That win over Essendon was not only the best of my AFL career, it was also the high point of Denis’ time at the club. He admitted as much when he told the press in his post-match conference, ‘It is by far the best thing I have experienced at Carlton.’ The scenes in the rooms after that game, when we were all hugging Denis and each other, suggested we were a team on the rise. Unfortunately for us and the coach, that victory—the greatest comeback in the club’s history—proved to be another false dawn. The following three months were nothing short of disastrous.
We lost six consecutive games after defeating Essendon. I was all over the place. Denis gave me a spray after I spent large periods of our round 5 game against the Brisbane Lions arguing with the umpires. And although I kicked six goals in a losing effort against St Kilda a week later, my conduct towards the umpires was questioned again. I was really frustrated during that fortnight, and it was the new hands-in-the-back rule that ticked me off the most. I kept trying to hold my ground by putting my hand on my opponent’s back, which didn’t involve any pushing, but the umpire would penalise me for that. It was ridiculous. Still, my behaviour was unacceptable and I knew it. The problem was that when I slipped into a negative mindset, I found it almost impossible to snap out of it.
I was again in the headlines for the wrong reasons after our loss to Collingwood in round 7. That game was fiery from the outset, but it exploded when Dale Thomas decked Marc Murphy in the first quarter. I was sick of the Magpies’ sniping tactics and I decided to let a few of them know about it. At the quarter-time break, as the Collingwood players came together to listen to Mick Malthouse, I ran through their huddle, bumping a few of them and mouthing off a bit. Up in the stands, Dad chuckled as the crowd started going off; Mum just put her head in her hands. My actions sparked an almighty melee, with pretty much every player involved. I was thrown to the ground by Alan Didak and a heap of the Collingwood blokes piled on top of me. By the time the umpires brought things under control, I had a cut head and the crowd was going nuts.
I ended up kicking four goals to help us to a 19-point lead by half-time. But I hardly touched the ball in the third and fourth quarters as we slumped to a disappointing loss. Many of the reporters who were at the game, and many of the fans as well, thought the fight was great, a flashback to the good old days of tough and rugged footy. The AFL, however, was not impressed. They fined the players involved a total of $32,100, with my fine amounting to $3300. The club, which had been pleased with the way we’d flown the flag after Murphy was put down, paid it for me.
In the middle of the season, I had a welcome distraction from the dramas on the football field when I was named in the Italian team of the century. The team was picked by some Italian footy fans who wanted to poke a bit of fun at the fact that most of the AFL clubs had recently named their teams of the century. I was named in the forward pocket, while big Saverio Rocca got the nod at full-forward. On the field, I also enjoyed a few rays of sunshine when we broke our losing streak with consecutive victories over the Western Bulldogs and Port Adelaide. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Dogs were in the top eight at the time, while the Power went on to play in the Grand Final. Those wins meant that our next game against Hawthorn at Telstra Dome was considered the match of the round. One of the biggest crowds to ever attend a home-and-away game at Docklands—the final count was 53,459—crammed into the venue that day, but the Carlton supporters among them should have stayed at home. Our performance was embarrassing, to say the least. We conceded twenty-seven goals, booted only twelve ourselves, and lost by an even 100 points. ‘I genuinely think we got ahead of ourselves,’ Denis told the media after the match. Well, we didn’t get a chance to do that again in 2007, as we didn’t win another game that year. We ended the season with eleven consecutive losses.
During that terrible run, the media kept bagging me for blowing up at my teammates, even though, as I tried to tell anyone who would listen, such things were just part of footy. They were never personal attacks. I remember blowing up at Stevo one day, and when we were in the showers after the game, I said to him, ‘Sorry mate, I really lost my shit.’ He just laughed and said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ We were great mates, but footy is a passionate game and sometimes even great mates have a crack at each other when things aren’t going right. Add to that the fact that we were playing in a footy team that hardly ever won a game and was on the bottom of the ladder year after year, and anyone would get frustrated.
