At half-time and then at full-time of Melbourne v Freo on Saturday afternoon, I was welling up. I felt like Carmela Soprano looking at that painting of baby Jesus and crying.
I was emotional for a couple of reasons.
The first was that the footy itself was almost a religious experience. It was aggressive and attacking in the first half, then in the second it became a game of styles make fights. Freo was trying to slow the game down, and did so sucacessfully at stages, but when Melbourne managed to force some speed onto the game they caught up with the league leaders who could neither stabilise nor go with them.
The Kozzie Pickett wizardry in with about 7:45 left in the first quarter told me this was going to be a masterpiece, but by the Harvey Langford hanger I felt like I was staring at the Sistine Chapel.
The second, though, was that it came at the end of such a grim week for footy. With the waiver scandal, every football fan with even a vague level of critical thinking capacity has had to reckon with the darkness and the dissonance at the heart of this game.
At the end of the day, the only certainty in a footballer’s life is pain. And it’s a pain that is brought on for pretty good, though not great, money in service of my enjoyment.
But I, and everyone else, do enjoy it. I love it, in fact. And this game, really Melbourne’s whole season, has showed me why I love it so much.
But this game told me something else, something easier to reckon with than the physical toll of my fandom on other people. It told me that the Dees are contenders.
I fell into the trap that footy as a whole, prior to this week I suspect, has fallen into. We all think that because Melbourne is fun and aggressive, and because Steven King can’t stop talking about how fun and watchable they want to be, they’re inherently unserious.
It’s just not true.
Football today doesn’t only reward aggression with ball in hand, it demands it. The team that Melbourne beat on Saturday afternoon know that, and this year they’ve changed their style of play to adapt to that new reality.
But there’s nobody better at it than Melbourne. On a system level, the Dees are all gas and no fucking brakes. They hunt space like a truffle pig both in contest and in play.
When they get clear air, they attack the fat side of the ground so their runners like Harvey Langford and Harry Sharp can run on the ball and enter 50 cleanly. And when the ball is down the other wing, each winger clearly has license to cheat forward and get on the end of it with the knowledge that they have so much running power that they’ll be fine to make it back down and defend.
But even in contest, the name of the game is space.
Through largely Jack Steele and Tom Sparrow, the Dees are the best in the league at taking the ball from inside to out but then crucially, winning when it’s out. Inside, the Dees beat Freo by 25 in contested ball and are fourth in contested ball differential for the year. But then they win after that, sitting fourth in the league at post-clearance ground ball gets and they surge from there.
Melbourne knows their currency is space. And they know how to spend it, even without top end forward 50 talent.
Freo was 14 points better than the second-best defence in the league heading into the game on Saturday afternoon, conceding 67 a game. The Dees hung 62 on them in a half and were only the third team this season to score over 100 against them. For the year they’re fifth in scoring, basically because of the way they play.
Beyond the method-alone, Melbourne’s contendership is built on two other pillars.
The first is they have a 2017-style Tigers formula working for them. They have a couple of genuine stars in Max Gawn and Kozzie Pickett, but then they have 20 players in absolutely perfect roles.
Koltyn Tholstrup has been refashioned as a tagger and demolished Murphy Reid on Saturday, Harvey Langford is doing an Ollie Dempsey impression with everything he does, Kade Chandler has become an elite high half forward, Caleb Windsor has gone from being a centre bounce mid to the Connor Macdonald role.
I could go on and on. I mean did you see Harry Petty’s Wayne Carey impression on Saturday?
But all of what I’ve written feeds into the ultimate thing that the Dees have going for them: belief.
They so clearly believe in themselves and each other. I don’t know if Steven King does themes before games or seasons, but Melbourne’s should be Muhammad Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle.
In virtually every quarter including the last, Freo was up by 3 goals but Melbourne took their punches and roared back. It was like Ali rope-a-doping Foreman’s shots then coming back with a 15-punch combo of his own. By the end, the Dockers looked dead. With 1:45 left the Dees hacked a kick forward to a 2v1 for Freo, with Sharp chasing the ball against Hayden Young and Karl Worner. Sharp won the race, got to the ball first, and Worner laid a tired tackle on Sharp before he got the ball.
Free kick.
And Dees ran everywhere to make themselves options, sucking up most of the clock and ending the Fremantle run.
It was like Ali, finally, sensing the moment and knocking out Foreman. It’s not that he was fresh, it was just that he had sapped the will of his opponent, and he still had plenty in reserve.
They could do it against the competition’s best team because of that trust and faith in themselves and in each other. They know their method is good enough, they know their superpower of run is enough to freak out even the best team, and they know that every single player on that pitch is in a role that absolutely maximises his ability.
In a flat year other than Freo, who they obviously just beat on the MCG, that kind of formula could be enough. Particularly with the level of superstar that Pickett and especially Gawn are, and the quality of the 20 other role players in this side.
The Dees are officially a true contender, and if nothing else, are going to be a bloody good watch in September.