collingwoodfootballclub - by Joe Blogg

DAKS BACK?!

February 7th 2007 21:31

I can play Round 1 - Pie Alan Didak
08 February 2007 Herald-Sun
Mike Sheahan

THEY said Alan Didak wouldn't play until mid-season after his knee reconstruction; he says he might play Round 1.

The Collingwood star, operated on in September, is months ahead of schedule and expected back by Round 4 at the latest.

"Every time I walk past (coach) Mick (Malthouse), I say, 'I could be ready for Round 1', and there's a bit of a smile," Didak said yesterday.

"In the past couple of weeks, I've improved a month-and-a-half, if you know what I mean."

Collingwood chief executive Greg Swann was confident the 2006 club champion and All-Australian would be ready to face the Kangaroos at the MCG on March 31.

Football operations manager Geoff Walsh was slightly more conservative, predicting any time up to Round 4.

Didak said his surgeon Julian Feller had been pleased with his progress at their most recent appointment two weeks ago.

"Everyone's pretty happy with the way I'm going," Didak said. "Round 1 would be great.

"If I keep going the way I am, there's obviously a good chance."

He conceded it would be tight.

"I haven't done any lateral movement yet, and that's vital to my game," Didak said.

"They say it can take up to 12 months, but I've got short legs and a low centre of gravity. I might have a bit of an edge on a few other people."

Didak, 24 next week, suffered a 70 per cent tear to the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee against Fremantle in Round 15, yet still managed to complete the season.

"I went for a mark against, I think it was Steven Dodd, and I stuck my leg out . . . and heard a little crunch," he said.

"It just kept getting sorer and sorer. By the Friday, it was fine and then I'd play again."

The full extent of the damage wasn't known until a planned post-season clean-up, when he woke to find he needed major repair work a fortnight later.

The leg withered after the two procedures, but Didak is back to his playing weight of 83-84kg.

Asked about possible psychological scarring, he said: "The good thing for me is that I kept playing (eight games) with it, and didn't know how bad it was at the time.

"If I think I'm right and the medical people are happy, I'll play Round 1, but I won't put any extra pressure on myself."

Whatever the eventual return date, it promises to be at least two months ahead of the most optimistic assessment of three months ago.

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Pie's memories of Caracella

February 4th 2007 22:05

03 February 2007 Herald-Sun
Gareth Trickey

COLLINGWOOD rookie John Anthony feared the worst when his head collided with a teammate's hip at training on Wednesday.

The 2005 draft pick, who bruised his neck in the collision, said he thought of fellow Magpie Blake Caracella's career-ending neck injury as he lay on the ground waiting for an ambulance to arrive.

"It was a bit of a scare when I first went down," Anthony said.

"I just lay still and waited for the ambulance. I was worried at first but I knew it wasn't as serious as Blake's injury because I could move all my hands and had no tingling in my hands or feet."

Anthony, who is expected to be discharged from hospital this weekend, will spend the next three weeks in a neck brace and is tipped to be sidelined for a month.

Doctors yesterday granted Anthony leave to watch Collingwood's intraclub game at Gosch's Paddock.

The 19-year-old Magpie said tests revealed no major spinal damage, but doctors were taking extra precautions because the bruising was in a sensitive area.

"I was worried at first, but when the CT scan, X-ray, MRI all came through clear I felt fine and I'm certainly not worried now," he said.

"The injury isn't going to do any damage to my future career."

Anthony, who is yet to play a senior game, will miss the Magpies' first NAB Cup game against the Kangaroos on February 23 at Carrara.

The young defender said a difficult month lay ahead of him, but he remained philosophical.

"Any footballer that gets injured wants to be out there with the team," Anthony said.

"But injuries are part of the game, you've got to get used to it."

Injured teammate James Clement's recovery is ahead of schedule.

The two-time best and fairest winner fractured a bone in his foot last month, but is already joining teammates for kicking and running drills and is expected to return to full training next week.

Ruckman Josh Fraser is also expected to commence full training next week after minor surgery to his knee.

Onballer Brodie Holland sat out yesterday's intraclub match and has been working through a revised training program because of his delayed start to the season.

Holland was handed a six-game suspension for charging Bulldog Brett Montgomery in last year's elimination final.

The revised pre-season program is aimed at ensuring he is fit and ready for Round 7.

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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.

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