- Dec 14, 2008
- 19,839
- 32,313
- AFL Club
- Essendon
Disclaimer: This is not knee jerk post just because we lost to the filth and are in a bad run of losses, these sentiments have been knocking around my head for a while, maybe over a year.
Im loathe to start another saga thread but this has been needling at me.
Ill start with the grand statement:
I don’t think our club will ever get over the supplements saga. I think we will still be crippled by it in 40 years’ time.
Let me go back to last century, there were not many grand sagas to rival ours but I believe there was one that may be considered as close.
We take you back to the year 1965, Melbourne are a genuine powerhouse of the competition led by the legendary Norm Smith. The Dees had won the flag in 1955, 1957, lost in a major upset in 1958, won again in 1959, 1960 and 1964. However there was major discontent behind the scenes at Demon land. Three years prior in 1963, Norm smith called an umpire of the day “a cheat”
The umpire went ahead and sued Norm smith. Our great game had reached the courts of law.
Smith went to his club looking for support (sound familiar?) but received little, he was told, you said it, you are an experienced public figure, you can wear the costs, we cannot support you in this. Despite winning the flag in 1964, the Board were continually plotting Smiths downfall, they were scared the man had become bigger than the club, along with Smith pushing for Barassi to be cleared to Carlton the dogs were barking behind the scenes.
Midway through the following season, taking the opportunity after a few losses, the board acted and sacked their legendary coach. But they didn’t count on the backlash that would follow…
Smith appeared on the ‘footy show’ of its day and ripped into the committee, his players, the football public – no holds barred. The club was falling apart in plain view, a car crash.
The MFC board backtracked and gave him his job back. But the damage was done.
Once powerful Melbourne didn’t appear in another finals series until 1987 (22 years) and has never won another flag.
One might say they never recovered.
Football clubs are not normal business environments, they are weird places that harbour and (sometimes) prosper despite bitterness, rage, factions, power plays, emotions, outside pressures. A lot of these traits embed inside the four walls and begin to define you, they pass on through generations.
Which brings me to the next huge saga that happened in football, ours.
We were bullish, we tried exceedingly hard to make out the saga didn’t affect us, we are a big club, a strong club, we were constantly flexing our muscle to the outside world showing how quickly we had gotten back onto our feet… we didn’t stop to, for a lack of a better word, grieve – we just kept on moving forward, suppressing what had happened. You know what happens when you suppress your emotional trauma rather than addressing it? You end up with a twisted version of yourself, what manifests is something that isn’t true to itself, it’s a web of lies, an internal witches brew bubbling away– that’s where PTSD comes from.
We may have gotten on with it, but did we get over it? I think we may never get over it.
..and I don’t mean on the field, sure our list is slightly damaged and lopsided but that’s nothing a generational cycle won’t fix. Its worse, its something else that’s damaged, our entire fabric has been torn…our metaphorical arse is hanging out a huge rip in our pants yet we are strutting along not even realising it – to the mirth of many.
I just wish we would have, or still can, stop, be humble, process what happened to us and rebuilt from the ground up rather than rushing to make finals ASAP to create a narrative of a fast comeback story.
We never actually addressed the root cause of why what happened happened; why we felt the need to go that way, nup. We have been too busy looking forward, too busy redefining our brand, creating esports, or bball, or becoming a destination club. But it was all about projection – about showing the outside world we were back, rather than addressing our internal consternation and change.
Making the finals a year later was like coming out of a long term relationship hurt and jumping on the first thing we see, sure it looked good, but its never going to work unless you have fixed yourself first.
We never once addressed our demons. Just like Melbourne never did – they just took the easy way out and reinstated the boss. Look where they ended up.
Football clubs are temperamental places, little mistakes can amplify, the butterfly effect. Tank for a few years, you may get short term gains but the nominal gains are ruined by the damage it does to your overall culture for years to come.
The butterfly wings from the saga will reverberate long and hard into our future, unless we stop and actually address what happened. We need to lie back on the couch and strip everything bare, it will hurt, it will leave us bare and raw, (we should have done it while we were at out lowest ebb) but it’s the only way to move forward properly, for us.. Not for what we want to project to the rest of the footy world.
In my personal opinion we are still a broken club with major flaws behind the scenes – which eventually always transcends onto the on field. We tried too fast to move on, it hasn’t worked.
Is it too late to try again? Before you know it, it’ll be 2050 and we will be in the same malaise.
Lets not let the saga define us, but we should have used it to define a new direction. It’ll always be there, it happened – but we need to own it and use it. Here in lies the problem. I don’t think we have ever owned it, we spent so long deflecting and flexing our superclub muscle that we never even reached step one of the healing process.
