Melbourne’s 2021 premiership: Paul Roos on how Demons became premier
Melbourne was at one of its lowest ebbs when Paul Roos took over. The former Demons coach reflects on the club’s drought-breaking flag and how it got there.
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Paul Roos was at home in Melbourne, locked down like the rest of us.
As he sat on the couch with his wife, Tami, last Saturday night watching Melbourne clinch its first flag since 1964, the former Demons coach had a feeling wash over him.
Of course there was joy and satisfaction, but the overriding emotion was one he’d not anticipated until it arrived when captain Max Gawn and Roos’ coaching protégé Simon Goodwin held the premiership cup aloft.
“It was sort of weird watching it. I just got this feeling of just closure afterwards,” Roos told the Sunday Herald Sun.
“It was just so cool … and a feeling of complete satisfaction.”
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The closure was the culmination of the transformation of Melbourne, which was first hatched at the end of 2013 when the Sydney premiership coach was brought in by then Demons chief executive Peter Jackson and former chairman Glen Bartlett.
Roos wanted to set the foundations and not overstay his welcome.
“I knew when I took over, and I spoke to Peter about it, that my journey was going to be to reshape the club and obviously then to put someone in who we believed would take it to the next level,” Roos said.
“That was always the plan and I was never going to deviate from that. I thought it was the best way to get the club back to where it wanted to get to and where I wanted to see them get to.
“It’s great to have a bit of closure around that now.
“Glen and Peter have done a lot of hard yards so hopefully they get the kudos they deserve.
“It was amazing to see because I know how much hard work has gone into it and I’m so glad that Simon and the current group of players and coaches have enjoyed that success.”
THE START OF THE DEES’ REBOOT
Roos was never sold a lemon.
When he took charge at the end of 2013, the Demons’ players and bosses made it abundantly clear to him the club was in a big hole.
“I met with the leadership group at the time, which was Nathan Jones, Jack Trengove, Jack Grimes, ‘Chip’ (James) Frawley, Lynden Dunn, Mitch Clark and Shannon Byrnes,” Roos said.
“They were taking responsibility for where the club was at and also giving me reasons why it was the way it was.
“And Peter Jackson and Glen Bartlett certainly didn’t sugar coat it at all and I think that was the first step, just a really clear awareness of where the club was and how much work needed to be done.”
Roos quickly went about putting good people around him and new systems in place, and by his final year in charge in 2016 he remembered the moment when he thought the club was on the right path.
“The game in my third year when we beat Hawthorn was one where I thought, ‘OK, this has now changed and we’ve really changed’,” he said.
“A lot of young players had come in and didn’t really know much about the past, so that felt like the moment.
“We then played Port Adelaide as well so we had a really good patch and I think we were 7-10 and won the next three games to go to 10-10.
“I felt we’d really achieved something over those three years to get to that point, so that was the moment when we all thought this was a completely different footy club now.”
APPOINTING THE SUCCESSOR
Roos wasn’t interested in game plans or the nitty gritty.
At least not initially when the time came in 2014 to appoint the man who’d be his senior assistant for the next two years before taking over in 2017.
Roos – along with Jackson, Todd Viney and Josh Mahoney – met Goodwin at Viney’s house one night.
Goodwin – then an Essendon assistant coach – impressed the panel when he started talking about coaching philosophy and building relationships.
“It wasn’t so much about the Xs and Os because I think most coaches know them, but it’s about how to put a high-performing team together,” Roos said.
“That was the main thing and also he’d come from a Neil Craig mould, and I’ve got a lot of respect for Craigy as we’d had some real battles when I was coaching Sydney and he was at Adelaide.
“Anyone can put a PowerPoint presentation together … but I feel like we were all just impressed with the conversation we had at Todd’s place.”
Recent football history is littered with botched succession plans, but the Roos-to-Goodwin handover worked superbly.
Roos said he had no doubt it would work, based on past experience and his desire to never deviate from the plan.
