Ruthless Storm fans flames of Melbourne-Sydney rivalry

Now that it has become a leviathan, an irresistible force which has pushed aside every immoveable object in the NRL for most of the past three years, Melbourne Storm has officially lost its ranking as everyone’s second-favourite team.

It has become too good for that, too brutally successful. The romance of the outsider underdog has gone; now the Storm is pretty much universally reviled.

The recent offerings from Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, representing rugby league’s heartland, have illustrated the growing animosity towards the southern upstarts who have taken their game and turned it on its head.

The headlines condemning the grapple tackle, chicken wing and other exotically named holds have all served to build the hysteria around Melbourne and its methods.

Cameron Smith’s tackle on Brisbane’s Sam Thaiday two weeks ago was reckless, stupid and deserved censure. Yet what sort of censure? No-one could seem to agree. On Channel Nine, Peter Sterling classified it as a classic example of a grapple tackle, while the ABC’s Roy Masters – someone less inclined to the populist and sensational – said Thaiday was not being choked and the tackle was more of a ‘’rake of the face and chin”.

But once the Nine commentary team had highlighted the move, and the Daily Tele went to work with its screaming headlines, Smith’s cards were marked. The judiciary had to act. And act it did, suspending Smith for both the preliminary final and grand final.

After a season in which the grapple tackle had reared its head almost every week, while the NRL looked on gormlessly and sat on its hands, the league chose to make a stand in the middle of the finals series – against the Storm, Queensland and Australian captain.

As Roy Masters noted in the Sydney Morning Herald this week: ‘’Setting a good example off the field, yet being punished on it, is at the heart of the Storm’s grief. When was the last time a Storm player engaged in sex in a nightclub toilet, urinated on a pub patron, or fled to France to play rugby union, they ask, while Smith misses the grand final for an offence committed 10 times each weekend?”

Masters added that the Storm players and coaching staff have been on a voluntary alcohol ban for over a month.

Little wonder that Melbourne coach Craig Bellamy and club CEO Brian Waldron felt seriously aggrieved. Their blunderbuss response to Smith’s suspension – spraying everyone from the NRL, to the judiciary to the Sydney media – earned them a $50,000 fine. It may have been ill-considered but, given the circumstances, not entirely without justification.

A fortnight ago, I posted on this blog a piece about how we Melburnians did not necessarily appreciate the quality of Geelong’s AFL team (well, it was right at the time), and the brutal brilliance of Melbourne Storm, even though they played right under our nose every second week.

It prompted a stinging post from Richard Green, who wrote: ‘’The people of Melbourne are showing remarkable taste in staying away from Storm matches. Whilst remarkable in their success, they play like a team of lawyers, based on the exploitation of the weakness of officials.

‘’And I mean that whenever they play, the sun goes behind the clouds, birds stop singing and children begin to cry for no reason.

‘’… And we shouldn’t be too surprised. the champions of the evolutionary game are the flu virus, cockroaches and rats, not peacocks, tropical fish and pandas.”

An eloquent put-down of the Storm, but one that bears little relationship to the facts. It is the sort of opprobrium and abuse that the club has had to wear now that it is racking up minor premierships and routinely dispatching the best that the NRL can offer up.

So the state-of-origin selectors have got it wrong – with 12 Storm players represented in Game Three this year? The Australian selectors have no idea what they’re doing in picking six Storm players in the starting line-up for the Centenary Test against New Zealand in May?

And playing like a team of lawyers? No team has produced the flair of Melbourne these last three seasons. They scored 584 points this season (ranking #3), 627 points last season (ranking #1 – and almost doubling the tallies of the Rabbitohs and Titans), and 605 points in 2006 (just three points shy of the No.1 attacking team).

So the temperature is rising, as is the growing Sydney-Melbourne NRL rivalry. It should make for a cracking grand final on Saturday. And having finally emerged from the cheerless, soulless, mindless News Ltd-driven Super League experiment, rugby league has at least got one thing to thank the Storm for: bringing some passion back into the game.