Max Gawn reveals the inside story of the cultural and attitude change which led to the Demons’ success
Inside Melbourne’s premiership win: Max Gawn reveals, in his own words, what changed at the Demons to reverse the club’s fortunes and how hubs played a part.
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CHAPTER 1:
People always ask me what changed at Melbourne. When did you turn the corner? What decision made the difference? Which person played the biggest part? I get that. As a lover of the game and of my club, I completely understand that curiosity. It’s human nature. We need that sense of meaning, don’t we? Particularly here in this amazing, joyful moment as AFL premiers. We’re a good story, the Demons, and good stories rely on understanding ‘the moment that changed everything’.
But of course there’s no one answer. There are a thousand answers. I like to think that what we’ve achieved this season at the Melbourne Football Club – a 13th flag, 57 years after our 12th – is the outcome of a slow burn from 2015. Do you remember 2015? I do and I don’t.
It feels like an eternity ago.
I could trace every slip and jump since then, in detail. I could think through every rise and every fall, but it would take too long here. And yet there’s definitely one small moment I want to dwell on, because it was a turning point in my growth, and I wonder sometimes if that kind of moment is what some of my teammates have gone through in these past 18 months, as things between us have gotten more honest and open and true.
Basically, I was young, and finding my feet.
In 2013 and 2014 I was playing one game in the VFL, one in the AFL, in and out and just unable to take those opportunities. If you haven’t enjoyed the thrill of playing AFL as an established senior – if you’re still emerging and grasping for your spot in the best 22 – then ‘oldest player in the VFL team’ is not a title you want.
But that was me in 2015. I was 24, and not quite sinking, but certainly treading water.
The feedback I got from Paul Roos was in my face, and direct: ‘Pull your head out of your arse.’
I remember we played a game against Fremantle in Darwin, and Garrick Ibbotson bodied me out in a marking contest. He was a great player, but he was also 186 centimetres and maybe 80 kilograms sopping wet. I was bigger, and stronger, and should have done better. I got subbed out immediately. Again, Roosy was direct with me, and in front of the group, too: “You muscle people out all day in the VFL … and then come out here and do nothing!”
GOOD, HONEST CRITICISM MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE
The little point I’m making here is not about the value of a coach firing up and delivering a spray. Nor is it a message about needing thick skin to survive in this game. The idea is that criticism can come from a good place, and when it does – when it’s pure and correct and deserved and real – it makes all the difference.
In Queensland in 2020, we were stuck in the hub in Twin Waters on the Sunshine Coast, in the back half of a pandemic-affected season. It sounds claustrophobic, doesn’t it, hub life? Locked down. Locked in. Tucked away from the world, surrounded by the same people day and night, night and day. But I look back now and it seems a key factor in the way we shifted. Daily, hourly contact meant daily, hourly conversations.
What was good about the hub? Being around families, for one. We talk always about being a family club – most clubs do. But we were finally creating that environment in a tangible way. It wasn’t just something we wrote in mission statements on our website.
And that sense of family spread even more widely. We began connecting more deeply with past players, even though they couldn’t be there. I remember hearing from David Neitz, and him talking to us through a screen, telling us how much football meant to him in isolation, how much watching the Demons while being locked down in Melbourne was doing for everyone back home. When you’re living your entire life in communal dining spaces, and retreating ‘home’ to a room in a resort, everything seems outsized. Bigger. Louder. More vivid.
More importantly, hub life magnifies everything – the good and the bad – and for us that meant two things. First, we were playing good football at the tail end of 2020, going eight and five while living together in the tropics. That’s the great part – feeling the team mingle and coalesce, and come together on the field.
The second part was both bad and good. And it was cultural. There was something about the way we were talking to one another, socially as much as professionally. It was too casual, or dismissive perhaps. We were having a laugh at one another’s expense, and doing it too often. It would be easy to say it was the laid-back Sunshine Coast seeping into our daily lives, but we began to see things that might sound minor or petty – perhaps not worthy of attention and analysis – yet I wasn’t so sure. It felt like something we shouldn’t take into 2021.
These are things that had been going on for years, and they needed to stop.
Goody (coach Simon Goodwin) lives on the Mornington Peninsula as well. We live only a few streets away from one another, so I got to see him up-close and personal. I can only say this one way: He turned full footy nuffy. In an off-season where I was trying to reset and recharge, getting away from it all, Goody was trying to win us a flag in October. Honestly, I felt like saying, ‘can’t you just let me watch the Caulfield Cup in peace?’