Nevertheless, I must admit that my performance in our 77-point loss to Fremantle at Subiaco Oval in round 13 was probably the worst of my career. Well, it was equal to the debacle against St Kilda in 2005, anyway. Early in the first quarter, Denis dragged me after I gave away two 50-metre penalties, which led to Fremantle kicking an easy goal. In the last quarter, I launched a torpedo at goal when I should have passed the ball to Marc Murphy, who was in the clear, and Denis dragged me again. When I sat down on the bench, I asked our interchange steward, Shane O’Sullivan, ‘Am I going back on?’ He jumped on the phone to Denis, who quickly replied, ‘No.’ So I took my boots off because it was hot and I had blisters on my feet. Shane didn’t care about that, but it was blown up in the media. Some journos said I didn’t care about the team and that sort of thing, which was blatantly untrue. I’d just had a bad day. Things went even further down the plughole when I walked into the rooms after the game and one of our assistant coaches, Tony Liberatore, the one-time Brownlow medallist, had a real crack at me. I told him to fuck off. ‘Libba’ grabbed me and again I told him to fuck off. We’d just been smashed and I wanted to be left alone, but he kept getting in my face, so I went off. I shouldn’t have reacted that way, I know that. But I didn’t need some little bloke screaming at me. I was feeling bad enough about the situation as it was.
The blow-up with Libba, combined with my terrible behaviour on the field, resulted in the club suspending me for one match. I was pretty upset, but I had to cop it on the chin. I had stuffed up. Denis also told me he was unhappy with the way I was training and ordered me to have a week away from the club. He wanted me to think about whether I still wanted to play AFL footy. I did that, and after a few days’ holiday with Alex and the girls, I returned to the club and met with our new chief executive, Greg Swann, and football manager Stephen Icke. I told them that I definitely wanted to keep playing for the mighty Blues. I also said I’d play in the reserves that weekend, but I was told that due to my suspension, I wasn’t allowed to play at any level. It was a pretty shit situation all round.
The media had gone into overdrive after the club had announced my suspension. They had been particularly excited by Swann’s comment that I might not play for Carlton again. The Herald Sun responded by running with the headline ‘He’s up for sale’. It was universally agreed that I was going to be traded at the end of the season. With West Coast star Chris Judd set to return to Melbourne, I was immediately linked with the Eagles, who needed a tall forward. I was also linked with Adelaide and the Western Bulldogs. The Dogs’ coach, Rodney Eade, added fuel to the fire when, during a routine chat with the press, he said, ‘He’s got a lot of talent obviously and we’re looking for a key forward.’ Eagles coach John Worsfold chimed in as well on Fox Sports’ On the Couch program: ‘There are aspects of Brendan which are very appealing.’ But by the time I’d met with Swann and Icke, things had started to settle down.
I was at the MCG the weekend of my suspension to watch us lose to Melbourne by 23 points. Sitting up in the stands while my teammates went so close to winning the game was hard to take. I knew that I could have been the difference between another loss and a much-needed victory. But I only had myself to blame for my predicament.
The following Monday I returned to training. I apologised to Denis for my recent poor behaviour and pledged to him that I was going to attack the rest of the season with a much better attitude. Being the great man that he is, he shook my hand and said he remained convinced that I could be a great player for the club. After that, I
addressed the playing group and told them that I wanted to be a new man. Most of them seemed supportive of me, which was a relief. We had a tough training session, after which I demonstrated my new commitment by doing a heap of sprints on my own.
I was named on the bench for our round 15 game against the Sydney Swans at the SCG, but I started at full-forward and did OK. I picked up twelve possessions, took six marks and laid a few tackles, though I only booted 2.4. As far as Carlton’s board was concerned, however, my wayward kicking was only a small part of a much bigger problem that was enveloping the club. We were again becoming highly uncompetitive on the field. Against the Swans, we conceded twenty-five goals and lost by 62 points. The result meant that the media heat shifted from me to Denis.
