A couple of days before the game, my heel was still giving me trouble. But my spirits were lifted when Herald Sun footy guru Mike Sheahan had me high up his annual list of the top fifty players in the game. Mike put me at number 6, behind Gary Ablett, Juddy, Buddy Franklin, Dean Cox and Luke Hodge. AFL players love to say they don’t take any notice of what’s in the papers, but you love it when they print something good about you. I regarded the pat on the back from Mike as being yet another great reward for all my hard work. Better yet, the people at Carlton all read Mike’s list when it came out, and they thought my inclusion in the top ten was pretty damn good, too.
A sellout crowd of almost 90,000 turned up to the MCG to see us play Richmond. While I’d love to say they were all there to see me, the fact was they had come to see Ben Cousins, the former West Coast captain, who was playing his first game for the Tigers. Cousins had been sacked by the Eagles after struggling with drug addiction, and I thought it was tremendous that Richmond coach Terry Wallace had decided to give him another chance. I couldn’t do much training in the days before we met the Tigers, but I was selected nonetheless and took to the field after having a couple of injections in my foot. Although I didn’t do much other than kick a great soccer goal out of mid-air, we smashed the Tigers by 87 points. The night was a disaster for them, and I felt sorry for Newy. I also felt sorry for Cousins, who would have wanted to put on a good show for the big crowd but was instead carried from the field after suffering a serious hamstring injury. For us, however, it was a brilliant way to start the season.
We backed up that win by defeating the Brisbane Lions in round 2 at Etihad Stadium. My foot injury was still troubling me, but I managed to kick five goals. A week later we took on Essendon at the MCG with more than 70,000 people watching on. I was surprised when Bombers coach Matthew Knights decided to start youngster Darcy Daniher—the son of former Sydney Swans and Essendon defender Anthony Daniher—at full-back on me. My performance against the Lions had put me in a very confident frame of mind, so I decided to give young Darcy a bit of trash-talk. After kicking a couple of early goals, I turned to him and said, ‘I’ll bet you $100 that you don’t last on me for the whole game.’ Darcy smiled, thought about it for a few seconds, then shook my hand. As it turned out, I lost the bet and we lost the game by 4 points. It would have been a different story if I had kicked straight, but after shanking the ball all over place I ended the night with 4.7 to my name. The following week I kicked 1.4 during another loss, this time to the Swans by 17 points.
Having been third favourite for the flag after round 2, we were now under the pump. However, the news that our club’s saviour, Dick Pratt, was gravely ill fired us up for our round 5 clash with the Western Bulldogs. Most of the players had only found out that Dick was very sick when he came to the rooms before we played the Tigers, looking extremely frail. Desperate to give him one last win to savour, we thrashed by Dogs by 43 points. A day or so later, myself, Juddy and Nick Stevens went to his house to say goodbye to him. He was in his bed, asleep, so we spoke to Jeanne instead and thanked her for all the work she and Dick had done for the Carlton footy club. Dick Pratt died the following day. His contribution to Carlton will never be forgotten. He saved the club.
Some of my favourite memories of Dick are from when he used to take the members of the player leadership group out for lunch at a steakhouse in Richmond called Vlado’s. It was always a very blokey affair; there were never any women in the restaurant. Sticks Kernahan was usually there, along with a couple of other board members. Dick would get dropped off at Vlado’s by his driver and he would be the life of the party for an hour or so, then he’d settle the bill and take off. I also remember how Dick would get stuck into me about gambling. ‘Don’t gamble, Fev,’ he’d always say. He hated it. I suppose that’s part of the reason he made so much money. He never wasted a dollar on stupid things like gambling. I should have listened to his advice.
