Dees 'didn't want to win': Brown

NATHAN Brown sensed the contest felt a little "strange" as he stood at full-forward on that fateful day in Round 18, 2009.

Nathan Brown

NATHAN Brown sensed the contest felt a little "strange" as he stood at full-forward on that fateful day in Round 18, 2009.

But it did not hit the Richmond forward until he filed into the rooms a few minutes after teammate Jordan McMahon sunk Melbourne with a last-gasp goal.

"You don't realise it when you're out there playing . . . it's only when you get in to the rooms after the game and you're told of all the moves," Brown said yesterday.

"Jade Rawlings was the coach and he was pretty disappointed with the way we played.

"He said, 'You just nearly got beaten by a side that didn't want to win'.

"He basically said we were kidding ourselves."

Rawlings, caretaker coach of the Tigers after Terry Wallace's departure, ironically is now a highly-rated assistant coach at Melbourne - the same club under the gun for its "tanking" tactics that day.

Brown, an elusive, 182cm forward, found himself marked by lumbering 199cm ruckman Paul Johnson.

In other bizarre moves, Melbourne's most consistent ball-winner, James McDonald, was banished to defence to guard small forward Robin Nahas.

Classy forwards Russell Robertson and Colin Sylvia were playing in the VFL.

Despite his obvious talents, Robertson was on the outer as "experimentation" went into full swing.

Yesterday he gave a firm "no comment" when contacted by the Herald Sun.

Defenders James Frawley and Matthew Warnock were also pushed forward for much of the day in an utterly baffling move.

Brock McLean, the man at at the centre of the latest tanking allegations, did not play.

But former Melbourne ruckman John Meesen, who was at the club between 2008-2010, confirmed there were some odd moves.

"You looked at how the team was lined up and you thought, 'Hang on, this is different'," Meesen said.

"Forwards were down back, the backs were in the midfield and the midfielders were up forward.

"For example, you saw Matthew Bate in the backline. It was just a different strategy, or look, in a game that we should have won.

"But the club was trying to rebuild and you could understand that it needed to play players who were going to be around for the next 10 years."

Brown, in fact, paid credit to the intensity of the Demons that day.

"The club might not have wanted to win the game, but the players out there were giving everything," he said.

Three weeks later, against St Kilda at the MCG, Melbourne's strange positional moves continued.

When the Demons found themselves three goals in front in the last round of the year, James Frawley was taken off Nick Riewoldt.

Liam Jurrah and Aaron Davey were sent to the bench and Nick Dal Santo ran free without a tagger.

Losing enabled Melbourne to snare draft picks No.1 and 2 - Tom Scully and Jack Trengove.

Some might say karma hit the Dees when Scully left, but they have two juicy first-round picks in this year's draft as compensation.

The carrot to lose was too big. The Demons, as sacked coach Dean Bailey once said, did what they had to do.