Carlton plays fans for mugs by masking woes with corporate claptrap

The Guardian

3 days ago

'If you start listening to the fans,' Wayne Bennett once said, 'it won't be long before you're sitting next to them.' Indeed, if you're running a high-profile sporting organisation, it usually pays to block out the noise. If Brendon Gale had heeded the advice of Richmond Twitter following their three elimination final losses, the club would be in ashes. There's no way Chris Scott would be coaching Geelong today if the club had acted on the criticism of him following the 2019 and 2021 preliminary finals.
But there's a fine line between not listening to the fans and playing them for mugs. So much of the messaging coming out of Carlton right now makes a mockery of what the supporters can clearly see and what the club continues to mask with corporate claptrap.
For a start, the fans deserve much better than what the general manager of football, Brad Lloyd, has served up in the last fortnight. Following the North Melbourne loss, he gave 10 minutes of banalities – 'Vossy's a wonderful person, he's working hard, everyone's working hard' – none of which is in dispute. Last Saturday, he was rattling off phrases like 'strong connections', 'strong feedback' and 'safe environments', the sort of language best reserved for the annual report, not for placating angry supporters.
The coach is more of a straight talker but what he's saying doesn't marry up with what we're seeing. His press conferences have been a mix of LinkedIn jargon and Champion Data cherrypicking. He insists their numbers are good and says their contested game is the envy of the competition.
In many ways, Michael Voss is to be admired for the way he has conducted himself this year. It takes an abnormally even temperament to front the media after losses like those against Richmond, North Melbourne and Port Adelaide and still manage to find positives. As senior coach, he has to be the last to yield. What's he supposed to do, shrug his shoulders and say his team's no good? No, he's going to keep fighting until they drag him out of there on a trestle table. But resilience can sometimes stray into delusion, into obstinance and into job preservation. There's a reluctance to deviate from being a 'contest and clearance team', and a refusal to accept that the one-dimensional gameplan has worn the senior players down and set them up to fail.
The Carlton fanbase is incredibly frustrated. They sat through the worst of the Malthouse and Bolton era. They watched a 16-man GWS beat them at the Docklands – as low a day as the club's ever had. They watched Port Adelaide put 19 goals in a row on them in 2021. They were there for the 'Collingwood have closed like the Grim Reaper' game. They've seen this team built brick by brick, high draft pick by high draft pick. They've been assured by the club and the wider commentariat that all the pieces were in place, and that their time was now.
And then, this. All that for this. They've heard many journalists, pokie grubs and bitter former coaches blame the senior players. Some are even pointing the finger at the captain, a player who's shouldered more responsibility than any footballer I've ever seen, a player who's wheeled out like a factional hack every time the team plateaus. They've seen the footy media give the senior coach an incredibly soft ride, the sort of luxury afforded to a coach with an 'aura'.
Blame it on the sins of Carlton past. But it means there's a kind of overcompensation of caution, a reluctance for the club and the media to acknowledge what's really at play here – that the Carlton coaching panel has not demonstrated it has the tactical acumen to compete with the top teams, to confound opposition coaches, to change within seasons, and to implement a gameplan that brings out the best in its players.
They can talk 'alignment' and 'values' and 'contest and clearance' until they're blue in the face. Facts trump waffle. The facts are this team has won eight of its past 24 games. It's beaten one top eight team in that period. Its players are tired, hesitant, slow, terrified of making mistakes and wedded to an obsolete gameplan. Its leaders are like Leslie Nielsen in front of the exploding fireworks factory. Ignore the performative talkback tantrums, the graffiti, the exhortations for greater effort, the calls to trade Cripps. Most sane and sober Carlton fans think major change is warranted, including the senior coach. This might be one of those rare occasions where it pays to listen to them.
This is just the sixth time a round of matches has been split down the middle in this way since GWS Giants joined the competition in 2012.
When Leigh Matthews unexpectedly resigned as Brisbane senior coach in 2008, Voss was thrust into the hot seat. His first year was a good one, and with the prime minister watching on, they met Carlton in an elimination final. Both clubs were far from their peak but there were some champions running around that night, including Chris Judd, Jonathan Brown and Simon Black. Brown played with a fractured eye socket, but still managed four goals. Daniel Bradshaw kicked the final two goals of the game to sink the Blues. Kevin Rudd, who was running the country on about two hours of sleep a night at that point, and who had hitherto shown no interest in football, was perhaps the most animated he'd been in his entire time in office.
Brisbane traded heavily and disastrously the following season, picking up Brendan Fevola, whose life was in disarray at that stage. They won their first four games, but fell in a heap thereafter. Voss was sacked in 2013, despite winning five of his last seven games, including one of the most extraordinary comebacks in the history of the game against Geelong.
The midfielder will be remembered for his match-winning goal in the 2018 grand final against Collingwood, as he retires after 165 matches. Sheed was overlooked by the Magpies in the 2013 draft but joined the Eagles with the next pick.
'The privilege of being at a big club is that you're relevant, there's people who talk about our club a lot, and I think you can't hide from that,' Carlton's Harry McKay told AFL 360. 'And when a big club isn't playing great footy, that's kind of expected.
'[It] doesn't change too much what we do day to day … We talk about what we can control and what we value inside the four walls, and if we were riding the rollercoaster of narratives every week, then it's a tough way to go about it.'
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McKay, who is out injured, said he was finding navigating Carlton's troubles this year even more disappointing because of how stable things felt inside the club compared to some of the other rough periods he'd experience in his 10 years at the club.
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