Max Gawn - Max Gawn Captains Diary: After 57 Years: Melbournes History-Making 2021 Grand Final Season

To all Melbourne fans, we did it, after 57 years we brought it home!

People always ask me what changed at Melbourne. When did you turn the corner? What decision made the difference? Which person played the biggest part? I get that. As a lover of the game and of my club, I completely understand that curiosity. Its human nature. We need that sense of meaning, dont we, particularly here in this amazing, joyful moment as AFL premiers. Were a good story, the Demons, and good stories rely on understanding the moment that changed everything.

But of course theres no one answer. There are a thousand answers. I like to think that what weve achieved this season at the Melbourne Football Club a 13th flag, 57 years after our 12th is the outcome of a slow burn from 2015. Do you remember 2015? I do and I dont. It feels like an eternity ago.

Paul Roos was our coach. Nathan Jones was our captain. So far, so familiar. But do you remember who was vice captain? Lynden Dunn was our deputy. Can you remember the exact make-up of the leadership group? I had to look it up to get it right: Daniel Cross, Chris Dawes, Jack Grimes and Heretier Lumumba. Jesse Hogan won the AFL Rising Star. Bernie Vince won the Keith Bluey Truscott Medal as our teams best and fairest. We finished in 13th spot.

Yeah. Six years in the past. An eternity ago.

I could trace every slip and jump since then, in detail. I could think through every rise and every fall, but it would take too long here. And yet theres definitely one small moment I want to dwell on, because it was a turning point in my growth, and I wonder sometimes if that kind of moment is what some of my teammates have gone through in these past 18 months, as things between us have gotten more honest and open and true.

Basically, I was young, and finding my feet. In 2013 and 2014 I was playing one game in the VFL, one in the AFL, in and out and just unable to take those opportunities. If you havent enjoyed the thrill of playing AFL as an established senior if youre still emerging and grasping for your spot in the best 22 then oldest player in the VFL team is not a title you want, but that was me in 2015. I was 24, and not quite sinking, but certainly treading water. The feedback I got from Paul Roos was in my face, and direct: Pull your head out of your arse. I remember we played a game against Fremantle in Darwin, and Garrick Ibbotson bodied me out in a marking contest. He was a great player, but he was also 186 centimetres and maybe 80 kilograms sopping wet. I was bigger, and stronger, and should have done better. I got subbed out immediately. Again, Roosy was direct with me, and in front of the group, too: You muscle people out all day in the VFL and then come out here and do nothing! The little point Im making here is not about the value of a coach firing up and delivering a spray. Nor is it a message about needing thick skin to survive in this game. The idea is that criticism can come from a good place, and when it does when its pure and correct and deserved and real it makes all the difference.

Thats why its worth starting this book closer to the present, but farther from home in Queensland in 2020, when we were stuck in the hub in Twin Waters on the Sunshine Coast, in the back half of a pandemic-affected season. It sounds claustrophobic, doesnt it, hublife? Locked down. Locked in. Tucked away from the world, surrounded by the same people day and night, night and day. But I look back now and it seems a key factor in the way we shifted. Daily, hourly contact meant daily, hourly conversations.

What was good about the hub? Being around families, for one. We talk always about being a family club most clubs do. But we were finally creating that environment in a tangible way. It wasnt just something we wrote in mission statements on our website. As AFL players, you naturally meet some of your coaches partners and families, but we suddenly got to see so many of these people up close, at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Jake Lever and Jack Viney both had kids who were no older than six weeks, so I was part of Daddy Day Care. Nathan Jones and Neville Jetta their families were bloody everywhere. When we were giving our votes for best on in the hub, Teddy Melksham Jake Melkshams middle son almost got the three votes.

And that sense of family spread even more widely. We began connecting more deeply with past players, even though they couldnt be there. I remember hearing from David Neitz, and him talking to us through a screen, telling us how much football meant to him in isolation, how much watching the Demons while being locked down in Melbourne was doing for everyone back home.

When youre living your entire life in communal dining spaces, and retreating home to a room in a resort, everything seems outsized. Bigger. Louder. More vivid. More important. Hublife magnifies everything the good and the bad and for us that meant two things. First, we were playing good football at the tail end of 2020, going 8 and 5 while living together in the tropics. Thats the great part feeling the team mingle and coalesce and come together on field. The second part was both bad and good. And it was cultural.

There was something about the way we were talking to one another, socially as much as professionally. It was too casual, or dismissive perhaps. We were having a laugh at one anothers expense, and doing it too often. It would be easy to say it was the laid-back Sunshine Coast seeping into our daily lives, but we began to see things that might sound minor or petty perhaps not worthy of attention and analysis yet I wasnt so sure. It felt like something we shouldnt take into 2021.

Ill give you an example. Multiple times to get a cheap laugh someone would say, Yeah, Jake Lever had a great game but he doesnt play on anyone. Thats something you hear outside the club that Jake takes intercept marks all day because hes not responsible for an opponent. Now, its not true. Jake Lever does play on someone. He always plays on someone. Hes just really good at reading the ball and making good decisions and knowing when to leave his man. But we would make that joke anyway. Ive made that joke myself. And that joke would bring Jake Lever down. These are things that had been going on for years, and they needed to stop. It wouldnt require a massive change just a renewed awareness, and an effort to scrap them, stripping those things out, to make people feel better about themselves, not worse. We found something bad and turned it into something good.

Theres one other thing that happened in the hub. We went to Cairns, and it was horrible. We lost twice, to two sides we should have beaten, in Round 15 against Sydney and Round 16 against the Dockers, and we dropped outside of the eight. These were teams below us, and those losses were almost an aberration compared to our other form, but that doesnt matter. In those five days the games were on a Thursday and the following Monday we had cost ourselves a place in the finals. And that spurred so many conversations. Almost too many conversations. Crisis meetings, really, trying to split too many atoms. Talk and more talk became a catalyst for even more talk, for our leaders to gather and make a pledge for change. Every team makes those kinds of statements, of course, but there was something about that connection in the hub, combined with the great footy we had played, and the sting of those defeats in Cairns, that made everyone seem more clearheaded about what we needed to do in the off-season. We knew we had to attack it with aggression.

For me, that meant running, cycling, and gym sessions. I live down on the Mornington Peninsula, and trained often with Adam Tomlinson. Just the two of us running in the heat with our dogs. Its actually more fun than it sounds. I was drafted in 2009 and have been in the system a dozen years now, and theres something about the off-season that you dont want to waste. Its not exactly freedom, but freedom from surveillance. Its that one extended chance you get to run without your uniform on, without a GPS tracker slipped into the pocket at the top of your guernsey, without a prescribed group, or time, or duration. We found a deserted oval. Dogs off lead. Shackles off players.