THE highlight of Melbourne Football Club's 150th year began yesterday morning in Federation Square with a quote from Ron Barassi in his ferocious prime: "If you are fierce in your desire to do it right, you do it."

Several thousand supporters gathered to see footage of past champions and hear interviews with perennial club favourite Robbie Flower and the recently retired David Neitz. In the crowd was 1991 Brownlow medallist Jim Stynes, the man being touted to take over the presidency of the club after yesterday's statement by Paul Gardner that he intended to step down at the next board meeting.

Asked what was needed to revive bottom-placed Melbourne, Stynes took care not to be critical of the present board or Gardner. "We don't want to lose good people."

But, Stynes said. "We have to galvanise the energy of the club. We need to attract young supporters. We have to connect with the diehards who fill the stadiums each week. They're the ones we have to respect the most."

Last week, AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou intimated that Melbourne could lose its Queen's Birthday match against Collingwood if the crowd did not exceed 60,000. In the event, yesterday's crowd was given as 59,542, but it would take a brave man to wrest the fixture, Melbourne's biggest, from the Dees.

To quote Melbourne's chief executive Paul McNamee, the Melbourne versus Collingwood fixture "is in our DNA". Fifty years ago, the rivalry between the two clubs was a bedrock of the league.

Melbourne coach Dean Bailey promised the Melbourne faithful at Federation Square that his players' intensity "would be through the roof" in yesterday's game after a weekend in which they had been saturated with the club's history, particularly its glory days in the 1950s and '60s.

At the end of the speeches, led by two pipers in tartan kilts and Melbourne jumpers, the Demons supporters marched from Federation Square to the MCG, passing a photographic exhibition about the history of the club installed on the banks of the Yarra.

Inside the stadium, the match was preceded by a parade of the club's past champions — led, among others, by Barassi — who formed a guard of honour for the present team.

But the day's festivities would have rung hollow if Melbourne had collapsed in the match, as it has several times this season. Its opponent, Collingwood, is a premiership fancy and took the early lead. It was Melbourne's teenager from the Tiwi islands, Austin Wonaeamirri, who scored the Dees' first goal and made the second.

The match had something of the atmosphere of a final. Time and again, Collingwood broke clear and, each time, the question was whether the Dees were broken. They weren't. Paul Wheatley and Colin Garland were bold and resolute in defence, Wonaeamirri was often a chance to score and, in the ruck, Melbourne held sway.

Collingwood won it in the third quarter but, even so, Melbourne rallied in the last. If the Dees' accuracy failed them at the end, their spirit didn't. The Pies won by 21 points but Melbourne's supporters clapped their team from the ground.