After another terrible loss, Carlton is a club in tatters with the coach, captain and CEO staring down the barrel of frustrated fans and angry “assassins”When Brian Cook was CEO of Geelong, he had a folder on his computer for all the vicious emails he received from fans, coterie groups, and board members. He labelled it “Assassins”.It’s easy to forget just how dire things were at the Cats when he took over. The coach and captain walked out. The team was useless and the club had no money. Garry Hocking was forced to change his name by deed poll to ‘Whiskas’ to rustle up 100 grand. “The organisation had no structures, no layers,” Cook told writer James Button. “It was...
The Blues were seconds away from securing a finals berth but there is little time to dwell on the club’s latest episode of anguishFootball, the historian Manning Clark once said, is “an emotional bath of agony and ecstasy”. For Carlton, this week’s bath was run on Thursday night, with a two-hour soliloquy from a crack QC. It bubbled over 48 hours later, at the City Road end of the MCG, with the son of a stand-up comedian sinking them at the death. The Blues had it in the bag. They were a dozen seconds away from finals. “Did you see that?!” Luke Darcy kept squawking in the commentary box. We’ve been seeing it for a quarter of a century, the...
Ken Hinkley’s boys should have beaten Carlton. They blew it, and are now up against it to salvage their seasonPort Adelaide simply had to win yesterday. Lose, and it was curtains for season 2022. The task before them was enormous. The Blues have an abundance of talent and play the MCG very well indeed. They were smarting after dropping a game to Gold Coast. And they were desperate to get one back on Port, after their Adelaide Oval humiliation last year. That was the day David Teague’s papers were stamped. There were plenty of Port players in downhill mode – slaloming into easy goals, dishing out the lip. Michael Voss, who was wearing a Port polo top that day, would...
The undefeated Blues have a new coach, a watchable brand of football, a captain in fine fettle and a pretty soft draw aheadDavid Foster Wallace once wrote that Michael Chang had the unhappiest face he had seen outside of a graduate creative writing program. A few years ago, I was on a city loop train when a group of Carlton fans alighted at Spencer St. Suddenly, I was confronted with an entire carriage of Michael Changs. I have never seen a more miserable-looking bunch. GWS were basically playing with 16 men and were 100 points up with a quarter to run. The Carlton fans had seen enough. Their team had broken them. They had lost faith, hope, interest and, in...