A little less than 13 years ago, on the same day as Gerard Healy entered footy meme history by calling Gold Coast ‘the Gold C–ts’ on live TV, Melbourne headed to the MCG desperate for a win after weeks of misery, with a coach firmly under the pump, against a Suns outfit seemingly building towards a bright future… and got absolutely battered in front of a miserable crowd.

It wasn’t the lowest ebb of the Demons’ decade of despair from 2007 to 2017, but it was the death knell for Mark Neeld, who hobbled along in purgatory before finally being put out of his misery two months’ later, and began the long, slow, painful turning of the worm that ended on a glorious night in Perth in September 2021.

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Who knows whether the same fate will befall Simon Goodwin, who has substantially more credits in the bank than Neeld ever did; but one thing is for sure, if it wasn’t already clear after their final-quarter capitulation against North Melbourne last week. Melbourne are broken.

They’re broken in ways that have been problems for years, the impotence of their forward line and complete inability to provide them quality opportunities from a blaze-happy midfield now seems married with a total loss of form from the few reliable avenues to goal they have up there.

But they’re also broken in areas that used to be so good those problems up front didn’t matter; a midfield built around an all-time great duo in Christian Petracca and Clayton Oliver is now being routinely stomped by younger, hungrier and quicker on-ball brigades, Max Gawn is staring football mortality in the face after another unassuming day at the office, and the backline is looking dangerously close to being a rabble.

The Suns were excellent to a point of finally needing to take them seriously as a football side, 14 miserable years after they entered the competition; but the resistance was so minimal, and the errors so obvious, you must again wonder at how much the quality of the opposition played a part in a second straight emphatic win on the road.

This is not a team capable of turning the corner after a wretched 2024; this is a former power now facing a long and perhaps excruciating rebuild – and with the new Tasmanian team looming, picking a dangerous time to bottom out.

Which leaves us two goals in dissecting Saturday afternoon at the MCG: one, an autopsy into everything that went wrong and why; and two, planning for an uncertain future for both Goodwin and the team he leads.

The heart of the problems began in midfield: this is a Melbourne team built around dominance at the stoppages, which relies on their control to allow its backline to set up effectively and give its forwards enough looks to kick a winning score.

It’s a sound strategy when Petracca, Oliver, Gawn and Jack Viney are your awesome foursome; but at this point in time, all are either staring their footballing mortality in the face, or performing substantially below their brilliant best.

Christian Salem reacts to Melbourne’s loss to Gold Coast. (Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)

Viney has been tireless as ever in the first two rounds, but looked completely unequipped to deal with Matt Rowell, Noah Anderson and co. at the coalface, a group he single-handedly shredded late last year.

With three clearances in the last fortnight, what was once his bread and butter – winning the hard ball and distributing to Petracca and others on the outside – is now beginning to dwindle; never blessed with pace and only ever a reasonable kick, a 31st birthday that’s only a month away might start to become a talking point.

Oliver’s numbers have lifted from his ghoulish 2024; but they’re empty calories, for the most part, far from as damaging as in his halcyon years when he was the best inside midfielder in the competition.

There are glimpses – a quicksilver handball in traffic to help set up a Petracca goal in the third quarter, for instance – but so much of his footy now is won out in space, where he has never been quick enough or damaging enough a kick to terrify opposition midfields like he did bursting through traffic in close. I think he even knows it, too.

31 disposals reads nicely on paper, but 10 contested possessions and five clearances speak louder: the Oliver of old would never have had that much of the ball and been so limited at the coalface.

His opposite number, meanwhile, is everything Oliver was: Rowell is a red-headed contested beast with an underrated burst of pace and a brilliant footy IQ to rove taps no matter who wins it.

As symbolic changings of the guard go, this was rather emphatic.

Petracca is the most alarming of all: three games into his return from last season’s horror internal injuries, it was always going to be a stretch to see him back to his best so early, but it’s getting hard to watch him run around exerting so little influence on a game he once dominated.

Like with Oliver, he is reduced to fleeting glimpses of his brilliance as a teaser of the player he once was, and still might be again – but with either his explosive pace or his ability to weild it diminished, the flaws in his game – namely his tendency to bomb long first and ask questions later – become more readily apparent.

Gawn, meanwhile, has looked every inch his 33 years of age in the last fortnight: the presence he held at his best, the feeling any ball sent into his vicinity would end with his hands on it, is now no more.

The captain still at least fought a draw with another quality rival in Jarrod Witts, but notably, just 37 per cent of his taps went to advantage on Saturday, a far lower number than his Suns counterpart (48 per cent); whether it’s his own ruckwork becoming less precise as in his glory days or the cumulative effect of his midfield being far reduced beneath him, who can say.

Together, their fall paints an effective picture of the day’s carnage at stoppages: a 24-40 hiding, 8-16 out of the centre, is their fourth-worst drubbing since the start of 2021, with only Fremantle twice last year in 10-goal crushings significantly worse than this one.

Those stats don’t mean much on their own, but giving up nine goals from clearances to the Suns sure does – and a week on from giving up a Goodwin era-record 59 points from them, it’s readily apparent that what was once the most devastating midfield in the league is now not just neutralised, but actively becoming a weakness.

Against the Suns, one of footy’s least complicated teams who drive the ball forward as a rule, that stoppage domination led to a 65-40 advantage in inside 50s. Neither the Demons’ struggling backs nor their wayward forward line were ever going to be able to cope with that.

