THE AFL is not having a good 150th. Its official history will not survive the early essay it contains, which goes out of its way to eliminate any indigenous connection with the origins of the game through Tom Wills.

The AFL has a Tom Wills round forthcoming but the Moyston Willaura Football Club, which has a unique connection to Wills and the early part of his story, has also found itself omitted from the official celebrations. Its president, Ruth Brain, has asked for an explanation from the AFL. None has been forthcoming.

Last week, it was revealed that the AFL's leading officials would be in Beijing at the opening of the Olympics when the replay of what is called the first match is played between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College. Then the AFL managed to convey what was interpreted by many as a threat when it suggested that Melbourne was at risk of losing the Queen's Birthday game against Collingwood, its biggest gate each year, if it didn't get a crowd of 60,000 at Monday's match.

This follows reports earlier in the year that the AFL told the Melbourne board that its brand was meaningless in 2008.

Hang on a minute. Isn't Melbourne Football Club the reason we're having the 150th?

I reckon Melbourne is owed a bit of respect. As I see the origins of the game known around the world in one form or another as football, there were a handful of clubs or loose associations operating in England, Scotland, Ireland and Australia in the couple of years before the formation of the Melbourne Football Club. I have read that in 1856, there were several football clubs in the Geelong area, all said to have been started by Tom Wills. These have long since disbanded. FIFA and the English FA recognise Sheffield Football Club as the oldest football club in the world.

This is neither Sheffield United nor Sheffield Wednesday, but an older, independent entity, which formed in 1857. The difference between Sheffield Football Club and Melbourne Football Club is that Sheffield now plays in England's Northern Premier League, division one south, while Melbourne plays in the AFL.

Melbourne Football Club is the oldest football club in the world still competing at the top level of the game it helped to invent.

To be sure, Melbourne is a quaint old beast, a bit like the Queen. I say that as a republican who likes the Queen. Admires her, in fact. Look at the tidal waves of crap she's copped over the years but she still goes on doing her job. The Queen is an on-baller, a Brad Sewell among monarchs. Real head-over-the-ball stuff.

Melbourne hasn't been nearly as constant as the Queen. Its last great period was the 1940s, '50s and '60s. A man said to me at the MCG on Monday that Melbourne has a generation of supporters he calls "the widows" — women who were married to young men in the '40s, '50s and '60s now going to the football with family and friends. This generation of supporters give the Dees a vestige of their aura of social class.

In 1964, Melbourne looked as impregnable as the Roman Empire. It had just won its 12th premiership. Then Ron Barassi left and went to Carlton, this at a time when loyalty to the jumper was said to be the game's paramount value. Barassi, the game's great modernist, believed in tradition — "up to a point".

He not only revived Carlton and set it up for decades of dominance, he is credited with changing the sport by inventing the running game in the course of the 1970 grand final.

Back at Melbourne, Barassi's mentor, coach Norm Smith, became mired in a dispute with the committee of a sort that mirrored the tensions 100 years earlier between Tom Wills and the Melbourne Cricket Club. Who was really running the show?

I mention the Melbourne Cricket Club because the Melbourne Football Club was formed by a subcommittee of the MCC, of which Wills was then briefly the secretary. The two clubs divorced in 1980 but there is still disagreement over whether the premiership cups won by the Melbourne Football Club belong to it or the Melbourne Cricket Club.

There has also been the long-running problem that lots of Melbourne supporters are MCC members, which means they can get into the MCG to see the Dees without signing up as members of the football club.

Geelong Football Club was founded within a year of Melbourne. At the time, Geelong saw itself as the alternative capital — the pivot — of the colony. It was an argument Geelong lost comprehensively, but Melbourne Football Club also lost in a way. Everyone soon knew where Collingwood was. And Fitzroy and South Melbourne. Where, exactly, was Melbourne?

Where is the street where the residents will fly the red and blue when the Dees reach a grand final? Like a certain sort of exhausted deity, Melbourne Football Club was everywhere but nowhere.

In the 1980s, Melbourne ostentatiously sought to modernise. It abandoned its rich, traditional colours for vulgar tones of red and blue. The mythical return of Barassi as coach brought something worse than failure. About all the Dees had in those years was a lean, sublimely skilful wingman named Robert Flower.

When Melbourne Football Club was founded, slavery was still legal in much of the US. People, here in the colony of Victoria, were fighting for the vote. The gentlemen of the MCC were not to be confused with the mob (Wills crossed that line, too). One hundred and fifty years later, it's an amazing maverick.

The Melbourne supporter I know best is musician David Bridie. When he had a financial windfall a few years ago, he promptly funded a concert for West Papuan independence at the Melbourne Concert Hall. He was there on Monday in his Melbourne guernsey, as was his daughter, Winnie. They're die-hards.

The Dees' record over the past 20 years in terms of finals played is actually up with the best. They're down now, but footy is ultimately about talent. If Melbourne picks the next Buddy Franklin in the draft, it will soon be on the up again.

What Melbourne has lacked in recent times is a public champion, or, rather, someone instantly recognised by the public as a champion. Well, it's got one now. An Irishman with a heart as big as Phar Lap's. Go Jimmy Stynes! Go the Dees!