In round 6 we played Hawthorn at the MCG. We had been flogged by the Hawks on a number of occasions in the previous three years, but Ratts told us before the game that he believed we were big enough, strong enough and talented enough to match it with them now. The game was a classic, but it still gives me nightmares. When Jarryd Roughead kicked his eighth goal for Hawthorn at the 20-minute mark of the last quarter, Alastair Clarkson’s men were 25 points up. We looked gone for all money. And yet we fought back. Kade Simpson put through a goal, then I bagged two more, which gave me eight for the game. At the 30-minute mark, we were trailing the Hawks by only 5 points, and we were all over them. Then Dennis Armfield danced around a few players in the middle of the ground and sent a long bomb in my direction. I pushed my arm into my opponent’s shoulder and took the mark, only 20 metres from goal on a 45-degree angle. The Blues fans were jumping up and down like crazy; the noise was deafening. As I went back for my shot, the clock showed the quarter had been going for thirty-two minutes—the siren was due to sound at any moment. The seconds ticked by as I collected my thoughts, then I took my kick. The ball left my boot sweetly enough and seemed to be heading straight through the big sticks. I had my arms up in the air, ready to begin celebrating. Even Channel 10 commentator Michael Christian found himself shouting, ‘He’s kicked a goal.’ But suddenly the ball faded to the right and grazed the goal post. I put my hands on my face. The Hawks then ran down the clock until the siren sounded. We had lost by 4 points. I slumped to the turf as the Hawthorn theme song began to play. I had never been so disappointed in all my life. I felt like crying. I could not believe I had missed that shot. What made it worse was that I had told the boys at three-quarter time, ‘Let’s do it for the big fella upstairs,’ wanting to honour Dick Pratt with another win. It was bloody heartbreaking.
2 May 2009: After the final siren during the Hawthorn v Carlton AFL match at the MCG. (Newspix/George Salpigtidis)
I suppose it was inevitable that I would suffer a drop in form after that. I kicked only two goals in the next three games after I failed to get the job done against the Hawks. The foot injury was still bothering me, which was a key reason why my form had dipped, but I was also a bit flat for a while. Our team was very inconsistent during the same period. We lost to Fremantle up at the Gold Coast in round 7, then we flogged Collingwood at the MCG in round 8. Even though I didn’t register a score in the game against the Magpies, I pleased Ratts by tackling and chasing and creating space for Jarrad Waite and Eddie Betts, who kicked seven goals between them.
Eddie and I became really good mates during the years we were at the club together. We often mucked around, staging competitions to see who could dribble the ball through doorways and stuff like that. Out on the field, Eddie was great fun to play alongside. He always had heaps of energy and he had some freakish skills. He could kick a goal from just about any angle. I loved seeing him do well.
In round 9, when we played the Crows in Adelaide, none of us made it onto the scoresheet in the first half. I’m not joking: we were goalless at half-time. The score read: Adelaide 8.6 (54), Carlton 0.5 (5). Thanks to the our gutsy midfield, led by Nick Stevens, Marc Murphy and Bryce Gibbs, we saved face by kicking eight goals after the long break, but we still lost by 44 points.
Thankfully, the team returned to form in the following round when we hosted West Coast at Etihad Stadium on a Friday night. I was manned up by Eagles skipper Darren Glass, who many people considered to be the best full-back in the competition at the time. But some brilliant delivery from our onballers—Judd, Murphy and Kade Simpson had ninety possessions between them—helped me to have a night out. I finished with six goals, and as was so often the case, only some wonky kicking had stopped me from booting nine or ten.
I went out for a few beers after that game, as I had done on several occasions earlier in the season. I had chosen to refine my pledge from 2008, when I’d said I would never again drink during my football career. What it now meant was that I wasn’t going to binge drink during the footy season for the rest of my career. And judged on tha
t criteria, I was doing OK. I really wasn’t going out much at all, and when I did I wasn’t writing myself off. I was happy with that. The club seemed happy enough with the situation as well. I could do just about anything in my own time during the 2009 season as long as I kicked goals.
With that in mind, I was well and truly back in the good books after I booted eight against the Lions at the Gabba in round 11, which made it fourteen snaggers in two weeks. The Lions had gone into the game in fourth spot on the ladder, but our victory saw us swap spots with them. My performance, for which I later earned three Brownlow Medal votes, prompted Mike Sheahan to write a glowing piece about me in his Monday column in the Herald Sun:
The question posed six weeks ago to the thinkers was: Can Carlton win a premiership with Brendan Fevola? The answer won’t be known for some time yet, if ever. What is known, though, is the Blues can’t win a flag without him.
