SLEEPING AND COMATOSE GIANTS
It’s September 18th, 1999. Essendon and Carlton have just mightily fought an intense Preliminary Final. If you’d said to any AFL fan after that day that not only would these two sides combine for three runs that lasted to the Preliminary Finals over the next 25 years, but that most of those would come in the immediate aftermath the 1999 season, you’d have been laughed out of the sport. Why would these two empires fall?
Carlton had made it their business to win at any and all costs. John Elliott was a boardroom tycoon so cartoonish that behind a constant chain-smoking haze, his eyeballs were actually dollar signs. Not only did he orchestrate at least one instance of illegal player payments (that we know of, at least), but he and his board were so set on world domination that they actually purchased 20% of the shares of the North Melbourne club to try and strong-arm a merger. In doing so, they ensured that fateful 1999 season would end, for the first and only time in football history, with a team losing a Premiership to a team that it part-owned.
They were also the only metro side in the 21st Century to play matches in their own boutique ground, and with the finishing touches to the John Elliott Shrine To John Elliott, located in the John Elliott wing of the John Elliott Grandstand almost completed, the side would remain as it always had – a dominating power.
Essendon had forgotten what it was like to lose. In fact, it’s arguable that they ever really knew how to. From the moment they built their own empire on questionable player recruitment and payments with Albert Thurgood at it’s centre (we’re talking a while ago here), they became an ever-present part of the Victorian footballing elite. Dick Reynolds, Bill Hutchison, John Coleman – name a bigger trio of Legends at any club. You couldn’t. Fourteen years was the longest stretch they had between Grand Finals, after the last of those Legends ceased his involvement. Lest Essendon be bad for a long enough stretch of time to realise they could only be great with a Legend on board, they found another one. Kevin Sheedy lifted them back up to a mark where they fell, inexplicably, one Terry Wallace coaching masterclass away from absolute perfection. The 21st Century was rung in with a Bomber raid, a stark warning to all that this could well be the team of the future.
But, of course, both sides were about to learn that sixteen Premierships and the legal claim to the Crown Kingdom of Victoria meant absolutely nothing in a nationalising world.
The Bombers and Blues were run by old heads in a new century, and were caught on the back foot immediately. Essendon were hunted down by the super-team the Victorian clubs forgot they created, thanks to an almost eugenic belief that Queensland could never really ‘get’ Australian Rules football. Their empire fell, amid a realisation that they didn’t know how to use the draft anywhere near as well as they thought. Their stars retired, their coach too, and the new generation was left holding a bag with so many holes, it was more air than fabric. They brought back an idol to lead them back to glory, but like Icarus, he flew too close to the Sun. And the Herald, and every other newspaper James Hird would feature in for the entire decade.
Carlton, meanwhile, got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, a hand clutching $1.2 million in salary cap breaches which I’m surprised they were able to afford since that new grandstand basically bankrupted them. Fined so badly they had to take a loan from the AFL (which was never paid back), and denied access to prime picks they earned from falling down the table alarmingly quickly, John Elliott was banished on an ice floe launched from St Kilda beach.
After a decade whose sole highlight was Brendan Fevola, until it wasn’t, Carlton needed a new Messiah. Chris Judd was it. Of course, Carlton’s crippling addiction to brown paper bags filled with money meant it had to lean on Visy to get him in, can’t believe that one passed checks and balances, but when an ACL tear ended his time in the AFL far too early, it sent Carlton back into the never-never, all while Mick Malthouse set fire to his legacy there. Barker, Bolton, and Teague couldn’t correct the skid and statistically you’ve forgotten at least one of them coached there.
And now we get to modern times. Both clubs stumbled into 2026 in vastly different contexts but with many similarities: both fallen Victorian giants whose most recent finals foray was dropping in on the final day to get eliminated uncompetitively, with star midfielders who have one foot out the door, fanbases who haven’t seen a Grand Final since Kim Beazley was Opposition Leader, boards who seem to revel in either sacking coaches or being blatantly incompetent and whose coaches had already ruined one club and were well on the way to ruining club number two, with both these sides in my preseason bottom four.
Long story short, they deserved to be here, and they deserve each other. Sacking their coaches within such a short period, both having had the full support of the board a month period (naturally) only showed how destined they are to languish together.
