Melbourne Storm Totally Explained

Everything about The Melbourne Storm totally explained

The Melbourne Storm is a professional rugby league football club based in the city of Melbourne, Australia. The Melbourne club is currently 100% owned and operated by News Limited.
The club was founded in 1998 as part of the newly formed National Rugby League competition. The club is the inaugural first-grade club based in Victoria. They play their home games at Olympic Park.

History

In 1996, the Australian Rugby League (ARL) decided to establish a Melbourne based team due to the high attendances at recent State of Origin matches. But in May 1997, Super League boss John Ribot pushed for a Melbourne based club in the Super League competition, which was the rival against the ARL competition. Former Brisbane Broncos centre Chris Johns became the CEO of the club and Ribot stepped down from head of the Super League to set up the club. In September 1997, Melbourne announced that Chris Anderson would be their foundation coach, and then the Super League announced that their new team will be named the Melbourne Storm.
   The Melbourne club then went forward with signing players from other clubs, including Robbie Ross, Glenn Lazarus, Brett Kimmorley and Scott Hill. With the Super League and ARL joining into one competition, the Melbourne team was now part of the National Rugby League (NRL) for the 1998 season. In their first ever game, they defeated Illawarra, with Glenn Lazarus being their inaugural captain. Melbourne, in a complete shock to the rest of the competition, won their first four games, before losing to Auckland. They went on to make the finals, but were defeated by eventual premiers Brisbane Broncos.
   In 1999, Melbourne won their eight of their first eleven games, and went on to make the finals in third position on the premiership ladder. The team was beaten convincingly 34–10 in the quarter final by St. George Illawarra, but came from behind in both the semi final and preliminary final to make the grand final. Melbourne faced St. George Illawarra in the 1999 grand final, St. George Illawarra were favourites due to comfortably defeating Melbourne just three weeks earlier.
   Season 2000 saw Melbourne have consistent results after losing their first four games of the season. They made the finals (finishing 6th), but were eventually knocked out by Newcastle in the quarter-finals. Between 2001 and 2002, the Melbourne club performed poorly. Cracks were starting to appear between Johns, Ribot and Anderson through out the period, and Anderson quit as coach of Melbourne mid season of 2001, and was replaced by Mark Murray. The Melbourne club failed to make the finals in 2001. Johns left the club as CEO at the end of 2002 and coach Murray was sacked due to Melbourne's poor form, and missing the finals for the second year in a row. Craig Bellamy was announced as the new coach of Melbourne for 2003.
   Between 2003 and 2005, Melbourne made the finals under coach Bellamy, but lost games in the semi finals preventing them from making the grand final. In 2006, the Melbourne team won their first minor premiership for being on top of the NRL ladder. Melbourne only lost four games in the season making them outright leaders by four wins. They went on to win their two finals matches and go on to the grand final.
   In 2007, they played as they did in 2006, once again finishing on top after 25 rounds. In the first week of the NRL Finals, Melbourne played Brisbane, in which Melbourne won 40-0. Securing a spot in a Preliminary Final. In the Preliminary Final Melbourne came up against Parramatta. It was tied 10-10 at half time, before a superb second half by Melbourne, finishing the game 26-10. The win was particularly satisfying for Melbourne fans, coming soon after Paramatta CEO Denis Fitzgerald saying that rugby league shouldn't be promoted in Melbourne. Melbourne ended up drawing a larger crowd than Manly's preliminary final.
   Melbourne comprehensively defeated Manly 34-8 in the 2007 NRL Grand Final. The 2007 season for the Melbourne Storm has been the most successful ever year of all time for a premiership winning side in rugby league, with the team losing only 3 games.
   Their first loss in season 2008 was their 100th of all time, which was a rare 17-16 loss at Olympic Park against Cronulla in round 2.
   The 2008 season has seen the introduction of the Toyota Cup Under 20's Youth Competition to be run in parallel with the NRL competition. Melbourne's Toyota Cup squad includes seven Victorian juniors developed through Melbourne's academy system. These players include Peter Tamarua and Laurence Nathan who were both born and grew up in Melbourne. (External Link

) They have had a fiery start to the 2008 season. Drawing a crowd of 20,084 for the first round clash at Telstra Dome against the New Zealand Warriors, they won 32-18 with Billy Slater scoring a hat-trick of tries.

Emblem and colours

Originally, the club favoured the name Melbourne Mavericks with a gunslinger logo holding a fistful of aces. The club officials were all set to go with this until News Limited's Lachlan Murdoch told them to go with something else because the Mavericks sounded too American. So co-CEOs Chris Johns and John Ribot decided to go with the themes lightning, power and storm. The club then became known as the Melbourne Storm. The team remained at the ground until the end of the 2000 season. In the 2000 season they attracted an average home attendance of 14,622

Statistics and records

Melbourne's highest ever point scorer is Matt Orford with 877 points. Current players Matt Geyer (628) and Cameron Smith (586) are the highest current players with the most points. Matt Geyer has the most tries in the club's history with 105 tries, followed by current player Billy Slater (73) and Storm legend Marcus Bai (70).. In his rookie season, current player Israel Folau broke the Storm's club record of most tries in a season by crossing over the line 21 times in 2007.
Melbourne's highest ever victory was the 64–0 against Wests Tigers on July 5 2001. The most points they've ever scored is 70, when they beat St. George Illawarra Dragons 70–10 on March 3 2000. However, their biggest defeat was by 46 points to both the Bulldogs (50-4 on August 10 2003) and to St. George Illawarra (50-4 on June 4 2000).
For regular season home games the record attendances are as follows for the three homegrounds Melbourne have used;

23239 MCG (vs St George-Illawarra 03/03/2000)
20522 Olympic Park (vs Norths 03/04/1998)
20084 Telstra Dome (vs Warriors 17/03/2008)

For home finals the attendance records are as follows;

33427 Telstra Dome (vs Parramatta 23/09/2007)

18247 Olympic Park (vs Sydney City 30/08/1998)

All time head to head record

Over the 11 years that Melbourne have participated in the National Rugby League, they've the following Win-Loss record.

Games	Wins	Drawn	Loss	Tries	Goals	F/G	Points	Win %
271	166	4	101	1214	954	9	6773	61.99%

Current squad

Although other players may play for the Melbourne Storm during the year, all NRL clubs are required to select a top 25 First Grade squad at the beginning of the season. Below is a list of around 25 players ranked by their cap number at the Melbourne Storm.

Team of the decade

As part of their 10 year celebrations in 2007, Melbourne Storm released a team of the decade. The 17 man team was selected by former assistant coach Greg Brentnall, foundation CEO John Ribot, Daily Telegraph journalist Steve Mascord and board member Frank Stanton.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Melbourne Storm'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://melbourne_storm.totallyexplained.com">Melbourne Storm Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.