Find out what’s being said about the club in the major daily newspapers on Thursday, July 7, 2011

The Age

Friends farewell Irish warrior
By Martin Blake

HE WAS known as a trailblazer, and a fierce individualist. Sean Wight not only helped make the AFL's Irish experiment successful, he changed the game, a service in his honour heard yesterday. Melbourne Football Club's chief executive Cameron Schwab told several hundred mourners at St James Catholic Church in Brighton that Wight, who died of cancer last week at 47, was ''perhaps the most courageous person we have met''. Schwab said Wight, Scottish-born but raised in County Kerry in Ireland, had played in an under-19 premiership with the Demons in 1983, a year after arriving in Melbourne. ''By 1987, he was redefining the way that backmen played our game, with risk-taking and athleticism.'' Past and present Melbourne players including Ron Barassi, Robert Flower, Brian Dixon, Stan Alves and Garry Lyon formed a line along North Road in Brighton to allow the cortege to pass. Irish comic Jimeoin was there; so was Sydney's Irish player Tadhg Kennelly. And of course Melbourne president Jim Stynes, who came from Ireland around the same time and helped pioneer the game's push into that country. Schwab, delivering one of the eulogies, talked of Wight's courage on several levels. ''When you are asked to stand in that empty space between full-forward and centre half-forward, ominously known as 'the hole', in front of a leading and snorting Tony Lockett, and the breathless silence of the crowd means you can hear the pounding of his size 13s on the MCG turf, when the shadow of the man hits you before the man himself, and your eyes don't leave the ball, that is courage,'' he said.

First-year Demons learn the ropes in school of hard knocks
By Michael Gleeson

IT sounds like a brutal form of football club hazing - take the first-year players to country Victoria, shove them in a caravan, get them up at dawn to run, jump off a pier into icy water and get in a ring to box each other and some older bigger, tougher teammates. But at Melbourne it is more bonding than belting. The Demons' eight first-year players this week trouped to Brent Moloney's family home in Warrnambool for a ''boxing camp'' with Moloney and Nathan Jones.  Four years ago Moloney organised the first of these now annual camps to show the club's new players something of his life and in turn learn something of them. "Really, I just try and get them out of their comfort zone and away from the club. I want to show them where I am from and open myself up a bit and they do the same," he said.  ''You get to know the players and probably talk more openly and ask questions you wouldn't ask sitting around the club in Melbourne.'' Staying at the local caravan park, being buffeted by howling winds, they would rise at 5.30 each day and head off for a run, then it is into the gym of "Rude" Rodney Ryan where Moloney boxed as a teenager, for sparring, then down to the breakwater where they would all jump in the bay.

The Australian

Pies support Dees for Queen’s birthday
By Greg Denham

MELBOURNE will again request a Monday home game against Collingwood on the Queen's Birthday in its fixture wish list submission to the AFL for 2012. Demons chief executive Cameron Schwab said yesterday the long-standing holiday fixture was viewed as being "intrinsic" on the AFL calendar and expected the current arrangement to continue. Industry debate once raged over whether the date belonged to Melbourne given several "moderate" attendance figures since 2006 when the crowd was 78,733. However, Collingwood president Eddie McGuire was yesterday fully supportive of his club, at no financial gain, continuing to play the Demons on the Monday public holiday. "We want to do the right thing by helping Melbourne and maximising the benefits for the whole competition," McGuire said. "In fact, we've lobbied the AFL hard to maintain the game as Melbourne's home game." McGuire said he hoped the match would eventually become so popular it could challenge the AFL home-and-away record attendance, set on the Queen's Birthday round in 1958 between the clubs at the MCG which attracted 99,256.