A LOVE STORY.............
February 3rd 2007 21:36
Guess that's why they call them the Blues
February 4, 2007
It wasn't so long ago that the Carlton Football Club was held up to be something strong, confident, powerful and rich. Its arrogance was accepted by the football world as a given because it had money, history, cache and drawing power. On-field success was never far away and, before the rules changed, its well-thumbed chequebook was ever at the ready to secure the nation's best players. It was the club of Sir Robert Menzies, Malcolm Fraser and Manning Clark, and its fortunes - very often good - were dissected in boardrooms across Melbourne.
So how must Carlton people have felt late last year when their chief goalkicker and media wideboy Brendan Fevola was filmed putting an Irish barman in a headlock, then separating from his wife amid allegations of an affair with a model, just weeks after coach Denis Pagan had said Fevola had "grown enormously, he really has. He's turned into a real role model"?
How must they have felt when rebel director Lauraine Diggins said last week, "Two AFL clubs have been given a Smorgon as a president. One of them is doing a great job. Unfortunately, it seems Carlton got the wrong one"?
The TV ratings season hasn't started, but the soap opera that is the Carlton Football Club has made for painful off-season watching for its diminishing number of members. This is where Carlton is at: it has "won" three of the last five wooden spoons for finishing at the bottom of the ladder; it has a debt of about $8.5 million ($7 million owed to National Australia Bank); its board is at war; the coaches of its senior team and its aligned VFL club Northern Bullants team (Pagan and former Carlton player Barry Mitchell) don't speak; and now one of its directors, Marcus Rose, has been reported calling the club a "financial basket case", in a "perilous position" worse than Fitzroy's before that club was liquidated. He added that Carlton was not guaranteed against a move interstate. (The club denied this and Rose resigned the next day.)
Rival supporters who have spent decades in fear of the Blues' expensive champions now toggle between three emotions: one is schadenfreude, a German word suggesting pleasure at someone else's pain. Another is a relatively new one: pity. And the last is a different kind of fear - that Carlton won't survive, because even the most rabid Blues hater would agree that the competition needs a Carlton, and one not anchored to the bottom of the table.
What happened to the old navy blues? How did the Carlton brand become so tarnished? And what are the team's hopes for resuscitation?
The club may this week be able to draw a line over its past and start anew. A vote in the club election on Friday night dumped Graham Smorgon from the presidency after a turbulent 12 months. Lauraine Diggins, a Smorgon adversary who, running as an independent, was also defeated, said the club's demise had been devastating.
While it is time to try to heal itself, it's fruitful for the club to acknowledge where it went wrong.
"At Carlton, there's always been a little bit of arrogance . . . that got out of hand in the '80s and '90s and people lost their way," says Diggins. "There's a strength in arrogance but a weakness when that arrogance means you lose your way. The arrogance stopped the club reassessing itself and realising it was in a slide."
Diggins believes Carlton was slow to understand and adapt to a new football and business environment, with the national draft system rendering obsolete the previous certainty that money can buy success. "Carlton was a club known for buying players," she says. "But things were changing. The AFL had rules and regulations that brought the game to a new level playing field, so you needed to build the club from within."
Off the field, administrators during the 19-year John Elliott regime were doing a different type of building, pouring millions into new stands and other redevelopments at a ground the club would vacate just a few years later.
Then, later, it was Carlton's perceived wealth and arrogance that cost it more money when its salary cap rorting was discovered in 2002. "Most people thought Carlton was a viable and financially strong club, whereas there were big cracks in the wall," says Diggins. "Essendon and Melbourne dealt with their (rorting charges) but Carlton snubbed its nose at the AFL and said, 'Not us'. So when the punishment came, it was ferocious. I think the AFL believed a million-dollar fine wouldn't damage us too much, but they didn't realise the parlous state of the player list. The fine and the removal of draft picks for two years was devastating."
CARLTON'S arrogance had caught up with it. The club had been out of touch for a decade. Flush from its 1995 premiership, while its fierce cross-town rival and then football powerhouse Essendon was trading average players for early draft picks, Carlton was trading early draft picks for average players. Relinquishing early picks for non-performing cattle was short-termism that patched up its ageing premiership team, rather than restocking with youngsters. It left Carlton's playing stocks in diabolical shape.
