NO EASY RIDES

[Demonland 66,890]

NO EASY RIDES by Whispering Jack

There are no easy rides to the top when you're involved in a highly competitive professional sport and Melbourne learned this lesson most emphatically when it was outclassed by West Coast in its Round 8 clash at the MCG.

After last week's heroic but failed effort to claim what would have been a significant victory over the Western Bulldogs (that would have lifted it into the top eight), Melbourne plumbed the depths with a shambolic mistake-riddled performance which coach Dean Bailey likened to its round 1 demise against Hawthorn. In fact, there were times during the game when the Demons were visually as bad as the team that played the Hawks not just on that occasion but in the first round two years ago and that was about as bad as it can get.

The result this time wasn't a 100 point defeat but Melbourne wasn't taking on a premiership side either. In fact, they lost a game for the second time in three weeks when they had gone in as firm favourite and this time it was against an outfit that has hardly won a game away from home in the past four seasons and not at all at the MCG since it won the flag back in 2006. Perhaps they thought after pressing one of the top dogs of the competition, that this week would be an easy ride.

Melbourne can hardly point to a lack of experience for its woes because the team went into the game with a slightly higher average age and more games experience than its opponent.

Just when I truly believed that the number of ways a team could lose a football match had been well and truly exhausted the Dees came up with another way to let their fans down. They succumbed to an intense game of attacking pressure unleashed upon them by a highly disciplined unit that lured them into a spider's web and strangled the life out of them not once but twice during the course of the one game.

West Coast somehow managed to squander the advantage of its superior play in the first half when it allowed the home team to catch up late in the second term. The scores might have been level at the main break but a messed up Eagles kick coming out of defence and then a fifty metre penalty cost them what should have been at least a two goal buffer after the Demons blindly stumbled and fumbled their way through the first half.

Melbourne started badly and gave away the now almost customary early couple of goals in the first five minutes and then kicked poorly for goal to trail by 9 points at quarter time. At that early stage the free kick count was 9 - 2 in favour of the Eagles. The only thing I can add is that the men who weren't wearing pink this time had as bad a day as the team that wasn't wearing pink this week.

The sloppiness continued early in the second quarter but three goals in midterm (half the team's aggregate for the match) in the space of five minutes to James McDonald, Daniel Hughes and Jamie Bennell gave the Demons the lead for the first time. At that stage, one could have expected that the storm had been weathered and that Melbourne could then go on and take control of the game

but West Coast persisted, the teams traded goal for goal and half time arrived with the scores deadlocked.

The game these days is played at such a frenetic pace that you simply can't afford to suffer a couple of injuries lest it plays havoc with your interchange patterns and ultimately leads to tired players doing tired things both physically and mentally. In Melbourne's case this scenario arose when both Matthew Bate (ankle) and Aaron Davey (broken nose) required treatment in the first half. While both spent time back on the ground after half time they were reasonably ineffective after that (but the same can be said of many of their uninjured teammates). The end result was an ugly start to the third term. They spent most of the first ten minutes with the entire team in the back half over possessing the ball, overdoing their handball and compounding all of the mistakes of the first half by twofold.

The final outcome was inevitable and only the fact that the Eagles weren't good enough, prevented a ten goal blowout. The 29 point final margin was nowhere nearly as truly indicative of the Eagles' superiority. I wasn't joking when I wrote that the Demons had regressed to their form of early 2008. They were that bad.

How else would you sum up a game in which the team took a meagre five marks inside the forward fifty metres? Often there was simply nobody around on the forward line to take a mark because

the team employed what seemed to be a rolling forward line theory which places most of your forwards around half back or wing. With that in place, they simply butchered the ball going forward after long, slow chains of handball, which if not botched gave the opposition plenty of time to cover any loose men and to beat them anyway.

Emerging teams will always have their bad and their good days but I hope that the team can get its act together next week lest there will be a long string of boat people wearing red and blue heading further north west into the Indian Ocean next week.

And that won't be an easy ride either!

Melbourne 1.3.9 5.5.35 6.8.44 6.10.46

West Coast 3.0.18 5.5.35 8.8.56 10.15.75

Goals

Melbourne Green 2 Bennell Hughes McDonald Scully

West Coast Kennedy LeCras 2 Cox Lynch McKinley Rosa Selwood Selwood

Best

Melbourne McDonald

West Coast Priddis LeCras Selwood Cox Stevenson Ebert Hurn

Injuries

Melbourne Bate (ankle) Bruce (hamstring) Davey (broken nose)

West Coast Nil

Changes

Nil

Reports

Nil

Umpires Meredith Wenn Mollison

Crowd 28,593 at the MCG