WHAT YOU’RE ALL HERE FOR
Oh yeah, plus they both played against each other on Sunday night in what I was thinking at the start of the season would be the annual ‘Sack Bowl’, a match between two struggling head coaches in which the loser would likely be sacked. That’s my fault for having that much faith in Brad Scott, but even the wisdom of Solomon couldn’t steer them past West Coast – who are still a rabble but at least a rabble that cares.
You might wonder, from my previously signposted dislike of Essendon and evident ridicule toward Carlton, why I’m covering this one. Truth is, I wanted this game weeks out, and from the look of it, wanted it more than some of the players involved.
These two teams are ostensibly in the same place – building a new regime after the old dictator has been toppled. Carlton’s appears to have been a peaceful transition that has produced positive results, while Brad Scott appears to have been dragged behind a cart carrying a smiling Dean Solomon, like Achilles and Hector from the Illiad.
Come on, read a book.
Both speak to negative attitudes in the club, of course – Essendon wallowing in the same filth like the fattest pig in the barn, while Carlton being able to beat Geelong mere weeks after collapsing to North Melbourne shows a complete lack of effort being displayed during the Voss regime. I assumed the game would start in a similar manner, with Carlton piling on clearances and pressure, and Essendon wandering around like they’re looking for their keys.
I was wrong.
The opening salvos from both sides seemed to rely on high intensity ball movement teamed with entering the forward 50 as inefficiently as possible, with dump kicks and pointless turnovers in equal measure. The first, and best, opportunity of the game came when the Bombers actually lowered the tempo, finding uncontested marks and allowing enough time for Mason Redman to bewilder audiences and problem gamblers alike, and score a fantastic opening sixer.
The uncontested ball soon became a major weapon with both sides seemingly unable to win an offensive one-on-one in the first stage of the game, and became the backbone on which the best chances were generated. Of course, this being a clash of mediocre sides, generating chances and finishing chances were much different asks. The talls were nowhere to be seen for a large part of the opener, despite conditions being ostensibly perfect. The best lead-up mark of the whole quarter wasn’t from any of the usual tall suspects, but Hussein El Achkar, the cult hero’s two marks only generating a single behind.
With the assembled crowd desperate for scoring, having only seen one goal in the opening eighteen minutes, Talor Byrne took a mark from a kick whose length was shorter than the distance Byrne spent juggling it. His goal did nothing to open up the game, the only other major coming from Ben McKa…Ben McKay? Hang on, just checking I didn’t mean Harry. No, it was Ben, starting forward in a desperate attempt to play him into any sort of form.
After an awful start, he found an easy mismatch on Cowan straight in front from 25 so it was hardly a world-shattering event. Carlton, still persisting with the corridor run that served them well against Geelong, had no real answers for Essendon’s superior ball use. That’s a phrase I didn’t think I’d be writing today.
DOES ANYONE HERE KNOW HOW TO KICK A GOAL?
The lack of scoring in the first term necessitated a rethink for the Blues going forward. There were positives – Essendon’s poor kicking led to a large amount of forward-half turnovers for the Blues, but poor delivery in the first – thanks to Essendon flooding the zone very effectively – was their kryptonite. Their solution was nifty and innovative – don’t bother. They continued to put their entries to the worst possible places with almost calculated efficiency. Their second-term scoring sources showed their lack of efficiency – two behinds from long shots that fell short, and a behind each from a stoppage, a failed Bomber spoil and a counterattack. Conversion errors hurt, yes, with Byrne’s shot that hit both posts a large dose of salt in a gaping wound, but the problem would be as troubling even if Carlton kicked like a real football team. It took a free kick to McKay to open their account for the second term, once again some seventeen minutes from its commencement. Naturally, as soon as they did, the Bombers scored from the centre bounce. Carlton’s other goal? Another McKay holding free. They couldn’t generate quality chances any other way.
It really was a poor watch, but not in the ways I was hoping for. Neither side really showed any kind of dominance, instead picking different ways to display a similar level of incompetence – Carlton preferring dropping marks, panicking through indecision and being generally undisciplined; Essendon preferring to rush it way too often resulting in dodgy disposal both by hand and feet; and Kayo preferring I didn’t watch this at all by cutting to black like the Sopranos finale.
The Bombers did have the closest thing to a sustained run of the first half – Kondogiannis scoring thanks to a highway pile-up of Carlton jumpers, with El Achkar goaling a minute later thanks to Nick Haynes dropping a mark that he couldn’t have put in a better position for his own side to concede.
