For me it's not envy.
Their systematic cheating of the cap and their flagrant ignorance of their crime is bad enough. But to then parade around social media as if nothing ever happened is the cringiest thing in Australian sport.
Given that this behaviour continues, it is hard impossible to respect them, even with fair success.
My bias aside and with all due respect, I believe that’s a somewhat inane opinion to hold.
Like many of the champion teams in world sport, such as the All Blacks or the Yankees, the Storm are a highly insular organization. They care about one thing, and one thing only: winning. They are often perceived as arrogant, but this ‘arrogance’ is more often a projection of their own obsession. I know a few Storm officials and whenever the cap scandal comes up, they always say the same thing; internally, the club still celebrates those stripped titles because they realize that the situation brought the club to its knees. They realize that they’d made a terrible mistake (as we all do at some point in life), but they managed to come out the other side stronger and better than ever.
The club knows that scandal best exemplifies how ruthless their organization truly is; for nearly every club, that scandal would have spelled destruction, especially in the short term. But, the fact they still kept winning in 2010 despite playing for no points and then came back and won the comp a mere two years later is absolutely absurd and to deny what an admirable effort that was would be to talk out of spite.
Could Melbourne have had more tact at times when addressing their past indiscretions? Absolutely. However, to say they cannot ever be respected, even with fair success, is a fairly petty thing to say and in and of itself speaks of envy. For the vast majority of people, they may not be consciously envious (and are unlikely to admit it regardless), but in the subconscious, the envy is undoubtedly present.
The proof lies in the phycological pudding; If Melbourne had cheated the cap, mastered wrestling techniques and produced countless champion players all the while being another middle-of-the-road, also-ran team which never won competitions and only occasionally scraped into the eight, people would rarely give them a second thought. They may be disliked and viewed with a vague air of contempt, but they wouldn’t be hated.
