WRITING ON THE WALL

by The Oracle

It was early in the final quarter and the game was well and truly over. Matthew Richardson marked the ball in front of Nathan Carroll at a little over fifty metres from goal. Noticing that his opponent's attention was elsewhere, he took advantage of the situation, ran around Carroll and booted a goal that put the Tigers back to eight goals in front. The next thing that happened was that a kindly trainer came along and gave the Demon defender a drink.

And that was it.

An hour later, the coach fronted the media and slammed his players for an "embarrassing and insipid effort"; the loss was "the team's worst in a long time" and he vowed his side would respond to the defeat. The how and the why of the promised response was not explained but I suspect that the details have not yet reached the drawing board stage. After all, the blueprint for the entire 2007 season has long been declared a total failure and, in its place, there are no Plans B, C or D.

Had there been a Plan B, C or D then it should have been employed at the ten-minute mark of the first quarter which was the time when the coach said he knew "the writing was on the wall". In the context of this match, that was about five minutes after it had become obvious to the rest of us. Melbourne's first two or three forays up forward were easily thwarted due to a lack of marking targets. Two of Richmond's early goals came as a result of coast-to-coast movement of the ball from defence to attack to goal without challenge. This pattern had been well and truly set for the night. In the context of the season of course, the writing had been well and truly engraved on the wall a long time ago.

The problem is that the pattern has hardly been altered as the club's season lurched out of control. Last night's game was allowed to become a training drill for the bottom side - one which had not won a game in the first two and half months of the season. Richmond's last goal of the first half from Shane Tuck said it all. He took the ball in the middle and ran unimpeded to forty metres to slot it through. Shamefully, as was the case for most of that half of football, not a single opponent came near him.

Yes, blame the players by all means for the lack of pressure on their opponents because they were absolutely pathetic. There was no application, intensity or hunger for the football and there was no sense or purpose in the way they played but the same can be said for the people pulling the strings up there in stratosphere. They were equally insipid starting with their team selection and ending with their slow reaction to the initial Tiger onslaught. After that, they were simply rotating deckchairs on a fast sinking Titanic. There's no use in hanging your hat on the fact that Melbourne won the second half because a young team like Richmond is always going to tire after the effort it expended in the first. The Demons had the wrong combination out there from the start but, in any event, they were switched off when they came out onto the ground.

And that brings me to ask the fundamental question which this game raised.

What is wrong with this club?

When the team won what was only its second game for the first half of the season, the playing group was falling over itself to declare Neale Daniher the best thing since sliced bread. Russell Robertson used his post-match interview following his seven goals against Collingwood to give "a resounding thumbs up to the prospect of Daniher being offered another contract." We were treated to a virtual chorus of Demons singing Daniher's praises and telling us how much respect they had for him. Well, they stopped singing last night because, by their performance - and that's what counts in this caper - all they could do was to show that they hold him in utter contempt.

Perhaps the players will one day realise that if you can't walk the walk on a regular basis, you don't talk the talk. In the meantime, they should leave it to those who have been charged with making the hard decisions about running the club to make those decisions. I trust that the Board has already made this fact known to the playing group, otherwise it will come back to embarrass them when they have to make some hard decisions in the near future.

I am not even going to mention Melbourne's better players, and they were few and far between, because that was another heartbreaking aspect of this game. The sad fact of the matter is that a lot of them are at the end of their careers and won't be part of the club when the next coach comes along to pick up the pieces. Hopefully, the person in question will have what it takes to give his full back his full dues and not hesitate to remove him from the ground if he ever takes his eyes off an opponent after being outmarked.

Melbourne 2.2.14 2.4.16 8.6.54 11.9.75

Richmond 6.3.39 12.8.80 14.12.96 18.16.124

Goals

Melbourne B Holland 3 A Davey 2 M Bate P Johnson N Jones B McLean R Petterd R Robertson

Richmond N Brown K Pettifer M Richardson G Tivendale 3 B Deledio C Hyde 2 K Johnson S Tuck

Best

Melbourne not this week thank you

Richmond S Tuck N Foley G Tivendale J Bowden M Richardson G Polak

Umpires C Donlon M James B Rosebury

Crowd: 46,161 at the MCG