Melbourne Storm like a well-oiled corporation

as posted here

This posting is not really about ASIO as such, but the story does make reference to ASIO in the sense of being a watchdog, which shows how the security organisation is seen in Australia by Australians

THE Melbourne Storm are the worthiest of grand final winners. It's just that it's like barracking for BHP.

It was a relief to see the Storm players throwing themselves around and whooping it up a little after Greg Inglis's field goal and again at the fulltime siren which announced their second premiership of Craig Bellamy's reign.

I have been worrying about how much fun is to be had in this Storm cell ever since Dallas Johnson disclosed last week that he and Cam Smith have a debrief meeting after every training session. During a 30-week season, that's near enough to 100 meetings a year.

It further emerged in grand final week that Storm ball-players Smith, Cooper Cronk and Brett Finch were called to a clear-the-air meeting with Bellamy in the days after their home loss to Manly late in the regular season.

While life at the Storm seems from the outside to be one big meeting, I guess there must be some fun to be had, otherwise players such as Inglis and Slater would have taken the chance to play somewhere else.

But structure is king within Bellamy's brutally efficient organisation.

The main ones to provide some innovation on the field are Smith, Cronk, Inglis and Billy Slater. Finch can pop up with the odd clever play, but generally the Storm play with the spontaneity of an East German military parade.

Other players run their lines in attack. They hit to hurt in defence before they set to work on the wrestle.

It's just the way Bellamy likes his teams to play and he has, in Smith and Cronk, expert organisers able to take his demands from the whiteboard and on to the football field.

In Sunday's grand final against Parramatta, structure won out over the ad-lib and the offload. In rugby league, it usually does in the most important games. Melbourne can play with tremendous skill in delivering passes just on the advantage line. Passes from Finch and Cronk were timed to perfection to put Adam Blair charging through the Eels defensive line for tries scored by Blair and Billy Slater.

It's a fantastic achievement for Bellamy to coach his team to four grand finals in succession. The only remaining question about Bellamy as a man manager now is whether his personality and brand of motivation can lead NSW to a series win at State of Origin time. He was close in 2008 and his team were closer this year than many Queenslanders would want to admit.

Yet in winning their grand final, the Storm also leant heavily on one of sport's simplest motivators, the old "stick it up our critics" ploy.

The previous week, Geelong AFL player Paul Chapman said he had enjoyed the way his team had won their grand final after wearing so much criticism. If ASIO had been charged with a house-to-house search of AFL media pundits who said Geelong could not win the grand final, they would have come up without an arrest.

Smith said last week some senior players and the coaching staff liked proving "the doubters" wrong. Melbourne lost some games and punters and commentators seemed to prefer the chances of the Dragons and Bulldogs in the run-up to the finals.

Interestingly, Bellamy mused on Sunday night that eight or 10 weeks earlier he had not envisaged a grand final appearance, let alone a second premiership.

In terms of a legacy left by the Storm's four grand final appearances, there are promising signs in Melbourne.

There was hope to be found in the television audience figures that showed there were more people in Melbourne (average of 682,000) watching the grand final than there were in Brisbane (563,000).

The Brisbane figure itself was an increase of 62,000 on the average figure for the 2008 grand final, indicating the NRL grand final keeps growing in its standing as a must-watch television event. I watched the game along with about 400 others at a Sunshine Coast surf club and the noisy enthusiasm for the game didn't suffer much at all for the lack of a Queensland club.

The Storm's win was carried on the front page of both Melbourne's daily newspapers and its main sports page to boot, which considering we are only entering week two of the Brendan Fevola trade is pretty good going. "Victoria's domination of Australian sport is complete," noted the Herald Sun after the win by a team entirely drawn from outside Victoria.

As ever, winners can smile and interpret victory any way they like.

And 11 years on, though, rugby league looks for signs of green shoots in Melbourne as carefully and hopefully as a boy who plants seeds which promise a big tree.

as posted here