A week later, we travelled to the Gabba to play the Brisbane Lions. I gave my all for Denis that night and was named among our best players after kicking 3.4. But our 117-point loss was too much for the board to ignore. Although I knew it was coming, I was gutted a couple of days later when Denis was given the sack. His replacement, on a caretaker basis, was my former teammate Brett Ratten, who had rejoined the club as an assistant coach at the start of the season.
Blokes like Kouta were delighted to see the back of Denis, but I still feel bad about what happened to him. Partly that’s because I know I didn’t do everything I could have done to help him keep his job. His win–loss record certainly suffered because of my wayward behaviour on the field. Also, looking back at that tumultuous time in Carlton’s history, I know there were so many other things that weren’t Denis’ fault. He inherited a list that wasn’t crash-hot to start off with, and then we got kicked out of the draft because of the salary-cap issue, so he had to use recycled players. He was handed a shit sandwich. It was way too hard to deal with, and I don’t think many other coaches could have done better. Furthermore, just look at some of the blokes whom Denis developed: Jordan Russell came second in Carlton’s best-and-fairest in 2011, while Marc Murphy is now a superstar. Denis will always be remembered for the bad days at Carlton, but that is grossly unfair. He was a super coach who treated everyone the same. If you had a go and got a kick, you’d get a game. He was a hard man, but I thought he was fair.
Brett Ratten’s coaching career began in very strange circumstances. Caretaker coaches usually chase success to try and ensure they are handed the job on a full-time basis. But due to the draft rules in place at the time, the club had far more reasons to lose games than win them. If we did not beat another opponent and our win tally remained at four, we would be entitled to a priority selection at the beginning of the national draft (that was because we would’ve won less than five games for two successive years). It was an enormous incentive to lose games.
Losing games to gain better draft picks is known in AFL circles as ‘tanking’. There was no talk of tanking when we almost beat St Kilda in Ratts’ first game in charge—which proved to be Kouta’s last, as a chronic groin problem combined with his ongoing knee problems forced him to retire the following week. But we were in the gun after we lost to Collingwood a week later. The thing that had caught everyone’s attention was Ratts’ decision to take me off at the 23-minute mark of the last quarter, when the game was in the balance. I had kicked six goals to that point, although I had just twinged a quad. Brett later told the media that he had taken me off because I was injured, not because we were desperate to lose. ‘You come into our room and tell our guys that we are tanking,’ Ratts said at his press conference. ‘You come into the box. You see if I am tanking the game. I tell you now I am not and I won’t be. I won’t be tanking any game.’
It is absolutely true that we never sat around as a playing and coaching group and worked out a way to lose any of our matches after Brett Ratten took over as coach. None of us ever deliberately gave the ball away or kicked a point instead of a goal or pulled out of a contest. But we all knew that if we won another game, we were going to make our future team worse. That was a fact—we would lose the first pick in the draft. It was a crazy situation. Why would you want to win? Every time we ran onto the field in those latter rounds of the 2007 season, we knew that it was in our best interests to lose. We knew that if we won, our supporters might say, ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’
It did seem like the club did a lot of things that made it more difficult for us to win games. The first ‘initiative’ related to medical procedures. Many players have some type of surgery in the off-season, perhaps to clean out a knee or do some work on a shoulder. But I was asked if I wanted to have my surgery early and miss the last half a dozen games of the season. I knocked that proposal on the head, as I wanted to keep playing, but in the end I did cut my season short, foregoing our last two matches against North Melbourne and Melbourne. I could easily have played in those games, but there was no real incentive to do so.