Andy Lee was in the coaches box for Carlton but I bet even he couldn’t produce that level of comedy.
Yet, the most frustrated player in Essendon’s 50 was Nate Caddy, unsighted all half thanks to Essendon kicking to him as if their vision updated every ten seconds. Seriously, El-Hawli saw Caddy fifteen metres free in a pocket and instead elected to turn the ball over to a mismatched contest.
Essendon’s preference for the uncontested ball, although a necessity due to their general lack of skill and Carlton’s seeming disinterest in pressuring the ball carrier, really suited their ball accumulators. Durham had 21 touches to half time and was absolutely everywhere including out-presenting all his tall forwards and goaling from a mark inside 50, while Will Setterfield had easily his best match this season with 18 before the half-time siren.
Merrett and Tsatas also racked it up, but they were both below 70% efficiency. Merrett was being played behind the ball almost as a sweeper across the half-back line which was an interesting move. Not necessarily good, but macabrely interesting, like an autopsy where the cause of death isn’t clear.
It took a single minute of the second half for this game to get all Carlton-Essendon on us – Lachie Blakiston, a man who moves at speeds to rival Antarctic ice sheets, embodied Essendon’s desire to move the play quicker than they could handle by playing on in the back 50. Talor Byrne mowed him down, a great effort, only to blow his lines from a regulation set shot. That was this game. Hints of entertainment, brought about by weaponised incompetence, only to be dashed by further incompetence. I can’t complain, though, I think we all entered this knowing how it would end. At least they both showed a bit of ticker, getting into a big jumper-punching brawl for no apparent reason. There’s a joke to be made about Carlton and The Jumper Punch in there, but I don’t want those guys to hit me so I’ll leave it.
Now I’d like to openly address Dean Solomon. If you survive James Hird’s return from the hinterland and subsequent bloody coup, I have some notes based off this third term:
- Stop running the ball all the time. You suck at it. Half the time, you get corralled backwards and waste a bunch of energy, and this is against Carlton, a side that exerts less pressure than air in the troposphere. Look it up.
- Lachie Blakiston is not a defender. Harry McKay ate him alive. He’s also not a ruck, either, come to think of it. The biggest contest win he had was getting in a fight with Ben Ainsworth, a man half his size.
- If your side gives away a 50, put someone on the mark for it. You almost let Harry McKay score the most embarrassing goal possible. You’re lucky he can’t kick.
Speaking of McKay, he dropped back to fill the hole quite effectively, with the main problem being that it left no one to present as a forward target – thankfully, Essendon remembered they couldn’t defend and allowed Brodie Kemp to look like Jason Dunstall there for a second, being lucky that his second shot missed.
Carlton used the momentum to get on top, with Essendon seeming like they’d run out of tickets thanks to their overly-fast ball use. Any trace of their methodical play had disappeared, as had Durham – just the one touch in Q3, with the other major ball getters using it unacceptably badly considering most of their touches were by hand. The ball lived in the Carlton half, with Essendon catching Carlton’s disease and being unable to find any targets up front. Carlton had certainly improved, and the game was even at the final change, but it would still be charitable to call this contest ‘good’. I can’t wait for the AFL journos to call this one a ‘thriller’, even though my heart rate is similar to a comatose sloth’s right now.
SKILL ERRORS AND MEDIOCRITY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING
What’s on your checklist for a simply enjoyable game? A lengthy ARC review, combined with Gerard Whateley editorialising on a system he likened to Chernobyl during the week, is on mine.
Still, it gave Carlton their first lead of the whole night. From here, they began to play like the side they think they can be – generating turnovers, forcing pressure and occasionally, when they’re really on top, doing what they do best and getting cut up out of nowhere. Thankfully, the opponent is Essendon and so Zach Merrett, who’d played maybe the least impactful 30-touch game I’ve seen this year, dropped a mark that would have cut the gap down to two. Ben McKay let a chance, albeit a long-range one, slide wide but Carlton, unable to abandon the instincts of the Voss era, gifted the Dons a turnover so that McKay could get his second tonight. Of four in his career. What is this game?
Of course, the Bombers aren’t a team to be outdone for poor decisions, Jy Farrow pushing Kemp into the fence after the play was dead which didn’t just offset the McKay goal, but allowed Carlton to get another off the centre clearance. And yes, Kemp milked the push for all it was worth, but a disciplined side doesn’t make that push at all.