“I already had a sample with Sydney and doing it with John Longmire, so I already had confidence it was going to work,” he said.
“I think some others probably didn’t as much as I did … and you can never be certain how it’s going to go.
“But I’m really please John Longmire won one after I left (Sydney) and I’m equally as excited for Goody that everything we tried to do as a club back in 2014 had come to fruition.
“And he’s been at the forefront of doing that.”
Goodwin faced his challenges on the road to the pinnacle in Perth last weekend.
He was under significant pressure going into this season, but he responded by adding more experience around him in Mark Williams and Adem Yze.
The result has been spectacular.
“If you go back over history, most coaches are under pressure at some point,” Roos said.
“I was in 2005 by the Swans CEO (Myles Baron-Hay) and ‘Bomber’ Thompson had to survive a review and Alastair Clarkson and Ross Lyon in their early days, so if you go through the history you’ve got to learn from it and improve and keep moving forward.
“I’m sure he learned from those couple of years and changed some things and the club did as well.”
GAWN’S JOURNEY TO THE TOP
Gawn was made to work for it.
When Roos came in, he made it clear to the Demons big man that he wouldn’t be handed games under his watch.
Gawn bit his tongue, gritted his teeth and worked harder, with Roos remembering the day Gawn flicked the switch for good.
It was round 12, 2015, at Kardinia Park, the scene of Melbourne’s infamous 186-point humiliation by Geelong in 2011.
The Demons ruckman collected the three Brownlow votes – the first time he’d polled for the medal – in a famous Melbourne win and never looked back.
“We certainly made him earn his spot in the team and he got a little bit frustrated at times,” Roos said.
“But once he got in the team, I remember specifically a game at Geelong where he just dominated and since then it’s sort of been full steam ahead for him, which has been amazing to see and rewarding for all of us.”
In Melbourne’s grand final-winning side last week, nine players were on the list in 2016 in Roos’ final year.
They were Clayton Oliver, Angus Brayshaw, James Harmes, Christian Salem, Jack Viney, Alex Neal-Bullen, Christian Petracca, Tom McDonald and Gawn.
There were two in particular Roos felt happiest for last Saturday night.
“Maxy and Tom McDonald were there when I first arrived and they would tell you how hard it was and how difficult times were,” Roos said.
“So to especially see Max and Tom reach the ultimate was really exciting.”
THE JONES HEARTBREAK
Roos could not help but notice the cruel irony.
The heartbreak story of the Demons’ grand final win was Nathan Jones, who went through all the bad years at Melbourne but missed selection in the drought-breaking premiership side.
It brought back a feeling of deja vu for Roos.
“The two captains I started with at Sydney and then Melbourne were Stuey Maxfield, who didn’t play in the 2005 premiership because he was injured, and Nathan Jones,” he said.
“A hundred per cent I really feel for Nathan.
“That’s probably the sad thing about it and I went through it with Stuey.
“It felt similar really when I reflected on it.”
THE END OF THE ‘CURSE’
It was hard for Roos to ignore, and he feared at times it may have seeped into the playing group.
In 2015, in his second year in charge at Melbourne, he referred to the “veil of negativity” among success-starved Melbourne supporters.
He compared the negative vibe around Melbourne to the long-time stigma carried by Richmond for finishing ninth.
That moment now feels like a long time ago.
Like Richmond, Melbourne smashed through that barrier and Roos declared it “absolutely gone.”
“I’m rapt for them and I’ve probably got more messages from Melbourne fans than I did from Sydney fans, but I know it’s easier now with Instagram which didn’t exist in 2005,” he said.
“But I’m just so excited and so appreciative that people have reached out to me, and I’ve gotten back to every one of them with a ‘well done’ or a ‘congratulations’.”
BROADWAY CLIP WHICH INSPIRED DEES TO FLAG
Jay Clark
Simon Goodwin found the inspiration for Melbourne’s premiership season in a spine-tingling Broadway rehearsal.
