IT WAS A UNIQUE week in the lead up to Melbourne’s Round 7 match against Hawthorn.
Thursday saw the club make four changes to its line-up with Kysaiah Pickett, Luke Jackson, Tom Sparrow and Harrison Petty all entering the AFL’s Health and Safety Protocols during the week.
Then, on Friday night, the club announced that Alex Neal-Bullen was a late out under the AFL’s Health and Safety Protocols, making it a total of five changes to the starting 22.
Jake Melksham, Tom McDonald, Toby Bedford, Jack Viney and Jake Lever all returned to the side on Saturday, playing important roles in Melbourne’s 10-point win over the Hawks.
And skipper Max Gawn couldn’t have been prouder of the group, who took their opportunities when it counted.
“Five changes is a lot, especially if you have a look throughout the history of our last 40 games,” Gawn told Melbourne Media.
“Neal-Bullen, who’s a leader of our club and plays a very important role for us, to lose him less than 24 hours before the game, Melksham comes in and I think we can all agree that Melksham looks like he hasn’t missed a bit.
“Tom McDonald was able to play at both ends today and he looked really good.
“Toby Bedford, I think we’ve got another live wire up forward [in him], which is really exciting.
“Vines and Jake Lever both came back in and they looked good. They’re both eight, nine days post-COVID, so it’s a pretty impressive effort to get out there and play a game of footy.”
The week also saw senior coach Simon Goodwin sidelined due to COVID-19, Adem Yze stepping in for the week as acting senior coach.
“Yze was really good,” Gawn said.
“He sees the game incredibly well, but I think it was a team effort, I think Goody was still on Zoom a lot of the time and was in Richo’s ear for majority of the game.
“Goody for the first time got behind the goal vision during the game, normally he’s on the bench and he can’t see much, but he would’ve been making calls left, right and centre.
“But Greg Stafford, Troy Chaplin, Choco Williams, Mark Corrigan and these sorts of guys were all there and everyone helped out.”
While the Demons continued their winning streak (14 wins overall and seven for season 2022) on Saturday night, the game wasn’t without its challenges.
Hawthorn led at the first break and created pressure right up until the final siren, kicking three late goals in the fourth quarter.
“We match up pretty well against each other and we knew that was going to happen today,” Gawn said.
“We talked about their start so much, they got up to a five goal start against both Sydney and Geelong in the last two weeks and unfortunately, we weren’t able to get that done.
“But we were able to peg that back and play our sort of footy towards the end of the game.”