A typical Bombers side sinks here, especially of late. 12 points down after Caddy misses a long-overdue shot, seven and a half minutes left. And, indeed, they did.
Will Hayward sealed it with, suitably for a game of this quality, a rushed shot after his set shot timer elapsed that slobbered its way through the middle. The Blues saw their way home with their transitional play that I can describe as ‘good enough for the occasion’, until they started to Carlton it up by letting their opponent into the game late on for no good reason. Nate Caddy came alive, showing how good he can be when his mids actually kick to him, reducing the gap to eleven.
Harry McKay soaked up 30 seconds by convincing an umpire that yes, he was a realistic prospect of having a shot on goal from sixty metres out on the boundary line, before surprising exactly no-one not wearing bright yellow and putting it to the hotspot. Post-match, he clarified his thought processes, managing to say that both the man on the mark was within the 50 and that he was kicking “from 75”. No one in this entire operation had any clue what they were doing, but this is the game we deserve, and the game we expected.
Essendon then made their comeback but way the hell too late…maybe. The clock had a bit of a senior moment, stopping for an extended period with under a minute left as Zach Reid reduced the gap to five. David Zita clarified post-game that it was only a visual glitch, but whether or not some time spilled away is an elementary matter. All we knew for sure was that this gave enough time for a good team, and therefore not Essendon, to get the ball forward and so the Blues hung on. But that’s not the story that’s going to be taken out of this.
I hate to join what will be an inevitable media pile-on concerning the timekeeping, but the issues this year have gone from embarrassing to unforgivable. We’ve been blessed with only a handful of errors over the last couple of decades, but this is at least the fourth error of just this year, even if it is simply a visual error with no time lost as David Zita has reported. Completely amateur stuff which is entirely preventable, and while not the biggest issue the League faces, it severely affects the legitimacy of results if fans feel they cannot trust that the time remaining is accurate.
However, it did not cost the Bombers a victory. Their gameplan – rapid, aggressive, risky – is awful and ill-suited for them. Indeed, Essendon played so much better when they took their time and used short kicking to exploit Carlton’s loose zonal structure. It spoke to a lack of composure amongst the young Bombers that they kept resorting to quick ball movement, and a lack of on-field leadership to control the tempo. This not only kept shovelling the ball into Carlton hands close to goal in the second half, it also visibly tired the Dons’ runners and allowed Carlton much easier transition through their preferred routes in the centre corridor.
Putting Merrett behind the play (and presumably behind a vendor’s stall in the last quarter) certainly didn’t help with that, and neither did treating Nate Caddy like the red-headed stepchild whenever he made a lead. Ben McKay up front was an interesting experiment but a better-kicking and experienced forward target in his place might have swung the contest…if Essendon had one. The timekeeping error is a convenient scapegoat for the club, an ‘oh, we would have won’ moment, when in reality many general, systemic failures did the job for them well before any nerd with a clock and a button could. Regular readers will know that I’ve said my piece about what a mess this club finds itself in, and all I’ll add to that is that this is a bottom-two team in every conceivable way.
This win also fails to cover Carlton in any sort of glory. Josh Fraser is 4-0, yes, and maybe 5-0 if you count that second half he allegedly coached, but I find it really hard to gauge if Carlton are actually any good under him. They seem braver with the ball, they challenged the Dons’ talls aerially, but if they’d played a team that had won multiple games in the last 390 days (i.e. any other team), they would have certainly lost.
The intensity and accuracy they had against Geelong was entirely absent tonight, and the absence of Jacob Weitering isn’t enough of an excuse to remotely cover the blame. Their forward entry was abysmal, their conversion pathetic, their running game was highly unconvincing, and the midfield battle was a stalemate for them at best. Considering that Geelong was by far their best opponent of the nascent Josh Fraser era, I still need a lot more convincing to believe the notion that Carlton can rebound to become any sort of credible finals force. The fact that Carlton is now somewhat likely to make the finals is more an indictment of the new system, and a neon advertisement as to why 10th place was never allowed to play finals until now. And let’s face it, if John Elliott could hear the excited fervour that Carlton have at the prospect of an away wildcard final, he’d roll in his grave.
This isn’t Carlton. Not the real Carlton, the one that used to loom imperiously, hit you hard, win at all costs. They’re in a better spot than Essendon, but that can’t be the benchmark. GWS looms after the bye as the real test for finals admission. Beat the Giants, and that might be enough to wake the sleeping giant.