By now, Carlton was lumbered with debt and a poor list of players. This did not improve when the AFL effectively removed the Blues from the 2002 and 2003 drafts. For a club with a list that was yet to reach its nadir, this was tantamount to kicking an unconscious man in the head.
Add to this a stubborn refusal to adjust to the ways of the national league and crippling factionalism on the board, and the club was a timebomb. Says Diggins: "We didn't understand what the new game was all about. Effectively, Carlton went from a powerhouse to a club that was out of touch."
When the new board arrived under Ian Collins in late 2002, they found the problems at the club were ingrained. It had inherited several lucrative long-term contracts such as those with coach Pagan and one-time superstar Anthony Koutoufides. They were paying money they couldn't afford on contracts from which they couldn't extricate themselves. Carlton had become a two-bob millionaire, and it was trapped.
Much of the blame for Carlton's woes was once sheeted home to Elliott, but today he inspires a mixed scorecard from Blues supporters. While the first half of his tenure is regarded as successful, it was the last years in which the big debt, the poor player list and the confidence that had been knocked out of the once-proud club all bit hard. "It's all nonsense," Elliott says to the charge. "I was there 19 years. In that time, we played 13 finals, five grand finals and won two premierships (1987 and 1995), and we made money every year except the last one."
Elliott says that after his departure, the club's decision to leave Optus Oval for home games at Telstra Dome was poor. Elliott believes the club should have played four interstate games at Optus and the rest at the MCG. "(Leaving Optus) ruined the Carlton social club. The club lost the catering rights, the signage. If they'd gone to the MCG, they could have had access to the ground's major social club. I worked out the club lost $3 million in income just by going to Telstra Dome." (There are doubts about Elliott's claim about the social club, given that as MCG tenants Collingwood has contractual rights for access to the club for its home and away games and for finals.)
ELLIOTT says it has been painful to watch Carlton's demise, and he scorned Smorgon's proposal announced last week for a $106 million redevelopment of Princes Park, which would involve the demolition of the $8.5 million Legends Stand. "The brand of Carlton has been eroded dramatically," Elliott says. "Here they are promoting a $100 million redevelopment of a ground they are not going to play on. There's no control in the place, no authority, they all leak, they all squabble."
Ted Hopkins played 29 games with the Blues, including the famous 1970 grand final in which he kicked a match-winning four goals. Hopkins agrees with Diggins, saying Carlton refused to join the AFL-imposed new order. "All of a sudden, the game got democratic, where success now depended on how you used your brain," he says.
Hopkins has two questions: can they acquire the smarts to work in the modern world and have they got the patience?
"Look at St Kilda, Hawthorn, Kangaroos, Geelong . . . they've endured years of disappointment. They have had to learn patience. Carlton people are used to driving around in a Mercedes Benz. Can they adapt to driving around in a 1987 Commodore? Can they learn to modernise, given patience is not the way of life for a Carlton supporter?"
Patience is what supporters seem to be running out of. Former Liberal senator Jim Short witnessed his first Carlton game in 1949, the grand final loss to Essendon. After six decades of following the Blues, Short is restless about Carlton's yoyo-ing performances. "What I find incomprehensible is the inconsistency of the team. They can play a terrific game of football one week and the next they will look like struggling schoolboys. There is clearly an endemic problem within the club that you see on the field. As a passionate supporter, I'm really sick of the week-to-week excuses."
Commentator and writer Tim Lane traces some of the club's demise to a lack of succession planning after Elliott. "Carlton had no plan, didn't think beyond Elliott. He probably fostered that but the club let him do it. So at the end of the Elliott era, there was this shocking black hole and a board couldn't be found that would take a difficult situation by the scruff of the neck. (Cricket writer) Mike Coward used to say of World Series Cricket that after revolution comes chaos and disarray. That's what happened in cricket, and that's what we're seeing at Carlton, to an extent. I think Elliott's heart was in the right place and he probably only knew one way, and in many ways it was effective but it did create this power vacuum."
