“Do you know what you need in a new coach?” interim president Brad Green was asked at the press conference announcing Simon Goodwin’s sacking last year.
“No,” he said.
He may have meant it. He may, as most assumed, have been eyeing off Nathan Buckley. But with the greatest respect to Bucks, I’m not sure he would have cultivated the kind of football we’re seeing from Melbourne right now. Maybe Green didn’t want to let slip too many trade secrets. But his wishlist may have looked something like this – someone who could free up a rigid team, teach the midfield how to connect with the forwards, make really hard decisions on champion players, turn fringe players into guns, and bring Melbourne supporters back to the footy. As Basil Fawlty would say: “Anything else?” But Steven King has so far delivered on every one of those measures.
It’s become something of a cliche in 2026 – “Gee, Melbourne are great to watch.” But they truly are. Their crisp ball movement and their appetite for risk is the antithesis of the last few years of the Goodwin era. Kicking big bags of goals doesn’t always necessarily equate to quality, winning or sustainable football. But with the way the game’s being played now, it doesn’t hurt. King saw the future, and ran with it. Certain other clubs who shall remain nameless were wedded to a brand of footy from a previous era, and are paying the price.
And right now, it’s something that the best coaches in the game are struggling to find an answer for. It’s not as though they’re beating up on mug teams and outthinking dud coaches. Ross Lyon, Damien Hardwick, Chris Fagan and Sam Mitchell are men who delight at putting the squeeze on teams like Melbourne.
But the Dees have beaten all of them on their merits. The win against Hawthorn on the weekend was in many ways the most impressive of the lot. The first few were shootouts. In the St Kilda and Brisbane games in particular, they got a level of acquiescence from Lyon and Fagan they would never get at the business end of the season. But they smashed Hawthorn in every facet of the game. They disrupted and eventually dismantled the Hawks’ much vaunted ball moment. And it wasn’t just “you kick 20, we’ll kick 25” football like a Malcolm Blight-coached team in the early 1990s. Melbourne worked their backsides off defensively, towelled up Hawthorn’s midfield and forced them long down the line all day. They’re a superbly conditioned team. They have so many hybrid types who cover the ground well, and who sought and exploited every inch of the MCG, an area where Hawthorn usually excel. They’re built for the open spaces of the G, having won six from six at the ground this year.
The Melbourne supporters are voting with their feet and their voices. The win against West Coast at Docklands was one where you bank the four points and never speak of it again. But every time they play at the MCG, another 10,000 or so seem to rock up. At their last home game there, they wore green socks as a tribute to Jim Stynes, and after every goal a fiddler and four Irish dancers would play Irish shanties from the grandstand. There were kids all around doing slip jigs in the aisles.
Just under 70,000 turned up on Saturday afternoon, bigger even than the famous merger game between the two clubs 30 years ago. In the preceding five games fans would have walked away thinking what a jolly romp that was. On Saturday they had confirmation that this is a serious footy team. This isn’t the dead cat bounce of a new coach any more. Now we just need a royal commission into how Essendon beat them.
Nearly every senior player has improved under King’s coaching. But their best and most important player did what he always does – ambling to the toss to AC/DC’s Hells Bells, running defensively, pushing forward, blocking space and getting to every contest possible. You know Max Gawn is in a mood when he’s swatting balls and by the time Melbourne had put the game beyond Hawthorn’s reach, he’d made Lloyd Meek look like Lloyd from Entourage. There’s been discussion recently over whether he’s the greatest ruckman to ever play the game. Mitchell wondered aloud whether he’s the best player of his generation. Neither is outlandish, and nor is Melbourne’s claim as a genuine finals team.
