Chris Dawes had a forgettable debut in red and blue Chris Dawes trudges off the ground a loser. CHRIS Dawes had been waiting six months for this day. Many had questioned what he was thinking, leaving premiership contender Collingwood for lowly Melbourne. While the amount of money in his bank account had a fair bit to do with it, there was also the theory that helping to create something new and exciting apparently appealed. Dawes would have arrived at the MCG pumped. This was the day he got to prove those doubters wrong. Thirty minutes into his career as a Melbourne player, if you had a pair of binoculars trained on him you would have probably picked up the following from Dawes: "What the f$%# was I thinking?" For the first 15 minutes the ball literally didn't go near him. And that wasn't his fault given the Demons had only managed a couple of scrappy inside 50m entries. At quarter-time of his first game Dawes had one handball to his name. What would have blown him away wasn't just the fact the Gold Coast were 33 points up and his team had managed just two points but the fact they'd hardly touched the ball. Remember Dawes is used to people called Scott Pendlebury and Dane Swan ramming it down his throat or in his vicinity around 20 plus times a quarter. Melbourne went inside 50m just seven times. It was an ugly stats sheet. Gold Coast led possessions 119-75 with a +13 advantage in contested, the tackles 17-8 and Gary Ablett was off the leash with 12 touches. Dawes finally saw some action at the five-minute mark of the second quarter when he marked and then drilled big man Max Gawn with an impressive 40m pass which resulted in his new club's first goal of the day. At halftime he was so embarassed that the ex-Pie premiership forward was urging his new teammates to get off the ground as quickly as possible. Clearly he didn't understand that this wasn't the worst of it. He hadn't been around long enough to understand it was just the entree. At three-quarter time Dawes could have been excused for thinking about how well those shares he'd invested some of his new cash in were going. By that time he'd had three kicks and three handballs, three inside 50s and two score assists. And Gold Coast's lead was 62. At the three-minute mark of the final term Dawes went on a long lead and as he took his third mark of the night the bronx cheers rang out from the small cluster of Melbourne supporters who'd bothered to turn up. It's something he's going to have to get used to because if he thought last night was bad, a peak at the draw will send him into cardiac arrest. The Demons face Richmond, Fremantle (at Subiaco), Hawthorn and Collingwood in the next month with Dawes' response likely to be similiar to his quarter-time statement: "What the ..."