MISSION: GRAND FINAL DAY
But the amount of conversations we had over a coffee or a beer, on a walk or around the campfire, even going for a run around Rye oval, I’m so glad that we were able to do that. He would share his ideas and philosophies, and I could tell him the players’ perspective and how we might feel, and in that way we were able to get where we wanted.
We found something. And it was presented on day one of pre-season training.
Every year we have a goal. Let’s do better than we did last year. Let’s make the top eight. Let’s make the top four. It’s always relative, and general. This year Goody went specific. “We’re winning it,” he said. “We’re winning it all.”
That’s the first year that’s happened. He put it right up on the big screen down at Casey Fields. We sat down in the auditorium and up there the words sat in big bold letters: ‘MISSION: GRAND FINAL DAY.’
He explained what we needed to do, and how to do it, and it all circled back to this new trademark we adopted. Our trademark for 2021 was going to be ‘TRUE’ – Trust, Respect, Unity and Excellence – and TRUE applied to everyone, from the president to the boot-studder.
Everything began to feel better than it had in quite some time. But you can’t let that fool you, either. December, January and February – these are the easy months of football. You don’t have to stand by what you said at the end of October in those months, because there’s no pressure, no newspaper articles, no stress of performance – of fans, of friends, of mum and dad calling you after a big session or game to see how you went.
The important part was going into matches. We’ve made changes in the past that felt good, like we were motoring along in a groove, only to play a match and find that we were actually stuck in a rut. A loss will bring you down quickly, while a win affirms everything.
There’s a chicken-and-egg question here: When you get on a hot streak – as we eventually did – was it the culture that came first and created the wins, or did the winning make the culture real?
HOW LOSING HELPED US WIN WHEN IT COUNTED
Did the way we changed help us win nine and zero, or did winning nine and zero help us change? I’m inclined to think they both helped each other. And in that context, the pre-season games mattered to us. People might think these games don’t count, but they do. And in 2021 both our JLT games were important in different ways.
Richmond came first. We played the reigning premiers at 9.30am on a Thursday in late February, and they put a very good team on the park, at least for the first three quarters. And we beat them, and that gave us confidence, because of the manner in which we did things.
All those little behaviours we talked about were on show. It gave us belief that what we said we wanted to do was something we would be able to deliver. It was good to see it, and taste it, and know that it worked.
And then we got a massive reality check. We came in against the Bulldogs not long after, with confidence sky-high, and we went away from everything we had pledged, and we got murdered. There was a nine day gap between games, but it felt like we had forgotten everything, because we got big heads, because we were fools floating sky-high over winning a midweek scratch match.
But in a way, that became almost perfect. That Western Bulldogs game set us up for the early weeks of the home-and-away season. We constantly referred to that game.
Even as far into the season as round five, we would be chatting at halftime when the match was in the balance and going, ‘but remember the Doggies game?’
There were these constant references. Nobody would think a practice game could have that effect on a group, but it did.
There was one final thing that happened in the pre-season, right near the end, which I think was important. People signed up. Before the season itself had begun, and then through the early months of the year, important names signed important contracts: Jake Lever. Christian Petracca. Clayton Oliver. Christian Salem. That gave me so much confidence that the group was happy – that an environment had been created that people wanted to stay in.
I was happy to sign on myself, on a four-year contract extension that would tie me to the club until the end of 2025. I was always going to be a Demon for life. It was an easy decision. But there’s ego on your shoulder, too. Your manager wants you to get the best deal possible, and you want to set your family up, but you also know that for us to keep Petracca, Oliver, Lever, May – and everyone else – you’ve gotta do your bit. Sometimes you need to convince others, but I never needed to convince myself.
The Melbourne Football Club was speaking so loudly in my ears. We have a great history but a poor recent history, and I wanted to be involved with the team that changed all that for good. We all did.
It’s not 20/20 hindsight to say we felt we were on the verge of something. We knew we had the skills. We knew we had the fitness. We knew we had a game plan. We had every position on the field covered – elite talent on every line. And there was belief, too – so much belief. Confidence was never the issue. Attitude was.
This is an edited extract from Max Gawn Captain’s Diary published by Hardie Grant. On sale December 10 from all good book stores, and available at Melbourne’s premiership celebrations at the MCG.
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Originally published as Max Gawn reveals the inside story of the cultural and attitude change which led to the Demons’ success
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