On 23/10/2016 at 2:03 PM, Whispering_Jack said:

I tried to finish the book a few times over the past several months and found myself skimming the pages as I passed the half way mark without taking in the words. Perhaps it was the style in which the book was written but I tended to lose interest and eventually put it aside altogether.

My interest was piqued again with the season coming to an end and my being laid low in bed with a cold so I grabbed my volume and finished it off in a single sitting this morning and into the early afternoon. 

From my point of view, it wasn't particularly satisfying in regard to it being a revelation of many unanswered questions I had about the troubled times in the lead up to his sacking as coach and the unrest surrounding 186 and its aftermath all the way to the disintegration of the board that replaced that of Paul Gardner which appointed Bailey in the first place. 

Bails comes across as really good bloke. He was thrust into a job at Melbourne that could never have resulted in the type of success that say, an Alistair Clarkson has achieved at Hawthorn. Clarko most likely would have failed had he come to coach Melbourne in 2008. Similarly, Mark Neeld was, in my view, in much the same boat - there were too many divisions and too much bad history.

Some call it the Norm Smith curse and while others might laugh at the notion, it's inescapable that our club has been blighted by more than its share of tragedy over the past five decades since we became known as a club that sacked its coaches. After all, if you can sack the very best, then coaching at this club will always be a dangerous activity. And we sacked the very best in 1965.

The troubles that stretched beyond Bailey's tenure were indelibly tied up with that history and I think we're fortunate that the "bad history" might have become just that - history. 

The club is now run in a different way, without the interference that marred administrations in the past. There is a better chance that the current coach won't have to deal with "wankers" or "bullies" and if that happens, one of Dean Bailey's lasting legacies will have been to aid in the process that rid us at last of the curse.

I think it is testimony to the man that he did not seek to vent about his tenure at the MFC.  The reflex inside his gut would have been most compelling I would have thought.  Rather, his whole ethos was based on positivity, having learned from his past with a view to the future.  Despite the moribund nature of the club at the time and immediately following, I remain of the view that left unfettered, DB may well have been a great coach of the Melbourne Football Club, even though that tenure would have been prematurely cut short by his untimely death.  We too often forget that a Bailey coached Melbourne beat the Swans in 2010 by 73 points. With the then Swans coach, Paul Roos suffering his biggest defeat as coach, he made the observation that the Dees were building something special.

Earlier, we had beaten a much better Lions outfit, compared to the present day breed, by 50 points.  We had also flogged Richmond that year by 55 points and repeated the does later in the year.  For much of 2010, we were a very competitive unit.

Having spoken to DB's previous legal representative, it could be posited that the MFC were lucky that legal action was not instigated.  But again, perhaps it is simply testimony to the man, his character and his beliefs that he chose not do do so.

 

 

 

We were actually pretty competitive for parts of 2011.   People in the Football Dpt were clearly working to undermine DB for most of the year.  Supporters  tend to forget that prior to the Geelong debacle Brad Green & some senior players approached the Board to complain about interference by members of the football Dpt.   

We played some really good football that year but it was interspersed with some really poor football as well. And there were discipline issues such as the drinking incident involving Beamer (which I think was poorly handled) and the story about the players calling off training. Divisions within the FD and the playing group are usually a recipe for disaster and Bails copped the full brunt of that disaster. We the supporters didn't fare very well out of it either.

As I said above, it's over now.