DANE ELDRIDGE: Craig Bellamy facing one of his greatest coaching challenges in NRL career

Despite spending the last half decade professing that every season will be his last, Craig Bellamy has still kept Father Time pinned down inside his own 20m zone.

But after finding himself amid an unprecedented crescendo of headaches at the worst possible time of year, has the Storm mastermind gone one set too many?

As per usual, Bellamy’s Melbourne will enter the 2025 final series from their mortgaged position in the top four armed with a god-given double-chance and twin home finals.

But despite moonwalking blindfolded in to another finals campaign as one of the premiership favourites, the club’s typical scent of ambush has been drowned by the stench of the coach’s stress patches.

Not only has the Storm rounded off its uncharacteristically scruffy season with its first back-to-back losses in two and a half years, Bellamy is now looking for an answer to the indefinite loss of star halfback Jahrome Hughes after gambling on an early return from injury for the Dally M Medalist only to come up shirtless.

Add the omission of the scintillating yet weirdly out-of-sorts Ryan Papenhuyzen, Shawn Blore’s fractured larynx and the season-ending suspension to transient standover man Nelson Asofa-Solomona, and not only has the coach got a spine that needs reintroducing, he’s also relying on a weakened pack that was already getting smoked and shredded like deli-prepped hock.

But this is far from the nastiest canker sore Bellamy is sporting.

In addition to his squad issues, the overriding concern for Melbourne’s mentor is his side’s discipline, ball control and goal line defence, and how all three have decayed before his eyes like a school bag banana.

Of course, conceding a cricket score isn’t a rare catastrophe for most NRL sides. It can be an off day, an unlucky chain of events, or in Newcastle’s case, just another Saturday.

But when it’s the Storm’s Soviet-esque defence shipping 70 across two losses to the Roosters and Brisbane, it can grind Bellamy’s beans so profoundly that he accused his charges of having an attitude that “stinks.”

Add 40 missed tackles against the Chooks and 14 errors against the Broncos for a 71% completion rate, it’s suddenly not just a side lacking care, but one that also couldn’t catch a cold sore in a nightclub.

As we know, all Bellamy Storm sides - whether the 2020 version (flamboyant), 2012 (robotic) or 2009 (illegal) - have been established on a bedrock of punishing defence and an encyclopedia of dark arts written in lemon juice.

But strip the Storm of these powers and there’s only so many times they can save their own backsides by kicking high to Xavier Coates’ corner.

Worse again, it’s a problem Bellamy would usually nip in the bud by reverting to simplicity, or by just discharging a tirade at his players so potent it can be felt in the fifth dimension.

But despite this reputation as a tactician with the brain of a nuclear physicist - the operative word being ‘nuclear’- not even chemically peeling strips off his players is eliciting a response anymore.

Nowadays the coach’s radioactive sprays have become so commonplace there’s a rain gauge in the sheds- and they’ve lost their impact so noticeably it’s starting to show in his unflappable public demeanour.

Even admitting he was “pissed off” after the Broncos trouncing, Bellamy also exhibited rare bile on the liver when he snapped shirtily at questions about Coates’ height advantage when earning penalties for being tackled in the air.

If his verbal napalm isn’t having an effect anymore - even after widening the blast radius to include the press - does this mean modern footy’s finest coach has finally exhausted his magic dust?

Of course, with Harry Grant returning, Eliesa Katoa in kaleidoscopic form, Cameron Munster at the helm and two generous chances to stuff this whole thing up, it’s not all bleak for the Victorian club.

The side has been drawn in week one against the equally under-confident Bulldogs, a team with an offence that plays like it’s been spun around five times and is simply trying to walk in the right direction.

And with the competition wide open thanks to a top eight full of wildcards and untested certs, who would be sincerely surprised in four weeks time if Bellamy is again being showered in plaudits and a bucket of blue Gatorade?

As a veteran coach perennially marooned between coaching and retirement, a premiership is much better than another canker sore.