Drenched, defeated and dejected, Melbourne, led by Max Gawn, trudges off at Cazaly’s Stadium. Photo: GETTY IMAGES

“To Hell And Back … to hell again”.

It might never reach the sort of infamy Carlton’s “They Know We’re Coming” slogan achieved, but Melbourne’s pre-season documentary series earlier this year just about has a readymade sequel in the form of the 2020 season itself.

The Demons’ catastrophe in Cairns – losses to bottom-six sides Sydney and Fremantle – over the last week has taken the finals equation out of their hands in a year they were supposedly primed to bounce straight back to the dizzying heights of 2018.

Instead, they’re still in a spin.

How many calls do you reckon Melbourne president Glen Bartlett has fielded, or more likely screened, from footy journos hanging out for a quote over the last few days?

Bartlett unleashed a scathing assessment of the Demons’ “insipid” defeat to Port Adelaide in late July, during which he labelled the players “soft as butter” and said they had “trashed” the jumper.

Bartlett, who played league football for West Coast (VFL) and East Perth (WAFL), has gone a bit quiet in the public arena, perhaps because he copped some blowback from recently-retired Melbourne players for lashing out and heaping pressure on his coach and the current squad.

But privately, he would no doubt have reached a whole new level of frustration and anger this month.

Entering September at 7-6, with three wins in four outings after the Power failure, Melbourne had it all to play for. Finals were there for the taking.

But they didn’t turn up against the injury-ravaged Swans and were outsmarted, outplayed and outworked by the rebuilding Dockers.

The contrast with Fremantle on Monday night could not have been more stark.
It was a team made up largely of senior players, many supposedly in the prime of their careers, versus an undermanned and inexperienced outfit learning a new game plan.

The latter showed up hungry and determined in difficult conditions, led well by a small core of senior veterans, and Melbourne didn’t give much of a yelp until having half a crack in the final few minutes.

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Goodwin had swung the axe in a bid to shock his team into action (and manage its workloads), making seven changes to the side that lost to Sydney. It didn’t work.

Max Gawn, Jack Viney, Clayton Oliver, Christian Petracca, Steven May and Michael Hibberd all featured against Fremantle and are all very good players. But the Demons, right now, are still not a very good team.

“As a club, I think we need to become a much more ruthless club and really grow up and start to perform in these types of games,” Goodwin conceded post-match.

“This is a great position for our club to be in to experience this again after last year, but we need to start to become more mature as a club and more unconditional in the way we go about our business.

“It’s everyone. We’re in this together and we’re trying to change shape as a footy club about where we’ve been seen for a long amount of time. To do that, it takes a whole collective group of people. We can’t have results like tonight.

“I think when teams are really unconditional in the way they go about their footy, their business, day-in, day-out, your method will stack up and get results, and we’re just not quite there yet.”

Goodwin arrived at Melbourne in 2015. Just on that, here’s a question that rarely gets asked: Why is the Paul Roos/Simon Goodwin succession plan almost always prefixed with the word “successful”?

Is it because the two coaches didn’t have a Mick Malthouse/Nathan Buckley style deterioration in their relationship? Is it because the Demons briefly rose into the top eight?

Melbourne certainly hasn’t morphed into the regular flag contender it had planned to be off the Roos-led launchpad. The Dees have managed one finals series under Goodwin, and were embarrassed by West Coast in the 2018 preliminary final.

Since that brief flirtation with the upper echelons of the ladder, Melbourne has topped up with Steven May, Adam Tomlinson and Ed Langdon, added mature-age recruits Kade Kolodjashnij, Braydon Preuss and Harley Bennell, and won just 12 of 37 games.

“There will be a level of frustration, I’m sure, amongst our supporters, fans and everyone alike,” Goodwin continued on Monday. “But we’re going to work incredibly hard to make sure we put together some strong performances in the last couple of weeks.”

Frustration, really, is putting it mildly.

Now Melbourne has just two games left – against Greater Western Sydney and Essendon – to avoid going back to “hell”.