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Footy can turn quickly. One minute you’re seven goals up at the MCG. The next minute Kozzy Pickett is coming at you with bazookas under both armpits. One minute you’re walking into training with the snout of a microphone in your face, as you apologise for yet another fade out, and yet another coach sacking. The next minute you’re in a circle while one of your teammates belts out the club song on a harmonica.
Carlton really should have beaten GWS Giants by more on the weekend. In the first quarter, they kicked just one goal from 18 inside 50s. They squandered a lot of chances and had the worst of the whistle. But it was exactly the sort of game they would have found a way to lose two months ago.
The Giants are a team that can slam on a lot of goals in a short amount of time. They want a fast and free game. Under former coach Michael Voss, you suspect the Blues would have given them one.
So what has changed? Even when things were especially dire under Voss, there were still signs of a good football team waiting to burst out. The Blues would bring the pressure, the contest and the energy. But when the inevitable push came from the opposition, they’d be shoved aside.
There were a couple of passages that demonstrated a marked shift. One was late in the third quarter, when the Blues’ four goal lead had been whittled down, and the ledger was square. The four kicks that led to Sam Walsh’s after-the-siren goal were all low, 25 metre, angle-changing kicks to players making space. Two months ago, they would have been nine irons. And two months ago, Walsh would have sprayed the set shot.
Then, with GWS still pressing in the final term, there was the buildup to Matt Cottrell’s second goal. It has been a long time since a Carlton side has had that kind of fluency and cohesion, that ability to calmly and cleverly transition the ball from one end of the ground to the other. Billy Wilson, in his 10th game, assumed kick-in responsibilities and booted long to neutral territory. Talor Byrne won the bobbling ball, and in about four seconds they solved problems on the hop, found the right option every time and circumvented what was frankly a pretty lax Giants team defence.
Indeed, in press conferences, coach Adam Kingsley speaks like a reiki practitioner. In team huddles however, he berates them like Rostov in the film The Club. He went hard again at three-quarter time, but his team didn’t respond at all as the Blues defeated the Giants 12.16 (88) to 9.11 (65).
Interim coach Josh Fraser’s Blues really aren’t that different to Voss’s. Walsh is fitter, Patrick Cripps is freer, their batch of kids are a few months older, and George Hewett and Blake Acres aren’t kicking the dew off the grass in the reserves. They still prioritise contest and defence. Fraser still talks about connection and effort. He still talks like a stand-in coach. He talks of building depth and handing over a vastly improved team to whoever gets the job next.
But there are changes. Every time GWS threatened on the weekend, Carlton were able to take the sting out of the game for three or four minutes. In similar scenarios earlier in the season, they’d completely lose their bearings. Under Fraser, they’ve been able and willing to reach an emotional pitch they weren’t under Voss. A weight has been lifted, and a season that could easily have been meandering and meaningless is now very much alive.
It’s too easy in such circumstances to conclude that Voss was the problem all along, and that the new bloke is some sort of coaching genius. It’s never that simple of course. Voss often spoke of the stonecutters credo – the heavily borrowed sporting philosophy of hammering away and not being discouraged when the cracks don’t immediately appear. It will eventually spilt open, he kept telling us, his players and himself. His problem is that it’s happened too late. The rock split at half-time of a game where he’d already checked out.
Voss recently returned from holiday straight into a job with Fox Footy. And on and on it goes. He was asked whether he’d consider a return to coaching. “No,” he said.
It leaves Carlton with an unusually difficult decision to make. The Blues have won five from five matches under Fraser. Yet he insists that he doesn’t want to be a senior coach. Carlton has long looked for an outsider to save them – Pagan, Judd, Malthouse, Voss, Wright. Fraser doesn’t look and sound like a saviour. Compare him to James Hird, who basically interviewed for a senior coaching job on live television. Compare him to Dean Solomon, the current favourite for the Essendon job whose record as an interim coach is zero wins from six games.
Fraser isn’t selling anything, angling for anything, or promising anything. His team keeps winning. He’s no saviour, but he’s a hell of a locum.
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