No player or coach in the game was under more pressure than Melbourne’s senior coach when he turned to the projector in the lead up to Round 1, and pressed play on a YouTube clip of American singer and actress Keala Settle rehearsing a song from ‘The Greatest Showman’.
Simply, the Demons were one of the most talented teams in it, but they had failed to cope with the pressure and weight of expectation, missing the eight in the previous two seasons.
They needed to learn to run towards the spotlight, rather than shy away from it.
Looking for a hook to help reignite the Demons’ premiership fuse, Goodwin turned to an unlikely source in the performing arts when he showed how Settle overcame a nervous start to deliver a rousing rendition of ‘This is Me’, helping clinch a movie deal for the hit production.
Goodwin said the three-minute clip encapsulated “everything we needed to be”, as Goodwin urged his troops to “not worry about our vulnerabilities or scrutiny” and, like Settle in that key audition, “be proud” to step up when the pressure came.
“That was the clip that set up our journey,” Goodwin told the Herald Sun.
“It is from ‘The Greatest Showman’ and you see Keala in the rehearsal, she just had to step up into the spotlight and basically let it rip, and that was exactly us heading into Round 1.
“I found it very powerful.
“We just turned the (lyrics) from “This is me” This is us” and it was just about being able to operate under pressure and under scrutiny in the biggest games.
“You have got to own your moments.
“I felt like it really typified us as a footy club, because we’d had a good summer, but we needed to deal with the expectation and the pressure and really, just go after it.”
It set the platform for the Demons’ season and ultimately the premiership decider when, faced with a 19-point third-term deficit against the Western Bulldogs, Melbourne produced some of the most powerful football of recent times to spark a 16-goal avalanche.
Goodwin, 44, knew his troops had the capacity to score quickly, having stormed home to beat the Cats in round 23 and then pulverised them in the preliminary final.
But what happened in the Grand final was something else. Something much more magical, as Clayton Oliver, Christian Petracca and Co owned their moment in breathtaking fashion, just like the Demon spoke about so many times in the inner sanctum this year.
“It was as powerful a footy as I’ve seen in a long, long time,” Goodwin said.
“Those last three goals in a minute in the third term, that blew me away.
“And we did it different ways. It was a bit of a grind to get Angus’ (Brayshaw’s) goal along the boundary line down to the forward half.
“And then the two centre bounce goals were just done differently, both clearly out the front (of the clearance) and chain out.
“But Tommy Sparrow from outside 50m and then ‘Clarry’ (Oliver) to get that one on the run and then the celebration.
“I think all of the players ran to ‘Clarry’ in that moment, and I don’t think they could believe it either.”
What happened next as Goodwin Face Timed his three children on the ground and then in the Melbourne changerooms – with only the players and the rest of the football department – will also stay with him forever.
It was pure, unbridled football joy at the end of a three-year journey which not only saw the Demons finish second-last in 2019, but also tested his love of the game.
That mounting stress, not helped when his former president Gen Bartlett went on a wild rant about Demons’ jumpers in Wheaties packets, took a significant personal toll which saw him almost collapse in a press conference, prompting deep introspection with some friends outside football.
But after the final siren in Perth, he enjoyed the best 25 minutes of his football life, having broken the longest premiership drought in the game.
“I was emotional before the game, just thinking about the different scenarios which may play out, but then after the game when we were just in the locker room with the footy department and the players just singing together, really,” he said.
“We would have sung the club song 10 times, as well as a range of other ballads that were belted out.
“That was probably the best 25 minutes that I can remember in footy. There was a lot of emotion attached to it, and it was just us.
“That was the big part of the theme heading into the year. Just being us.
“Being true to who we were, and just to share that moment together was something I’ll cherish for a long time.”
But the road has been winding.
Even in the back half of the season the Demons’ wheels began to wobble a touch, with losses to Collingwood (in Nathan Buckley’s last game), Greater Western Sydney (Round 16) and then the Bulldogs in round 20.