Unfortunately, the rest of the home-and-away season was the kind of rollercoaster ride that had typified my career. I managed only four goals in the two games that followed our great win over the Lions. A mangled little finger was partly responsible for my drop in confidence during that period, but quite simply, I just had a couple of down weeks. The week after our embarrassing eleven-goal loss to Essendon in round 13, my mood picked up a little when I got to meet cyclist Lance Armstrong in the lead-up to our next match against Fremantle at Subiaco Oval. Carlton had done a deal to promote Lance’s cancer-focused charity, Livestrong, when we played the Dockers, so we’d worn yellow jumpers in the game (they had a navy blue trim and CFC monogram). The colour must have been good for us because we won.
I was back to my best when we beat Richmond by 20 points at the MCG in round 15. Despite being goalless in the first quarter, I finished the game with a career-best haul of 9.1. Playing footy that day was just so much fun. I kicked goals from 50 metres out right in front. I booted them from 30 metres out on the boundary. I even slotted an over-the-shoulder scissor kick from the goal square which had the Blues fans dancing in the aisles. My best mate Chris Newman was among the Tigers’ best players that day; he was also the first Richmond player to congratulate me on my performance after the final siren sounded.
A week later we broke our twelve-game losing streak against the Sydney Swans. That put us on a path towards the finals, and our late-season victory over Geelong cemented our spot in the top eight. We went into the final round of home-and-away matches knowing that if we beat Adelaide at Etihad Stadium, we would finish fifth and earn a home final. But we had a shocker against the Crows. I kicked five goals, which was enough to wrap up the Coleman Medal—I’d swapped the lead with Brisbane Lions skipper Jonathan Brown for much of the season—but we lost by 72 points. Adelaide’s score of 27.14 (176) was the highest registered by any team that season. It was a very embarrassing loss for us, and as a result we slipped to seventh on the ladder, which meant travelling to Brisbane to play the Lions in an Elimination Final. Ratts gave us a fearful talking to after the debacle against the Crows, but he soon focused our minds on a big positive: after three wooden spoons and so many seasons of battling against the odds, Carlton had qualified for the finals for the first time since 2001.
We arrived in Brisbane ready to have a massive crack at pulling off an upset. I was seriously excited as we ran onto the Gabba. I was the only player left from Carlton’s last finals side—the Semi-Final loss to Richmond in 2001. I was the only bloke in our side who had been through the club’s fall from grace, and now I wanted to see it complete its revival.
The Lions were a point up at half-time, but we exploded in the third quarter. I was in the thick of the action as we booted six goals to two and opened up a 24-point lead at the last change. As we huddled together to listen to Ratts, I was convinced that we were on our way to a Semi-Final clash with the Western Bulldogs, who we had thrashed earlier in the season. We headed back out and Cameron Cloke kicked the first goal of the last quarter, which put us 30 points up. We thought we were as good as home. Yet the Lions found a spark. They started attacking relentlessly, and after they’d booted a couple of goals, the big pro-Brisbane crowd started roaring, which seemed to lift the team even more. Seemingly out of nowhere, they hit the lead when Daniel Bradshaw took a mark close to goal and threaded the big sticks. We desperately tried to fight back, but our hearts were broken when Bradshaw snapped an unbelievable goal from 35 metres out on the boundary. It was the Lions’ sixth goal in a row and it put them 7 points up with only a couple of minutes to go, a margin we were unable to peg back. It was the most gut-wrenching, sickening loss I ever played in. The feeling at the end of the match was even worse than when I’d hit the post against Hawthorn earlier in the season.
As I sat on the floor in our deathly silent rooms, my head in my hands, I knew that I had given everything for my team, which was something. And it was pleasing when Ratts singled me out for praise in his post-match media conference: ‘I thought his game tonight, his chasing effort, was the best I have ever seen of any power forward. He was probably best-on-ground for what he tried to do for his team. It was unbelievable.’