The defence has become a worry for about the last 18 months now; in truth, it has never returned to being the impenetrable fortress it was in 2021 and the first half of 2022, but now it’s leaking at an alarming rate.

Five times last year, all from Round 9 onwards, the Dees gave up 100 points in a match; it happened just three times in total across 2021, 2022 and 2023, with no score higher than 110.

In their last nine games – six from 2024 and their first three in 2025 – the triple-figure mark has been reached five times.

Part of it is the inside-50 domination, but part of it is that the backline now looks less like a solid unit and more like individuals all battling their own personal, well, demons.

Sloppy mistakes are now common, from Steven May dropping simple marks to Harrison Petty repeatedly dallying with the ball and then shanking the kicks he does muster. Far from the surety with which the Dees used to move the ball out of defensive 50, now there’s every chance it’s coming back over the top of their heads in a matter of seconds.

The biggest factor in this rapid unravelling of what was once footy’s miserliest defence is May, another for whom footballing mortality is looming larger than ever.

The skill errors are one thing – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen his hands poorer than on Saturday – but it’s also what he’s not doing, and where he’s not stationing himself, that is so antithetical to his former omniscience when determining where the footy was headed.

If you bombed long inside 50 against Melbourne in days gone by, you’d invariably pay the price, because May would have stationed himself exactly where the ball was, and either marked, safely spoiled, or engaged an opponent to let Jake Lever in for the intercept.

Now, he’s lost; and there’s no one in the Dees’ defence capable of filling that void.

In days gone by, May would have safely defused this long ball in the dying seconds of the third term; instead, the footy spills out the back, and Will Graham is able to easily run onto a loose ball and snap just as the siren sounded, for the game-killing goal.

The most damning one for May was this classic outpointing from Ben King in the third quarter.

There’s so much to unpack in that one play. One: Steven May does not get caught under the ball. As a rule, he’s an old-school back shoulder defender right up to the point where he judges he can mark the ball, at which point he’ll either sprint clear to the drop zone to intercept, or if he’s already in it, nudge his forward under the ball to grab it.

In short, he does exactly what King did to him for that goal; and worst of all, the vision shows that his mistake was in misreading where the kick inside 50 was going to fall, trying to hold his space too far in front, and going under the ball in the process.

And that’s not to mention the countless times he was fractionally, but noticeably, late on impacting the contest, a once unthinkable prospect: conceding an early 50m penalty for the game’s first goal was utterly rubbish in every imaginable way.

Melbourne, the very late stages of 2021 aside, have never been a high-scoring team of late; their brilliant defence and awesome midfield both papered over cracks in attack and, paradoxically, made them shine all the brighter, the fatal chink in the armour of a potential dynasty team.

It’s no surprise that in a game dominated from start to finish by the Suns, the forwards would have limited supply; add to that the Dees’ still-woeful efficiency going forward, something not helped by fewer opportunities, and it’s frequently taking acts of individual brilliance for them to score at all.

But the malaise is team-wide, and among the forwards it’s just as noticeable: Bayley Fritsch, barely sighted against North Melbourne, dropped the easiest mark he’ll get all year deep in the third term on Saturday, when another goal would have kept his team well and truly alive.

Even poorer is their work defensively; no wonder the Suns racked up the score they did if Fritsch is going to let John Noble stroll past him for a simple handball receive and goal like he did here.

Petracca, too, is at fault here, wandering aimlessly inside 50 more intent on complaining with teammates than clogging up space.

There is a smorgasbord of embarrassing vision to show of the Dees on Saturday; the worst, in my view, is this complete capitulation to let the Suns kick a training drill goal, under less pressure than an Auskick side would have put on.

This is a team in dire need of a reset, of playing personnel at least if not the coach as well: behind the scenes, given the amount of young talent given exposure to AFL football in the first three rounds, it seems Goodwin and co. know it too, for all their public utterances about being in it to win it this year.

Before a knee injury early against the Suns, Xavier Lindsay had clearly been the Dees’ biggest shining light this season; arguably best afield for them on Saturday was second-gamer Harvey Langford, who put their star-studded midfield to shame with a bullocking game at the coalface, finishing with team-highs for contested possessions and clearances and putting his body on the line when no one else in red and blue would.

Jacob van Rooyen needs help but is the future of the forward line; Harry Sharp shows a bit out on the wing even if he’s certainly not prolific; Jake Bowey looks back to being the calm, sensible player he seemed to be when his first 17 games ended in victories.

The question, really, is whether Goodwin continues to flog what is now looking all too much like a dead horse, or chalks this season up as another write-off, gives the kids some extra responsibility, and answers some tough questions about the stars at the top.

Is a midfield of Viney, Petracca and Oliver still sustainable? Are there other options to spark life into the game as a sub than Jake Melksham, who for all his endeavour is the wrong side of 30 and never more than a reasonably good player even at his best? Is there any point playing a Jack Billings, or a Tom Sparrow, or even a Tom McDonald, if this is what we can expect from them?

It would be an exceptionally brave call to do it after just three games – the season is long, form can be found, tides can and will turn.

But so many Dees look so badly out of touch, and the system they’re playing looking so outdated, and their rivals so much more imposing, especially on-ball, that it’s all but impossible to see a turnaround sufficient to take this team to where they want to be in the short-term.

Right now, Melbourne are broken. In this hour, Goodwin faces what might be his toughest task as coach: deciding whether to try and put the pieces back together, or grind the refuse into dust, clear the slate and have a crack at trying again from ground zero up.