's departure from the club - Sharp words before knife.

Wilson, who has been has been chief football writer for The Age since 1999, wrote that prior to his departure McNamee had been "deep in talks with [Jonathan] Brown's management" and that an offer of a five-year $5 million-plus contract had been made to bring the triple premiership forward home to Victoria. She quoted McNamee as follows:

"I believed we could take on Collingwood … I was sick of making up the numbers as a football club and I felt … we could be the first, the premier club.

"I was going to be audacious in the player area and it was an area familiar to me. Federer, Agassi, Graf — the works. I've done it before. I said to them: What about Jonathan Brown? He stands for everything we are working towards and we have to work quickly. We don't have much time. But he didn't fit into their game plan."

Stynes quite rightly scuppered the plan when he was told about it.

The plan might have been audacious but it simply did not reflect the way in which the club, under coach Dean Bailey, has been going about rebuilding the team; nor does it reflect the time, place or space that the Melbourne playing list currently occupies. Rather, it reflects the vision of a CEO who is not football savvy and that the judgement of Stynes and his board about McNamee's place at the club was an accurate one.

We would all love a "quick fix" solution to the club's playing list problems but to throw money at a player who has his share of injury problems and will be 27 years old when the 2009 season opens would fly in the face of everything that Bailey and his team have been trying to achieve at the club.

The Demons will cop plenty of flak from the media about the McNamee departure and the way it was handled. They are an easy target at the moment. Stynes and his team should shrug that all off and stick to their plan for the club's revival. We don't want to be the "premier club" but rather the premiership club. To do that it takes time, patience, perseverance and yes - ruthlessness.

Toes were trodden upon in a ruthless manner when the so-called "premier club" Collingwood, then considered a basket case, came under the control of Eddie McGuire and his team. Likewise, with the Bulldogs and David Smorgon and, more recently, Melbourne's opponent for this week, North Melbourne.

That "R" word has finally found a meaning at the Melbourne Football Club. We need more of it - not less.