The Melbourne Football Club

[Cactus 2]

I have been thinking about this for a while and i think that in this time where we are choosing a new coach is the right time to bring it up.

Melbourne has a fantastic board who are slowly and safely bringing us out of debt. They are working hard on getting us into some new facilities and trying to build the brand up to somewhere close to the collingwoods and essendons.

Craig Cameron is supposedly one of the best recruiters in the league, constantly getting good players late in that draft and through the rookie draft. There have been some dodgy higher picks however.

We have had the same coach for the last 10 years, and he was generally regarded as a good coach who at certain stages got the best out of the list.

It has been 7 years since we last went really deep into september and there are teams such as port adelaide, brisbane, collingwood, essendon and hawthorn seem to be streets ahead of us, yet were involved deep into september after us.

All this leads me to the question: Where are we going wrong?

I genuinely think that we are too soft on our senior players. The likes of Johnstone get away with too many lazy efforts and set a bad example to the younger kids. Bruce wouldn't have had a good blast for a long time, whilst his kicking and decision making continues to erode. Yze's front running efforts have kept him in the team to the point where in was reprted he was playing to take the games record of Jim Stynes, looking back now how appropriate would it have been if he took over the record?

Posters around here constantly criticise the likes of holland and godfrey but as the astute few have noticed on many occasions, the so called 'star' players could learn a lot from the effort that these less skilled players put in.

Our list is overrated i believe, but unfortunately we can only delist 6 players per year. The people complaining about sheedy picking up all the aborigional players should have a look at how many premierships he has won compared to us in the last 27 years. IF he comes to the club i believe he should have a say in the recruitment, along with CAC.

We are going in the right direction but lately i have taken a huge reality hit and realised that we are not as close as some think we are. With the current list we wont win a premiership and our next viable option for a shot at it i belive is when the likes of McLean, Bate, Sylvia, Jones, Moloney, Pettard, Newton, Rivers, Bell are in their late 20's and the core group of our football club.

The shame in this is that champions of our club who bleed red and blue such as Neita, Robbo, Green, JMac and Jeff White will play out their careers building for the future.

I am still young and have hope that we can return to the power that we were during the middle of the last century. But realistically, it wont be in the next 5 years.