Liberated and unburdened: Can the Melbourne Demons remain free as the stakes rise?

Midway through the last quarter and Blake Howes ran for a ball punted forward without a plan by Josh Battle. Connor McDonald, head swinging faster than his legs, ran after Howes who appeared to consider the idea that McDonald would catch him as unlikely as McDonald did.

Howes gathered the ball without breaking stride and kept running. He did a one-two handball to one Pickett, Latrelle, then kicked long to the other one, Kysaiah, deep forward. Kozzy goaled but the art in this picture was provided by Howes not Kozzy.

It was probably the furthest from goal Howes had been in red and blue. The longest he has run and carried the ball and the most piercing he has been by foot. He was playing like he was at Mordy-Braeside again.

Howes is a naturally attacking athletic player who had become nervy and playing like he was second guessing every decision and worrying on every disposal. He was latterly being moulded into a lockdown defender when he was naturally an expansive player.

The moment embodied the most fundamental change in Melbourne football this year under Steven King. The change in coach and jettisoning of big names and personalities has been well chronicled, but a more profound shift has taken place under King. It’s the unburdening of their play. It is not only the freedom to make a mistake but the encouragement to do so because then you are at least pushing your boundaries.

This is not intended as a slight on Simon Goodwin for it is common at clubs with long-term coaches and as pressure and expectations rise. Melbourne players have noted the change.

The poster boy of the new Melbourne is Tom Sparrow, who previously could not regularly fit into a midfield with Clayton Oliver and Christian Petracca but is now edging towards becoming an A-grader. With him is Daniel Turner who is becoming a seriously good player, obviating the pre-season loss of Steven May. Ed Langdon has become a running backman.

The Demons look more liberated without the reliance on the big names and personalities. They are playing with the instruction to attack and licence to make it up on the run.

Three big names left Melbourne – Petracca, Oliver and May – but Harry Sharp, Jack Steele and Max Heath came in as perfect complements to the game King wants to play and gaps that needed filling. Petracca in particular but also Oliver have been good pickups for their new clubs. Two things can be true: trades need not be binary, both sides can win and that appears the case here.

Sharp has been an excellent pickup from Brisbane. He was an emergency in the premiership side and entered this Melbourne team like a player playing catch up. He fills the Alex Neal-Bullen role with an enormous running capacity he can get up the ground as an extra midfielder yet still surge forward with a poacher’s eye for a goal.

Heath is a smart second ruck choice to support Max Gawn. And Steele is just honest. That St Kilda is paying about $200k of his contract is helpful, especially given the chunk of Oliver’s contract they are paying for him to play for GWS.

Matthew Jefferson is emerging as a promising key forward. He presented well on Saturday and was strong in the air. His kicking was a bit fretful but he is normally more reliable than that.

After 10 rounds they have embraced the freedom to play with flair and speed and clocked seven wins, including over Brisbane, Hawthorn and the Suns. In one way the licence has been easier to give the players when you are all new and expectations are low, as they were at the start of the year for the Demons.

The query for Melbourne and King for the half of the year is this: can they be brave and keep playing with that freedom when the expectations rise and the stakes become greater?

Hawks troubles

Sam Mitchell thought it was an outlier performance. And on wins and losses for the season he is right. But there are underlying worries for the Hawks.

In the Port Adelaide game, which we wrote about here previously, the Power used a method of attack that for a quarter really unsettled Hawthorn. Ultimately, they were not talented enough to win. Collingwood borrowed from the approach for how they brought the ball forward.

And Melbourne went with a similar plan to try to spread Hawthorn’s defence and at least bring the ball to ground where teams feel they are vulnerable. No team likes to defend balls coming in fast and long with runners surging into the forward line. Denying Hawthorn’s intercept marking is critical.

Initially, Melbourne’s game was built on trying to win the ball at stoppage but in the second half they won the ball back and scored on turnover. That is far harder for any team to defend and once that momentum swung Hawthorn could not halt it.

The Demons kicked 5.2 from eight inside fifties in the last quarter at one point against. Seven scores including five goals from just eight entries is having a picnic. That’s against a Hawthorn defence that has been one of the more difficult to score against. Admittedly, it was one without Tom Barrass.

The Hawks went tall with Ned Reeves, Lloyd Meek and Max Ramsden all playing, and it didn’t work. None of them are natural forwards.

Hawthorn are normally a contested ball-winning team and the Demons beat them at that. They also beat them at another strength in clearances after having led that statistic by 7-1 early in the game. These were the stats Mitchell would hope are outliers.

Fraser’s Blues

Two interconnected things happened on Saturday on two different grounds.

Carlton won and despite his 100 per cent winning record caretaker coach Josh Fraser was unmoved from his position that he is not yet ready for permanent senior coaching and would not be a contender for the vacant Blues job.

Across town King provided the case for Fraser to hold his position. King, too, was a caretaker, briefly marshalling Gold Coast after the sun set on Stuart Dew’s coaching career. Being a caretaker did not harm his chances of a senior gig, it will not hurt Fraser’s.

Secondly, the way King has handled Melbourne in his fledgling senior career offers the case to support Carlton’s intent to run a process to find the next coach.

Melbourne might have scrapped the broad coaching search and just been singularly focused on the available Nathan Buckley. Instead, they did two things at once and ran a process while talking to Buckley. Then they signed King.

Many expressed alarm when Carlton CEO Graham Wright said the club would run a process even if it meant ruling out experienced premiership coaches. He and Carlton are right to stick to that.

First games under caretakers often lead to wins with liberated teams playing unburdened. Longer term they can prove to be a dead cat bounce, so we wait to see what happens next for the Blues.

The Josh Fraser-Blues didn’t just play with freedom they played with discipline. Vulnerable to open games they closed down the corridor and often moved the ball forward patiently with uncontested marks, leaving them able to protect territory behind them in the case of a team running back at them with a speed they could not match.

They had decisive advantages in one on one contests across the ground: Harry McKay on Buku Khamis or Jedd Busslinger; Marc Pittonet and McKay against Rory Lobb and Louis Emmett. They were helped by Tom Liberatore still not being there and Ed Richards and Marcus Bontempelli playing sore. But these sorts of things have been true of Carlton opponents in other games without them getting home.

Jagga Smith was good and attracts a lot of attention because of the Blues plunging two draft picks to get to pick three to select him. But Matt Carroll is a genuine talent, Lachie Cowan improving fast and first-gamer Jack Ison arrived in the game with the look of someone wondering why he hadn’t been here sooner.

Paddy Cripps drew plaudits for his game, but Fraser too should be acknowledged for tweaking the captain’s role. Cripps went deep forward in the third quarter. This has happened sporadically before, but this is the move, the next evolution of his game that Carlton and Cripps need.

At times Fraser used Ben Ainsworth in the middle with George Hewitt and Jagga Smith. This too was the sign of the evolution Carlton knows it needs to take with its midfield. Josh knows that.

Golden day

Do you care that Scott Pendlebury is wearing a gold number? Weird and a bit ‘look at me, look at me’ that is out of kilter how he has played the rest of his career, but do you really care? No, me neither. Do you care that he is going to make a motza from it? No, me either really. Tim Watson was right, it is a unique achievement. Let it be celebrated and let him have his pay day. Lord knows he must have been underpaid these last 21 years.

Whether they should have manufactured the missed games to deliver the AFL games record against West Coast on the MCG is a different question. He had to miss games. That is without a doubt. At 38, he would break down if he played on short breaks. Should he have missed the Anzac Day game and played Hawthorn or Sydney is a more pertinent question.

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