When the earthquake hit Melbourne this week, only one thought flashed through my mind: “Great, I’m going to die having never seen a Melbourne premiership.”
It took a full 10 minutes for my brain to think “I’d better check on the family”.
Such are the priorities of a Melbourne supporter ahead of the grand final, the first for the Demons in 21 years, and potentially the first premiership in 57 years. In those 57 years, the Melbourne Football Club has unleashed a level of mental torture on its fans that breaks every component of the Geneva Conventions and a lot of things they don’t even cover.
Since that last premiership in 1964, when we still used shillings and pence, Melbourne have been a laughing stock, the worst team in the competition, and I’ve sat through more than 40 years of it, turning up time and again expecting a different result despite all evidence to the contrary.
As a supporter, I’ve given everything to this club, my time, my mental health, and my money. Why, under coach Mark Neeld, when the Dees represented more a comedy troupe than a football team, I’d get my membership form and tick the box where you’d pay an extra $100 to guarantee yourself a grand final ticket. This was despite the team finishing last more often than not back then.
That didn’t used to worry me until I learnt that if I’d taken that $100 back then in 2010, and invested it in Bitcoin, it would now be worth more than $48m.
Now Melbourne supporters are all upper class, so I wouldn’t notice an extra $48m in my bank account, but it’s the principle.
Things all started to go pear-shaped for the Melbourne Demons when on a dark Friday night in 1965 a courier delivered a termination notice to legendary coach Norm Smith at his home.
Sacked by a courier! It was the 1960s equivalent of being sacked by text.
Smith had at this point played in four premierships for Melbourne and coached the Demons to six flags. That meant he was involved in 10 out of the 12 premierships Melbourne has won.
This included a run where they made the grand final in 1954, losing to Footscray, won the premiership in 1955, 1956 and 1957, were beaten by Collingwood in 1958, and then won flags again in 1959, 1960 and 1964.
And they sacked him!
It was all downhill since then, leading to a belief that a Norm Smith curse hung over the club.
The curse was brutal. It took 22 years, from Smith’s sacking, for the Demons to make the finals again in 1987.
That’s not just the grand final; the finals altogether. Twenty-two years! I almost managed to finish high school in that time.
The curse didn’t relent even when the Demons had some success, such as in the 1987 preliminary final when club legend Jim Stynes famously crossed the mark, giving away a free kick to allow Hawthorn to kick a goal after the siren to win.
The following year, when the Demons finally made it back to the grand final, Hawthorn smashed them by 96 points in a display so brutal, police asked Dees supporters to fill out victim impact statements during the game.
Their next, and last grand final appearance in 2000, was not much to write home about, with the game over in the first quarter, the Dees playing the role of sacrificial lamb to the all-conquering Essendon, losing by 60 points.
This century has not been much kinder. From 2006 to 2018, the Demons didn’t play in finals at all. Twelve years is a long time, and it didn’t help that in those years, NASA announced it would design, build and fly a spaceship to Pluto – and managed to do it before Melbourne made it back to the post season.
Pluto even stopped being a planet in that time. And let’s be clear, Pluto is quite far from Earth, 5 billion kilometres in fact.
It proved that it’s easier to travel to the far reaches of the solar system than get the Demons to play in September.
Then came the 186-point loss to Geelong in 2011, an event that lives in the collective memory of every Melbourne supporter. The team performed so badly on that day you could have dragged a bunch of drunk British backpackers, who had never seen Australian football, from their hostel and they would have acquitted themselves to a similar level.
The fans, stereotyped as rich, cheese-loving, alpine enthusiasts, whose only diversity was that they came from every exclusive private school in Melbourne, had reached what they thought was the nadir.
But the Norm Smith curse had another twist. A 2013 investigation into the 2009 season examined whether the club had “tanked”, lost games on purpose to improve their draft position.
The club was found not guilty of tanking but fined anyway.
Melbourne fans were not sure what to think, it seemed there was no difference from the season they supposedly lost on purpose to every other season.
But that was the breaking point; the AFL stepped in, appointed respected former Essendon chief executive Peter Jackson as the new CEO, and he recruited Sydney Swans premiership coach Paul Roos.
The path to this grand final had begun and the strategy was breathtakingly simple: for something new, they decided to appoint competent people who knew what they were doing.
This was nothing short of revolutionary for the Demons.
But the curse still seemed to be hanging around, despite continual improvements, there were years the club seemed to be going backwards – only this year, suddenly, everything came together.
The Demons of old, both literally and figuratively seemed to have gone. The team finished top of the ladder this year and have cruised through the finals to make it into the grand final, and as narrow favourites.
Could the curse of Norm Smith finally have lifted?
The current success seems to suggest it has, but the fact that due to Covid restrictions, most Melbourne fans can’t go to the game, and even more can’t watch it legally with anyone else, makes a Dees premiership perhaps just another clever trick by the curse.
In good news though, I’ve figured out a way Demons fans in Melbourne can celebrate together if their team does win: just chuck on some high-vis clothing and you can hang around together in the CBD together for days on end apparently.
For me, a Demons victory would make decades of misery, frustration, and hair loss all worthwhile. It would be the proverbial dog catching the car, I won’t know what to do when I get there, but at least it will be different.
For all the analysis this week, I’m tipping Melbourne for one reason and one reason only.
We’ve had a mouse plague, a pandemic, and an earthquake. Surely a Melbourne premiership is the fourth horseman of the apocalypse?
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/afl/afl-grand-final-hopes-and-fears-the-demons-within-are-running-rampant/news-story/8f6fda0f949d2a9e7eef284c1469e92c
