Crikey Sports is honoured to have a guess post by Crikey’s own Greg Barns.
Melbourne Demons supporter Greg Barns writes:
Melbourne supporters got a text message yesterday from their effervescent club president Jim Stynes. The moment has come for Jack Watts, Melbourne’s much hyped young star and draft pick, to make his senior debut. Appropriately it’s in the annual Queens Birthday clash against the ancient rival Collingwood.
Watts will hopefully be the real deal — and he is joining a fast improving young club that is playing exciting football, albeit flawed at crucial times.
But Melbourne has a Messiah complex. Ever since Ron Barrassi left at the end of 1964 to play with Carlton, Melbourne has looked to someone to replace him. Barrassi, one of his former Melbourne team mates once told me, was an awesome inspirer of men and there has been none like him at Melbourne before or since.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Melbourne rolled out red carpet and kindled media interest with a succession of players who it said were going to return the club to its glory days of the 1950s and 1960s.
In the early 1970s it was South Australian recruit “Diamond” Jim Tilbrook — given that stone’s name because he was meant to be The Man. At the same time the team payed record money for St Kilda ruckman Carl Ditterich. And there were others. Footscray full forward Kelvin Templeton in the early 1980s, young David Cordner, scion of the famous Melbourne family, and even Ditterich again, who captain-coached Melbourne in 1979-1980. But not much changed until John Northey worked with what he had in 1987 and took Melbourne into its first finals series since Barrassi’s departure. Northey made a valuable point about Melbourne’s psyche.
One feels sympathy for Jack Watts – a callow 18 year old Year 12 student, who is being flung into a contest equivalent to a young batsman playing his first test in an Ashes series. Watts will hopefully make it — but he is not a Messiah and should not been seen as such by Melbourne fans. He is not an heir to Barrassi, but he is coming into a young side and could be a valuable player in Melbourne’s future.
He is no more, no less.