We had to have a few beers in the days after that loss to the Lions. There was no other way to get over such a shit experience. We managed to keep our Mad Monday out of the newspapers, which was a relief, and while enjoying a few quiet ones we all pledged to go at least one better in 2010. Because we had such a young squad, we knew we were in a position to play finals for a number of years. A week or so after our season ended, Juddy and I were lucky enough to be selected in the All Australian team. I was named at full-forward, while Juddy was given a berth in the midfield and was named vice-captain. The team was announced at a gala function at which I was also presented with my second Coleman Medal for booting eighty-nine goals for the season.
* * *
How I went from being regarded as one of the best forwards in the game to being on the football scrapheap only eighteen months later is a tale that is painful to recount, but I guess I’d better give it a go. My slide from grace began on what is regarded as footy’s night of nights: the Brownlow Medal count at Crown Casino.
Juddy and I started drinking at the casino at about 2 pm on the day of the count. We played a bit of blackjack and had plenty of fun. Although I knew I had to take it easy because I was taking painkillers and antibiotics after some post-season surgery, I smashed down a heap of Scotch. After three hours or so, we met up with Alex and Chris’ partner (now his wife), Rebecca, and headed over to the Brownlow function. Now, the great thing about Juddy is that he knows when to stop. He had a few waters before we walked into the room where the Brownlow count was being held. But me, I just kept on drinking.
I can’t remember anything from about halfway through the count, so I have no recollection of Gary Ablett being awarded footy’s highest individual honour. But being rotten drunk is no excuse for what happened next. The Footy Show had organised for me to shoot a post-Brownlow edition of the popular segment ‘Street talk’, for which I was given a microphone by one of the cameramen. As everyone milled around before heading off to the afterparty, I started trying to interview some players, in the process slurring my words and generally acting like an idiot. I only know what happened next because Alex made me watch the vision of it a few days later.
Among the first blokes I accosted was Juddy. I walked up to him, stuck my thumb into his neck, and started yelling, ‘Ahhh, ahhh, ahhh. Pressure point, pressure point.’ It was a pointed reference to the defence Juddy had used a couple of weeks earlier after he was cited by the match review panel for eye-gouging Lions’ midfielder Michael Rischitelli (he’d claimed he’d been applying a martial arts move). After embarrassing Juddy, I went on a rampage. Swearing like a madman, I walked up to Chris’ partner, Rebecca, and rambled on about how Chris should have won the Brownlow. She couldn’t get away from me quickly enough. Then I tackled Western Bulldogs midfielder Adam Cooney and flicked his Crown Lager bottle out of his hand. It crashed to the floor and beer went all over the c
arpet. I kissed Sydney Swans forward Ryan O’Keefe on the lips and yelled, ‘I’ve got a stiffy. Woooo.’ I tried to interview Essendon champion James Hird, but when he looked unimpressed with my state, I said to him, ‘Am I not smart enough to talk to you?’
Eventually, the Footy Show crew took the microphone from me and handed it to recently retired Richmond player Nathan Brown, who was in much better shape. Among the first people that Browny interviewed was Alex, who was stone-cold sober because she was five months pregnant. It was clear that she was very embarrassed by my drunken antics. ‘I’m running away from Brendan,’ she said. ‘He’s a grown man. He can sort himself out. I’ve got to get upstairs to the kids.’
Before Alex went up to our hotel suite, she pleaded with me to stop drinking. But I didn’t listen. I went to the afterparty and I further destroyed my reputation by drinking more, smoking and generally being a pest to the entire crowd, including a number of footy reporters. Many of my Carlton teammates tried to get me to go home, yet I refused. I wanted to be the last bloke at the party. It was after 3 am when a couple of the Carlton boys finally dragged me out of there and made me go to my room. My head hit the pillow and before I knew it, Mia and Leni woke me up.
I felt surprisingly fresh when I woke up at about 8 am. ‘Phew, big night,’ I thought, as I gave the girls a hug. I couldn’t remember anything that had happened, so I had no idea that I was about to be engulfed by a storm of negative publicity. I had promised the kids that I would take them to the hotel pool, so I took them down there for an hour and swam with them. When I was back in our room, I sent Juddy a text: ‘How’d you pull up, mate?’ He wrote back straightaway: ‘How’d you pull up? You were pretty bad last night.’ I rang him and he said, ‘You were really loud and swearing a lot.’
Fev: In My Own Words Page 20