Carlton wasn't pitied or in crisis when David Parkin coached them in 1981-85 and 1991-2000. Out of a desire to help, Parkin late last year initiated the Spirit of Carlton, a group of ex-coaches and players - including Geoff Southby, Ken Hunter, David Rhys-Jones, Robert Walls and Alex Jesaulenko - to raise money and mentor players, drawing from the Richmond Football Club's example, which Parkin admired.
While Parkin is confident the club can be competitive within a couple of years, Diggins sounds a warning. "If we don't get it right very quickly, the rest of the clubs may get away from Carlton," she says. "If you look now, there is a clear gap between Carlton and Collingwood, our greatest rival."
Diggins sees lessons in Collingwood's Eddie McGuire-led revival. "Five or six years ago, before McGuire took over, there was in-fighting at Collingwood, their finances were in disarray, but they turned it around to become a powerhouse financially."
Meanwhile, the Blues must try to be patient. There's a photograph of Sir Robert Menzies watching a Carlton game while sitting in a Rolls Royce on a special platform. It's an image that shows how long the club has enjoyed its silvertail powerbase. It seems, like the 1995 premiership, a long time ago.
February 4, 2007
It wasn't so long ago that the Carlton Football Club was held up to be something strong, confident, powerful and rich. Its arrogance was accepted by the football world as a given because it had money, history, cache and drawing power. On-field success was never far away and, before the rules changed, its well-thumbed chequebook was ever at the ready to secure the nation's best players. It was the club of Sir Robert Menzies, Malcolm Fraser and Manning Clark, and its fortunes - very often good - were dissected in boardrooms across Melbourne.
So how must Carlton people have felt late last year when their chief goalkicker and media wideboy Brendan Fevola was filmed putting an Irish barman in a headlock, then separating from his wife amid allegations of an affair with a model, just weeks after coach Denis Pagan had said Fevola had "grown enormously, he really has. He's turned into a real role model"?
How must they have felt when rebel director Lauraine Diggins said last week, "Two AFL clubs have been given a Smorgon as a president. One of them is doing a great job. Unfortunately, it seems Carlton got the wrong one"?
The TV ratings season hasn't started, but the soap opera that is the Carlton Football Club has made for painful off-season watching for its diminishing number of members. This is where Carlton is at: it has "won" three of the last five wooden spoons for finishing at the bottom of the ladder; it has a debt of about $8.5 million ($7 million owed to National Australia Bank); its board is at war; the coaches of its senior team and its aligned VFL club Northern Bullants team (Pagan and former Carlton player Barry Mitchell) don't speak; and now one of its directors, Marcus Rose, has been reported calling the club a "financial basket case", in a "perilous position" worse than Fitzroy's before that club was liquidated. He added that Carlton was not guaranteed against a move interstate. (The club denied this and Rose resigned the next day.)
Rival supporters who have spent decades in fear of the Blues' expensive champions now toggle between three emotions: one is schadenfreude, a German word suggesting pleasure at someone else's pain. Another is a relatively new one: pity. And the last is a different kind of fear - that Carlton won't survive, because even the most rabid Blues hater would agree that the competition needs a Carlton, and one not anchored to the bottom of the table.
What happened to the old navy blues? How did the Carlton brand become so tarnished? And what are the team's hopes for resuscitation?
The club may this week be able to draw a line over its past and start anew. A vote in the club election on Friday night dumped Graham Smorgon from the presidency after a turbulent 12 months. Lauraine Diggins, a Smorgon adversary who, running as an independent, was also defeated, said the club's demise had been devastating.
While it is time to try to heal itself, it's fruitful for the club to acknowledge where it went wrong.
"At Carlton, there's always been a little bit of arrogance . . . that got out of hand in the '80s and '90s and people lost their way," says Diggins. "There's a strength in arrogance but a weakness when that arrogance means you lose your way. The arrogance stopped the club reassessing itself and realising it was in a slide."