Its possible we can never actually move on while the affected players and associated staff are still at the club. Herein lies the problem.
Will we be another Melbourne?
Im loathe to start another saga thread but this has been needling at me.
Ill start with the grand statement:
I don’t think our club will ever get over the supplements saga. I think we will still be crippled by it in 40 years’ time.
Let me go back to last century, there were not many grand sagas to rival ours but I believe there was one that may be considered as close.
We take you back to the year 1965, Melbourne are a genuine powerhouse of the competition led by the legendary Norm Smith. The Dees had won the flag in 1955, 1957, lost in a major upset in 1958, won again in 1959, 1960 and 1964. However there was major discontent behind the scenes at Demon land. Three years prior in 1963, Norm smith called an umpire of the day “a cheat”
The umpire went ahead and sued Norm smith. Our great game had reached the courts of law.
Smith went to his club looking for support (sound familiar?) but received little, he was told, you said it, you are an experienced public figure, you can wear the costs, we cannot support you in this. Despite winning the flag in 1964, the Board were continually plotting Smiths downfall, they were scared the man had become bigger than the club, along with Smith pushing for Barassi to be cleared to Carlton the dogs were barking behind the scenes.
Midway through the following season, taking the opportunity after a few losses, the board acted and sacked their legendary coach. But they didn’t count on the backlash that would follow…
Smith appeared on the ‘footy show’ of its day and ripped into the committee, his players, the football public – no holds barred. The club was falling apart in plain view, a car crash.
The MFC board backtracked and gave him his job back. But the damage was done.
Once powerful Melbourne didn’t appear in another finals series until 1987 (22 years) and has never won another flag.
One might say they never recovered.
Football clubs are not normal business environments, they are weird places that harbour and (sometimes) prosper despite bitterness, rage, factions, power plays, emotions, outside pressures. A lot of these traits embed inside the four walls and begin to define you, they pass on through generations.
Which brings me to the next huge saga that happened in football, ours.
We were bullish, we tried exceedingly hard to make out the saga didn’t affect us, we are a big club, a strong club, we were constantly flexing our muscle to the outside world showing how quickly we had gotten back onto our feet… we didn’t stop to, for a lack of a better word, grieve – we just kept on moving forward, suppressing what had happened. You know what happens when you suppress your emotional trauma rather than addressing it? You end up with a twisted version of yourself, what manifests is something that isn’t true to itself, it’s a web of lies, an internal witches brew bubbling away– that’s where PTSD comes from.
We may have gotten on with it, but did we get over it? I think we may never get over it.
..and I don’t mean on the field, sure our list is slightly damaged and lopsided but that’s nothing a generational cycle won’t fix. Its worse, its something else that’s damaged, our entire fabric has been torn…our metaphorical arse is hanging out a huge rip in our pants yet we are strutting along not even realising it – to the mirth of many.
I just wish we would have, or still can, stop, be humble, process what happened to us and rebuilt from the ground up rather than rushing to make finals ASAP to create a narrative of a fast comeback story.
We never actually addressed the root cause of why what happened happened; why we felt the need to go that way, nup. We have been too busy looking forward, too busy redefining our brand, creating esports, or bball, or becoming a destination club. But it was all about projection – about showing the outside world we were back, rather than addressing our internal consternation and change.
Making the finals a year later was like coming out of a long term relationship hurt and jumping on the first thing we see, sure it looked good, but its never going to work unless you have fixed yourself first.
We never once addressed our demons. Just like Melbourne never did – they just took the easy way out and reinstated the boss. Look where they ended up.
Football clubs are temperamental places, little mistakes can amplify, the butterfly effect. Tank for a few years, you may get short term gains but the nominal gains are ruined by the damage it does to your overall culture for years to come.
The butterfly wings from the saga will reverberate long and hard into our future, unless we stop and actually address what happened. We need to lie back on the couch and strip everything bare, it will hurt, it will leave us bare and raw, (we should have done it while we were at out lowest ebb) but it’s the only way to move forward properly, for us.. Not for what we want to project to the rest of the footy world.
In my personal opinion we are still a broken club with major flaws behind the scenes – which eventually always transcends onto the on field. We tried too fast to move on, it hasn’t worked.
Is it too late to try again? Before you know it, it’ll be 2050 and we will be in the same malaise.
Lets not let the saga define us, but we should have used it to define a new direction. It’ll always be there, it happened – but we need to own it and use it. Here in lies the problem. I don’t think we have ever owned it, we spent so long deflecting and flexing our superclub muscle that we never even reached step one of the healing process.
Its possible we can never actually move on while the affected players and associated staff are still at the club. Herein lies the problem.
Will we be another Melbourne?
