FIND out what’s being said about the club in the major daily newspapers on Sunday, June 12, 2011

The Age

Leading from the back
By Peter Hanlon

SITTING in the cafe at Melbourne's headquarters on Thursday, Jared Rivers got a good look at the vision he'd seen only fleetingly. As a wall-mounted screen showed Dean Bailey slamming an exultant fist into the perspex roof above the MCG bench six days earlier, Rivers's smile turned into a hearty laugh. The laws of football's fishbowl dictate that even Bailey's reaction to beating Essendon had to be questioned, as if holding the Demons' coach up to the light for much of the previous month wasn't adequate dissection. For Rivers, Bailey's emotional release was a joy to behold. It was also the culmination of a personal Rivers' watershed. The 26-year-old is not given to self-doubt in a purely football sense; so long as his body has been strong, he's backed himself against the game's biggest and best forwards. Some of the associated expectations of the professional team-sport athlete haven't come so naturally.  ''I've definitely had to work on it,'' he says of the art of leadership, happy for so long to leave it to more obvious candidates at a club with obvious options.