Diggins believes Carlton was slow to understand and adapt to a new football and business environment, with the national draft system rendering obsolete the previous certainty that money can buy success. "Carlton was a club known for buying players," she says. "But things were changing. The AFL had rules and regulations that brought the game to a new level playing field, so you needed to build the club from within."
Off the field, administrators during the 19-year John Elliott regime were doing a different type of building, pouring millions into new stands and other redevelopments at a ground the club would vacate just a few years later.
Then, later, it was Carlton's perceived wealth and arrogance that cost it more money when its salary cap rorting was discovered in 2002. "Most people thought Carlton was a viable and financially strong club, whereas there were big cracks in the wall," says Diggins. "Essendon and Melbourne dealt with their (rorting charges) but Carlton snubbed its nose at the AFL and said, 'Not us'. So when the punishment came, it was ferocious. I think the AFL believed a million-dollar fine wouldn't damage us too much, but they didn't realise the parlous state of the player list. The fine and the removal of draft picks for two years was devastating."
CARLTON'S arrogance had caught up with it. The club had been out of touch for a decade. Flush from its 1995 premiership, while its fierce cross-town rival and then football powerhouse Essendon was trading average players for early draft picks, Carlton was trading early draft picks for average players. Relinquishing early picks for non-performing cattle was short-termism that patched up its ageing premiership team, rather than restocking with youngsters. It left Carlton's playing stocks in diabolical shape.
By now, Carlton was lumbered with debt and a poor list of players. This did not improve when the AFL effectively removed the Blues from the 2002 and 2003 drafts. For a club with a list that was yet to reach its nadir, this was tantamount to kicking an unconscious man in the head.
Add to this a stubborn refusal to adjust to the ways of the national league and crippling factionalism on the board, and the club was a timebomb. Says Diggins: "We didn't understand what the new game was all about. Effectively, Carlton went from a powerhouse to a club that was out of touch."
When the new board arrived under Ian Collins in late 2002, they found the problems at the club were ingrained. It had inherited several lucrative long-term contracts such as those with coach Pagan and one-time superstar Anthony Koutoufides. They were paying money they couldn't afford on contracts from which they couldn't extricate themselves. Carlton had become a two-bob millionaire, and it was trapped.
Much of the blame for Carlton's woes was once sheeted home to Elliott, but today he inspires a mixed scorecard from Blues supporters. While the first half of his tenure is regarded as successful, it was the last years in which the big debt, the poor player list and the confidence that had been knocked out of the once-proud club all bit hard. "It's all nonsense," Elliott says to the charge. "I was there 19 years. In that time, we played 13 finals, five grand finals and won two premierships (1987 and 1995), and we made money every year except the last one."
Elliott says that after his departure, the club's decision to leave Optus Oval for home games at Telstra Dome was poor. Elliott believes the club should have played four interstate games at Optus and the rest at the MCG. "(Leaving Optus) ruined the Carlton social club. The club lost the catering rights, the signage. If they'd gone to the MCG, they could have had access to the ground's major social club. I worked out the club lost $3 million in income just by going to Telstra Dome." (There are doubts about Elliott's claim about the social club, given that as MCG tenants Collingwood has contractual rights for access to the club for its home and away games and for finals.)
ELLIOTT says it has been painful to watch Carlton's demise, and he scorned Smorgon's proposal announced last week for a $106 million redevelopment of Princes Park, which would involve the demolition of the $8.5 million Legends Stand. "The brand of Carlton has been eroded dramatically," Elliott says. "Here they are promoting a $100 million redevelopment of a ground they are not going to play on. There's no control in the place, no authority, they all leak, they all squabble."
Ted Hopkins played 29 games with the Blues, including the famous 1970 grand final in which he kicked a match-winning four goals. Hopkins agrees with Diggins, saying Carlton refused to join the AFL-imposed new order. "All of a sudden, the game got democratic, where success now depended on how you used your brain," he says.
Hopkins has two questions: can they acquire the smarts to work in the modern world and have they got the patience?
