Fans make no secret of their feelings as Melbourne players walk back after losing to Essendon in round two.

Fans make no secret of their feelings as Melbourne players walk back after losing to Essendon in round two. Photo: Sebastian Costanzo

On Monday, as the media and social media firestorm engulfing the Melbourne Football Club grew, a new phrase sparked further outpourings of scorn and derision - Melbourne was ''rotten to the core''.

But, from what I can determine, no one actually said it - the phrase came from a headline. No matter, the phantom phrase took off like a spot fire leaping ahead of the main blaze.

Periodically, the way people use sport as a blank page to scribble their frustrations and inadequacies tips over into a sort of mass pathology. There's a lot of things in the world to get upset about, to take brave stands for and against. Young Australians are dying and getting blown up in Afghanistan. For what? You reckon Melbourne Football Club is rotten to the core? What about a country that does that to its young people and then is overwhelmingly indifferent to their fate, preferring to rant and rave about sport?

Melbourne is not rotten to the core. People may question the wisdom of Don McLardy's decisions but, if anybody in football is trying to do the right thing, it's him. On Monday, while calling for the head of then Melbourne CEO Cameron Schwab, there were also calls for the AFL to take over the administration of the club. People ought to be careful what they wish for - they might just get it. Whatever his faults, Schwab had some real strengths, one being a vision for the club based on an intimate understanding of football culture and the Demons' place in it. People point to the AFL's intervention into the Swans in the early 1990s. Ron Joseph, the administrator the AFL installed, had footy culture in his DNA.

I am no longer sure how many people employed by the AFL actually know what footy culture is or what it means to the longevity of the game; so many of their ideas are transparently lifted from American sport and marketing manuals. To someone with a corporate mindset, if the figures stack up, the Hobart Demons might sound like a good idea. Besides which, the AFL is partly responsible for the position Melbourne finds itself in. The risk with extending the competition to 18 teams was always going to be a talent drought among the bottom clubs.

Melbourne's status as the oldest football club of its sort in the world means that, like other venerable institutions, it is beset with paradoxes. Melbourne is the club with no particular suburb or locality in Melbourne it can call its own. In the early 20th century, Melbourne was a gentlemen's club struggling to survive in an increasingly professional league. The two coaches who lifted it to its great peaks, Frank ''Checker'' Hughes and Norm Smith, were outsiders from working-class suburbs.

In 2009, the heart of the Melbourne team was captain James McDonald. But McDonald was a silent warrior; the player providing the sound and the fury within the team was Brent Moloney. McDonald's axing by then coach Dean Bailey was a major miscalculation, but Bailey's team still had its moments on the field. It was just hopelessly inconsistent.

Mark Neeld arrived with a consistency of approach that was apparent to even the blind, but his ''year zero'' approach cost the club solid citizens like Brad Green and Jared Rivers. Moloney departed also, and with him went not only a valuable midfielder but also a supply of that passion which is to football teams what coal is to steam trains. Two youngsters were chosen like head prefects to captain the club on the basis of their performance at training.

I thought Neeld's televised address before last weekend's match was taut, positive and logical. Delivered 90 minutes before the game, it was without false or feigned emotion. I like all that. But, in the course of instituting a regime which made physical fitness its mantra, what appears to have been mislaid is the fact that footy, like most sports, is also played in the head.

A football ground is a psychological space like the stage in a theatre. Great players - Dermott Brereton and Robert DiPierdomenico to name but two - grow to fill that space. When Melbourne had its epic loss to Geelong in 2011 that cost Bailey his job, the Cats grew like giants while Melbourne shrank. Now the Demons have shrunk again.

Personally, I can't help but wonder where the Dees would be if Kevin Sheedy had been appointed coach when Bailey was. I'm not suggesting they'd be tilting for the flag, but I don't believe they'd be in their present sorry state. Sheedy not only understands the game and the diversity of the individuals playing it, he understands footy clubs, what builds them up, what brings them down.

The great French soccer player Eric Cantona immortally compared his media critics, and indeed those of other sportspeople, to seagulls following a fishing boat.

What should never be forgotten is that even if every AFL club had state-of-the-art facilities and was functioning at its absolute best, one would still finish last and be labelled a disgrace. I'm sick of it.