The second week of March is not the time to be out on the footballing ledge. A tardy start can actually be beneficial in the long run. It means you’re not being picked apart and copied. You want to be popping in early spring, not in the first fortnight of autumn.
But that’s probably scant consolation at Carlton right now. On the Richter scale of scenarios heading into round one, coughing up a 41-point lead to last year’s wooden spooners was at Krakatoan levels. The encouraging practice match form meant little when senior players were dropping chest marks, when kicks were sliding off the boot at right angles, and when a thoroughbred midfielder who’d garnered 45 Brownlow Medal votes last year was rucking against a draft horse.
It has been called one of footy’s biggest upsets this century, a Buster Douglas toppling Mike Tyson-type shock. But there were distress signals at Carlton all summer. Throughout the Michael Voss-era, Carlton has been a stable and well-run club. Luke Sayers’ compromised social media account might have been unforeseeable. But suddenly the new president, a JP Morgan executive who lives in Sydney, was being heckled at the AGM, accused of running a communist organisation. And suddenly the Age’s football reporter Jake Niall was going back over the old Carlton. The Carlton that buried scandals. The Carlton with the messiah complex. The Carlton that tried to buy its way out of trouble. The Carlton that would have seriously considered sacking the coach after a loss like last week’s to Richmond.
Then there are the injuries. Every club gets them, and it’s not as though Carlton’s injury list could get any worse than last year. But Nic Newman was exactly the sort of player they needed on Thursday night – an excellent kick, a sure pair of hands, a loud voice and a cool head. Jacob Weitering aside, the Blues were a shambles in defence without Newman.
The other was Jagga Smith. They gave up so much to land him. Most fans had never seen him play a full game but the clips were enough – his lateral movement, his ability to draw and fake, the way he snakes and skates out of congestion. Only the true diehards would turn up to watch a scratch match with a foul northerly blowing on a Saturday morning. But Blues fans gave him a generous round of applause for his first touch and were beside themselves with his blind pirouette. His injury seemed like blip – a bump on the knee and nothing to worry about. When the news of a torn ACL came through, it knocked the stuffing out of the club.
There are other things that sat uneasily too. One was the trading out Matt Kennedy. A tough, reliable, “deploy where required” player who was popular with supporters. He’d just become a new dad and dashed to the Gabba for the elimination final, where he was swiftly subbed off. He sat on the bench, murder in his eyes. Naturally, he was excellent in his first game for the Western Bulldogs.
And then there’s the coach. Voss, like so many footy people who travel to America and do leadership courses in the off-season, talks a lot about continuous improvement. “Vossy’s massive on something called Kaizen, which is just about incremental growth every single day and coming in with a mindset to get better,” Orazio Fantasia said earlier this year. “If we’re following that process and making sure we’re getting better every day with how we want to play and how we want to defend, the outcome and the results will take care of themselves.”
Indeed, Voss’s comments on this team often come back to a central theme, to what is almost a belief system – if we keep fronting up, if we keep “pounding the rock”, then eventually we’ll break through, and eventually our time will come. The way they play reflects this. It’s all pretty simple – win the stoppages, work their backsides off, crash and bang and get it in as quickly and efficiently as possible. When they’re in that mood, and when they have a clean bill of health, they’re a magnificent team. When they’re like that, it resembles how footy was played in Voss’s day – when you smashed teams in the midfield, when you built from the spine out, when success was a matter of talent and will, not necessarily system and smarts.
But increasingly, that’s not how successful teams operate. Increasingly, football is about speed and precision off half-back, about high-quality, high-pressure hybrid forwards, about shifting opposition team defences with angle-changing kicks – areas where Voss’s teams have never really excelled.
“Pound the rock,” Voss told his players at the John Nicholls Medal count last year. “Keep swinging. One strike at a time.” That’s the Voss way. That’s how he played. That’s how he apprehends alleged car thieves. And that’s how he coaches. But it’s a blunt approach, one assumes that the list is sound, that the gameplan holds up and that all that’s needed is luck, patience and persistence. His challenge now is to demonstrate there is more to his coaching than that; that he can manipulate a game, that he can stem a tide, that he can make the opposition play wrong handed. If he can’t, then 2025 will quickly become another swing and a miss.