"Look at St Kilda, Hawthorn, Kangaroos, Geelong . . . they've endured years of disappointment. They have had to learn patience. Carlton people are used to driving around in a Mercedes Benz. Can they adapt to driving around in a 1987 Commodore? Can they learn to modernise, given patience is not the way of life for a Carlton supporter?"
Patience is what supporters seem to be running out of. Former Liberal senator Jim Short witnessed his first Carlton game in 1949, the grand final loss to Essendon. After six decades of following the Blues, Short is restless about Carlton's yoyo-ing performances. "What I find incomprehensible is the inconsistency of the team. They can play a terrific game of football one week and the next they will look like struggling schoolboys. There is clearly an endemic problem within the club that you see on the field. As a passionate supporter, I'm really sick of the week-to-week excuses."
Commentator and writer Tim Lane traces some of the club's demise to a lack of succession planning after Elliott. "Carlton had no plan, didn't think beyond Elliott. He probably fostered that but the club let him do it. So at the end of the Elliott era, there was this shocking black hole and a board couldn't be found that would take a difficult situation by the scruff of the neck. (Cricket writer) Mike Coward used to say of World Series Cricket that after revolution comes chaos and disarray. That's what happened in cricket, and that's what we're seeing at Carlton, to an extent. I think Elliott's heart was in the right place and he probably only knew one way, and in many ways it was effective but it did create this power vacuum."
Carlton wasn't pitied or in crisis when David Parkin coached them in 1981-85 and 1991-2000. Out of a desire to help, Parkin late last year initiated the Spirit of Carlton, a group of ex-coaches and players - including Geoff Southby, Ken Hunter, David Rhys-Jones, Robert Walls and Alex Jesaulenko - to raise money and mentor players, drawing from the Richmond Football Club's example, which Parkin admired.
While Parkin is confident the club can be competitive within a couple of years, Diggins sounds a warning. "If we don't get it right very quickly, the rest of the clubs may get away from Carlton," she says. "If you look now, there is a clear gap between Carlton and Collingwood, our greatest rival."
Diggins sees lessons in Collingwood's Eddie McGuire-led revival. "Five or six years ago, before McGuire took over, there was in-fighting at Collingwood, their finances were in disarray, but they turned it around to become a powerhouse financially."
Meanwhile, the Blues must try to be patient. There's a photograph of Sir Robert Menzies watching a Carlton game while sitting in a Rolls Royce on a special platform. It's an image that shows how long the club has enjoyed its silvertail powerbase. It seems, like the 1995 premiership, a long time ago.
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Comment by Joe Blogg
Joe Blogg's Blog
manchesterunited
collingwoodfootballclub
CARLTON supporters used to seem to enjoy being the object of rival clubs' hatred. But it's not as much fun being the object of ridicule. And by Friday night, they'd well and truly had enough.
The board election that ousted president Graham Smorgon and fellow director and nemesis Lauraine Diggins didn't just make a point, it was more like Peter Finch yelling out of the window in the classic movie Network: "We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it any more".
If the poor handling of a number of key issues, most notably the near-sacking of coach Denis Pagan for his assistant Barry Mitchell, hadn't rankled enough, the past couple of months were insufferable.
They were a soap opera-like catalogue of name-calling and insults when a club on its knees could afford it least, Smorgon and Diggins scratching at each others' throats. It was unedifying stuff, and as a result the leads in the melodrama have been dumped from the cast for Carlton's new production, which is shaping as a horror movie. Or pure comedy, if you're one of those rival club supporters queuing up to stick the boots in, which has been pretty apparent, and instructive, over the past week.
Football supporters have long memories, which was demonstrated last week when another now-former director Marcus Rose made comments casting the Blues as a potential Fitzroy.
If Rose was looking to elicit some public sympathy for Carlton's plight, he pulled the wrong rein.
Even the odd token show of support, such as Collingwood "personality" Joffa donning a Carlton jumper, was on the premise that the AFL needed its most hateable club alive and kicking.
And it's not just the depth of that hatred, but its basis, which is intriguing. The Fitzroy comparison certainly irked old Lions' supporters, who remember well the scant regard they received from Carlton as a co-tenant of Princes Park in the 1980s.