That’s when Goodwin reached into his coaching trick bag to find another theme to help refocus and re-energise the team.
There were eight weeks remaining, so Goodwin, again looking outside the football sphere, tipped the number eight on its side.
Next up on the team screen was an infinity logo.
“It was at a period in our season when we were just starting to fluctuate in terms of how we were playing, and it was just a time to really re-engage,” he said.
“So we flipped that number on its side to that infinity logo and it was just a nice little thing to say this is a chance that you will never have again.
“They have the opportunity to do something that no one has been able to do for the club for 57 years. They could be remembered forever.
“But we had to get going. We wanted to be really ruthless about our footy. We needed to recommit to the cause and get back to our best footy.
“It was at a period where it led to quarantine and lockdown and all that sort of stuff, so it was really refining our commitment to what we needed to do to get our game in shape before the finals.”
The next week, the Demons rolled poor Gold Coast by 98 points, and then Adelaide by 41 points as they finished the home-and-away season with four-straight victories.
It was seven wins in a row by the time they lifted the cup, including finals triumphs by 33 points, 83 and 74 to round out a ridiculously dominant September.
Two years earlier things couldn’t have been more different as the Demons lost their last seven matches of the season.
Only 23,700 fans saw their 53-point hammering from Sydney Swans in Round 22 which was something of a turning point.
Goodwin maintained the faith in the list, but knew things had to change. The way the team defended the ground, their fitness regimen, and even his own approach to things.
So the former Adelaide star midfielder started a personal journey, saying his collapse in the press conference that year was the “catalyst” to reach out to some friends outside the game, including former teammate Kane Johnson, champion surf life saver Trevor Hendy, big wave surfer and mindset coach Mark Visser and “energy healer” Charlie Goldsmith.
Together, Goodwin said, they examined “how you are feeling and what you are thinking” and Visser’s approach to the “ultimate you”.
“It’s about how to deal with certain events in your life and how they take energy away from the things that you should really be focused on,” Goodwin said.
“There’s no doubt the end of 2019 the game had got to me personally. I certainly wasn’t enjoying the game the way I should have or the way I did when I was a player, and in my initial stages of coaching.
“We lost eight out of the last nine (games in 2019) but really early on in the season I thought we were in a bit of a pickle.
“Physically, we hadn’t done the work to prepare for the demands of the game and mentally you start to take wound after wound.
“But more importantly I had some work to do as a coach.
“I had to go and speak to some people away from the game that look at things differently and, in footy, I probably needed to look at the game a little bit differently.
“There were some things I needed to deal with, and bring some energy back to my role.
“You speak to coaches who have gone through a lot of challenges and you think ‘surely it can’t be that bad’.
“And then you get in there yourself and if you are not prepared for what it is, it can get really big on you.
“But I went away and reassessed all that and that’s when I started to shape the footy club again.”
Johnson, who was in Goodwin’s bridal party and played 220 games for Adelaide and Richmond, said he saw similarities between Melbourne’s current culture under Goodwin, and Richmond’s transformation under Damien Hardwick in 2017.
“You can really see the work the club has done, led by Goody, to build a really strong foundation of belonging and connection and it is no different to what I have seen at Richmond,” Johnson said.
“I remember going to the Richmond best and fairest a few years ago and listening to everyone talk and thinking ‘Wow, this is an impressive club’.
“The way they talk about each other and about their bigger purpose more than just win-loss. It is really powerful.
“That is exactly what Goody has created at Melbourne and it is amazing what can happen when people feel connected and empowered, whether that is football, the corporate world or your family life.”
Johnson said he was incredibly proud of his great mate.
“He was always a great team man and one of the guys everyone always wanted to be around but he has just taken himself and his language to the next level,” Johnson said.
“He’s been really open to learn about the mind and being in the moment and be more present with what he is doing and having a powerful effect.
“We are always influencing as a leader, and he has really turned himself into a really positive influence and that is what great leadership is and what inspires others and has a flow-on affect to the people who are close to you.”
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