The second ‘initiative’ was to put players in unusual positions and not pressure the opposition much. In some games, our best midfielders played deep in the back line, while at other times our forwards were stationed in defence. All sorts of things like this occurred when we took on Melbourne at the MCG in our last match of the season. The game was branded the ‘Kreuzer Cup’ by the media because the loser would get the first pick in the draft, and the best young player in the country was an athletic ruckman by the name of Matthew Kreuzer. We usually tagged the Demons’ gun midfielder Travis Johnstone every time we played them, yet on that day we let him run free and he picked up forty-two possessions and kicked a goal. We lost the game by 31 points, which I suppose meant that we’d ‘won’ the Kreuzer Cup. I’d been down in the rooms before the match and there was just a weird feeling in the air. It felt like the lead-up to a practice game or an intra-club match. The strangest thing that day, however, was hearing Carlton supporters cheering whenever the Demons kicked a goal.
Often there was banter on the field about tanking. I remember one incident in our game against Essendon in round 20. We kicked four goals in the second quarter and were 21 points up when the half-time siren sounded. As I started walking towards the rooms, my opponent, Mal Michael, turned to me and said, ‘What are you blokes doing? You don’t want to win this game.’ Clearly, he thought we could’ve been even further in front. I smiled and said to him, ‘Yeah, I don’t think we’ll win, mate.’ Sure enough, we ended up losing by 10 points. No matter which way you look at it, there was no point in us winning that game. I don’t agree with tanking, and I never turned up to a game wanting to lose, but sometimes a few things were done so that there was no chance we would win. When it comes to the crunch, do you want your team to become better the year after or do you want to win a game of football that doesn’t matter? It’s a no-brainer. You want your team to get better. Anyway, that’s why the AFL scrapped the priority picks prior to the 2012 season. Those picks were rewarding mediocrity, and you don’t want that in the game.
And so while Richmond finished the 2007 season on the bottom of the ladder, our priority selection gave us the first pick in the upcoming national draft. Before that came about, though, the club managed to sign the best player in the competition, Chris Judd. Prior to the trading period in early October, a lot of people had linked me with West Coast as part of a swap for Judd. But Brett Ratten, who had been confirmed as our full-time senior coach during September, rang me and said he didn’t want me to go anywhere. The club gave up a lot to get ‘Juddy’. We gave the Eagles picks 3 and 20 in the draft, as well as emerging key forward Josh Kennedy. It was shattering to lose Josh. I had really been looking forward to playing alongside him for many years, and he was keen to stay at Carlton and continue enjoying Melbourne life. But at least the trade sent him back to his home city of Perth rather than to a place that he didn’t know.
It was bloody exciting when the news came through that we had outdone Collingwood, Melbourne and Essendon and secured Juddy. He was such a great person and player—a Brownlow and Norm Smith medallist and a premiership captain—and his decision to sign with us showed that Carlton was u
p and about again. A few years earlier, a bloke like Juddy would never have come to the Blues, but we were a laughing stock no more. Everyone at the club was aware that Dick Pratt had played a big role in the recruiting coup, and that it was all above board. No-one at Carlton was going to become involved in another salary-cap debacle.
A month or so after Juddy became a Carlton man, our list grew even stronger when we did as expected and selected Matthew Kreuzer with the first pick in the national draft. There was no doubt about it in my mind: the Blues were on the up. I had ended the 2007 season with fifty-nine goals and had easily won my fifth consecutive Carlton goal-kicking award. And as I enjoyed some time off, I kept thinking about how good it was going to be having Juddy put passes down my throat in 2008. It was going to be awesome.
13 A BLOODY FREAK
The arrival of Chris Judd inspired everyone at the club to lift their game. Juddy was a complete professional on and off the field, and all the players looked up to him from the moment he set foot on Princes Park for the first time. His arrival also had the punters queuing up to back me to win the Coleman Medal, making me the $3.50 favourite when the market opened early in 2008. It might have seemed strange to people outside the club that Judd was almost immediately made our captain, despite the fact that he had not yet played a single game for the club. But he was such a natural leader that the players all knew the match committee had made the right decision. I was honoured when everyone voted for me to be included alongside him in Carlton’s six-man leadership group. I really appreciated that support from the boys.
Fev: In My Own Words Page 17