The Blues weren't likely to receive much compassion from the Kangaroos, still smarting from the then powerhouse's attempt to take over that club getting on for two decades ago.
Nor St Kilda, which at its lowest ebb back then was regularly treated with contempt by Carlton, as well as a dumping ground for Blues' players past their prime. And certainly not the Western Bulldogs, any reminder of former Carlton president John Elliott's "tragic history" swipe still enough to make Doggies' fans blood boil.
It was easy enough back then for Carlton to claim from a lofty perch that it was "premiership envy".
But the common denominator in all that loathing hasn't been the Blues' 16 flags, nor a cavalcade of stars over the years who have given plenty of pleasure to football fans beyond Princes Park, but the high-handed, ego-driven arrogance of those outside the playing arena who have continued to determine the club's culture as much as, if not more than, any on-field success.
Former president George Harris set the tone by rubbing Collingwood's noses in it after Carlton had just pipped the gallant Magpies in the 1979 grand final. Elliott made it a calling card.
It's a perception that has stuck, even five years into a spell of misery. And the Blues have hardly helped change the popular view.
Few would ever mention the name Stephen Kernahan and arrogance in the same breath, but the Blues' legend and vice-president only underscored his club's stereotype when he signed off an angry speech at Carlton's best and fairest last year with a dismissive: "We're Carlton and f--- the rest!"
Five months after that, the view has only been underscored by an off-season in which Carlton's "suits" have again dominated the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Not through pulling together, putting heads down and bums up and turning around a dire situation, but with blame games that have overshadowed any rays of hope Blues' fans might be able to take from an overhauled playing list, and some promising recruiting.
The focus is going to remain off the field for a while yet, certainly until Carlton decides on a president and makes more genuine attempts to get its board at least heading in the one direction.
Greg Lee and Stephen Moulton are the popular fancies to take over Smorgon's presidential role. Neither has anything like the profile of their predecessor, let alone the likes of Elliott or Harris, which might well be their greatest asset.
Even the most starry-eyed fans have realised that the glory days are long gone. But it's also time they realised the days of tub-thumping and hairy-chested corporate swagger are over, too.
If the Blues are ever to get out of their current trough, they'll need quiet diligence, a bit more introspection, and a lot more humility. It's no coincidence that those clubs most successful on the field in football's new era tend to be those from whose boardrooms and backrooms you hear the least.
But Carlton fans will only know that's even a possibility once they can start hearing about the feats of Bryce Gibbs, Marc Murphy and co. at least as often as they're hearing about the latest board subplot or outlandish statement concerning the club from someone who hasn't pulled on a boot.
Comment by Norm
Consumption Malfunction
Equal and Opposite
Arses and Elbows
Footy Power
ever thought of getting a blog?
We need to get Honest John on the board.
No Labour people please - Kim that means you.
I could never stand the arrogance - and it's still there.
Look, I'm not mad about footy - I love it but I'm not in it.
I reckon that some on-field improvement is on the way.
Us bluebaggers have to cop it sweet, we've been dishing it for yonks.
So keep it coming(grimacing sourly).
Norm
Comment by Joe Blogg
Joe Blogg's Blog
manchesterunited
collingwoodfootballclub
Football is football, sport is sport, work is work & life is life.
I'm not mad about broccoli but I'll still eat it.
It's all about perspective mate.
As for the baggers, if they keep accumulating #1 picks they're bound to improve.
The system they railed against for so long will ultimately be their saviour.
Mind you giving Pagan the lemonade & sars would bring automatic improvement.
But the 'myth' that was Carlton will never return.
Comment by Norm
Consumption Malfunction
Equal and Opposite
Arses and Elbows
Footy Power
All I ask for is a footy team to barrack for....in the comfort of my lounge room.
Ironic about the system, isn't it?
You're clearly mad on footy and football.
Madness is sanity, mate.
Comment by Joe Blogg
Joe Blogg's Blog
manchesterunited
collingwoodfootballclub
Me?
Collingwood has made me cross but I'd never let you nail me to it.
Comment by Fat Barb the Blue