THE TRADING CHRONICLES - HAPPY DAYS

HAPPY DAYS by The Oracle

The free agency and trading period which began so brilliantly for Melbourne when the club secured Billy Stretch for a third round national draft selection and overall pick 3 as compensation for James Frawley, who everyone knew from a long way back was leaving the club, turned sour yesterday.

After all of the drama of the Friday evening announcement that former captain Jack Trengove was on the trade table and almost certainly off to the Tigers, the news of further damage to his navicular bone was devastating to hear given that he has been such a model citizen at the club, that he has gone through so much in terms of injury and disappointment and has shown so much in terms of loyalty. The injury certainly scuppered the proposed trade which would have given the club an additional first round draft choice but also left the club's playing list one short for the foreseeable future. The Demons rightly are backing their man and hoping that he can get back to full health and resurrect his career.

The much-awaited mega trade involving what seems to be about half, if not more, of the participants of this year's trading block, still didn't make it across the line even though the Dayne Beams part of the equation managed to resolve itself yesterday. We all thought that once that happened, all of the other pieces of the jigsaw puzzle would fall into place and the number of "done deals" would mushroom from the piffly four trades completed to date to more than a dozen but it didn't happen.

The reason for that is that the Travis Varcoe move from Geelong to Collingwood was still waiting on the crossing of some t's and dotting of i's. The thing had been on the drawing board for days waiting of the resolution of the Beams matter; now the football world would have to wait another day while two of the slowest moving football clubs on the planet got their acts together.

Mark Robinson of the Herald Sun who has been much maligned over his handling of the Bombers' drug saga got it almost right with this tweet:

@Robbo_heraldsun: beams deal narrative: stalled, slight movement, moving, breakthrough, clubs talking, maybe done, almost done, nearly done, poised ... done!

One can only hope that the final part eventuates and the other twenty or more transactions manage to get across the line in the 1½ days left for trading, at the end of which we'll all be singing, "happy days are here again".