Michael Warner: Kate Roffey’s trainwreck interview shows fans where Dees’ problems truly lie

Amid a backdrop of crisis and backstabbing in April 2021, Kate Roffey took over the Demons. But Thursday’s trainwreck display showed how inept the club’s leadership is, writes Michael Warner.

Kate Roffey’s presidency of Melbourne has always been tainted and now the moment of reckoning has arrived.

Amid a backdrop of crisis and backstabbing in April 2021, it was Roffey who was installed suddenly as Glen Bartlett’s replacement by a group of plotters (inside and outside the club) determined to cover-up fears over a festering off-field culture.

Bartlett and at least one other Melbourne director had sounded the alarm in a secret meeting with AFL chairman Richard Goyder and then league boss Gillon McLachlan just weeks before the Roffey coup was hatched.

It’s ironic that a premiership so desperately sought by the Demons faithful would follow just a few months later, allowing club powerbrokers to portray Bartlett as nothing but a man of sour grapes.

But the truth in football always comes out eventually.

Simon Goodwin and Kate Roffey after the 2021 GF. Photo by Michael Klein

The current crisis enveloping Melbourne goes directly to those responsible for the Bartlett assassination and the failure to address the cultural issues later exposed by former club doctor-turned whistleblower Zeeshan Arain and others in a Sports Integrity Australia investigation.

Roffey’s trainwreck interview on SEN radio on Thursday morning might finally be the moment Melbourne fans wake up to the true cause of the endless headlines and scandals that have plagued the club over the past three years: inept leadership.

Only chief executive Gary Pert’s now infamous SEN interview last October in which he declared the Melbourne culture to be “the best I’ve seen in 40 years” could top Roffey’s performance of denial, bordering on delusion.

According to the president, calls for an independent review at Melbourne are unfounded.

There’s nothing to see here other than the issues that affect all football clubs, she said.

It’s all media rhetoric. I’m at the club and I talk to the parents of our players and they all love us. (Does that include Joel Smith’s parents or Christian Petracca’s mum and dad?)

“Trac” is a contracted player, she said. I haven’t spoken to him yet but we’re going to get there with a resolution. Kosi’s just homesick – it’s not a trade thing. (But isn’t Alex Neal-Bullen also homesick and aren’t they going to trade him?)

And regarding the long-running legal dispute with Bartlett – “we just have to deal with that” and “defend ourselves from those accusations”, she said.

Roffey took over the job in 2021. (Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

But Bartlett has stared them down and refused to go away and the tide has turned in a boardroom war that has cost the Demons far more than just mounting legal costs.

That glorious premiership of 2021 will always be special to Melbourne supporters, but how many more flags could a generational list have bagged if the club had faced up to the cultural issues that have since derailed the careers of Clayton Oliver, Smith and now Petracca?

Club chiefs who remain unconvinced about Petracca’s desire to leave would be wise to start work on a deal with a rival club instead of risking the airing of further dirty laundry at a hearing before the AFL grievance tribunal.

The club’s separate and unnecessary court fight with board challenger Peter Lawrence has also exposed the club’s constant state of denial.

Eleven years ago, the AFL intervened at Melbourne in the wake of the tanking fiasco, cleaning out the board and putting veteran administrator Peter Jackson in as CEO and Bartlett in charge as president.

One wonders how long it will be until Andrew Dillon and the AFL Commission lose patience with the club again.

Originally published as Michael Warner: Kate Roffey’s trainwreck interview shows fans where Dees’ problems truly lie