Given the utter disaster that was Carlton’s Round 1 loss to Richmond, the pressure bubbler will probably cool following a defeat to Hawthorn that was, on paper at least, infinitely more creditable.
Not expected to win, or really to come close given these two teams’ disparate starts to 2025, the Blues fought the good fight, tackled ferociously, defended with far greater vigour than against the Tigers (although that’s like saying a child with one arm swam more vigorously than Stephen Hawking), and even overpowered one of the premiership favourites for a 15-minute second quarter purple patch that felt like something from the late-2023 era Blues that rollicked their way to a preliminary final.
An honourable loss, in short.
But I’m not in that camp. Like against the Tigers, this was an eminently winnable game the Blues frittered away with poor decision-making, both on-field and in the coaches’ box, a motley of strategy errors, and continually frustrating inefficiency moving forward that surely must have fans yearning for the days of Brendon Bolton when at least they KNEW they sucked. (I’m only being half-sarcastic here.)
The Blues, right now, are playing the dumbest footy in the league. And the quality of the opposition shouldn’t be the standard on which to judge a team that simply has to be better than they are right now.
Let’s start pre-match, with a pair of decisions that backfired spectacularly: the replacement of an ill Harry McKay with Lewis Young, a like-for-like only if you’re comparing centimetres, and the selection of Charlie Curnow at all after a nonexistent preparation due to a summer’s worth of surgeries.
Curnow at least was a logical move: Voss was surely compelled to play his talisman even with only partial fitness, especially once McKay was ruled out. Most coaches would have made the same call.
But having such minimal influence across the game, with none of his usual pace on the lead or presence in contested marking situations, it begged the question why there wasn’t another role for him, and indeed why the Blues kept banging the ball long inside 50 as if prime Curnow was there to try and clunk a big grab.
The one time I can remember the Blues trying something different bore fruit instantly: Adam Saad, dashing up the middle, goes long and over the head of the leading Curnow and Jack Silvagni, to a one-on-one not featuring either Josh Battle or Tom Barrass, who again ruled the skies for the Hawks.
It works perfectly: a less capable one-on-one defender in Changkuoth Jiath is shunted under the ball with ease by Zac Williams, for the simplest of goals.
Had that been the play all night, I’d be singing Vossy’s praises; but alas.
Young’s four years at Carlton have featured a mix of frustration and potential, but at this point it’s got to be questioned what exactly his role is in the Blues’ defence. He neither complements Jacob Weitering’s usual brilliance as an interceptor and monster-stopper, nor allows him to focus on one element like Josh Battle and Tom Barrass’ arrival at the Hawks has done for James Sicily.
It’s never a good sign when the opposition try to play through you; but with Blake Hardwick assigned to impede Weitering’s run at the ball at every opportunity, the Hawks aimed at Young’s contest with Mabior Chol whenever they could in the first term – and it was a bloodbath.
Outpointed in the air and unable to go with him on the lead, Young was essentially a spectator as Chol took three marks inside 50 to quarter time, with only inaccuracy preventing him from taking the game by the throat.
The baffling thing about Young’s selection isn’t just the rainy weather in Melbourne, nor Hawthorn’s noticeable lack of key forwards – Chol, sub Jack Gunston and brief cameos from Josh Weddle and James Sicily was basically as big as they got down there – but also because the Blues are already pretty tall in defence.
Nick Haynes and Mitch McGovern both seem set to play the third tall, intercepting role that would also suit Young; it’s not great praise to say Haynes was miles better than in Round 1 simply because, with eight disposals for the match, he barely got near the ball to screw anything up, unlike against Richmond.
He did, however, have one horror moment early in the last quarter to all but gift a goal to Chol, which serves as an ideal segue to my next point about the Blues’ stupidity.
The obvious error is Haynes’: with a ball in dispute inside defensive 50 that he caused with a sloppy fumble, he inexplicably becomes more worried about catching Dylan Moore high than actually competing for the footy.
So he overruns the ball, throws his hands out to try and show he couldn’t possibly be taking Moore high (pointless, because his body still collides with Moore, who absolutely could have milked a free kick if he’d been so inclined), and is therefore powerless to do anything but watch Chol pick up the loose ball, take a few running steps, and snap through a critical goal.
But the blunder is more than just on the former Giant: I count three Blues defenders in Adam Saad, Young and McGovern watching on from mere metres away, seemingly waiting to see what happens.
McGovern stands, frozen, even as Chol makes his break for space in the forward pocket; Saad, who was on Moore as the original kick tumbled inside 50, sags off him to try and win himself a cheap possession, assuming (wrongly) Haynes will gather; Young, meanwhile, is originally going for the same loose ball as Haynes, overruns it, and with his man Chol the one capitalising, makes about his third or fourth cardinal sin of the night – if you’re going to leave your direct opponent, you must impact the contest.
That’s two weeks in a row now the Blues’ defence has lacked any semblance of cohesion, of assigned roles, and even of responsibility for a direct opponent.
The most egregious example of this defensive chaos came in the second term, when an easily defusable Hawthorn foray forward – a scrappy tumbler towards 50 and an under-pressure hack forward from Dylan Moore – somehow ends up with two Hawks goalside of their opponents to effectively walk it in.
Why? Well, one problem is Saad again: when the ball is in his area, he seems to instantly forget that he’s a defender, to the point that I really hope his teammates have been instructed to cover for him like many rebounders have done for them, and that it’s the other backmen who are letting him down.
Saad does nothing to influence the contest: he literally watches as Ollie Hollands puts a tackle on Moore, hovers a few metres away hoping that the ball will jar free and he can send it back the other way, and then puts in a very ordinary smothering attempt on a ball close enough to him that it could easily have been stifled if that thought had occurred to him early enough.
He’s not the only one at fault – Lachie Cowan is the Blue under the original high ball, makes a poor attempt at a fist, and then loses touch with Nick Watson, allowing him out the back while he doesn’t even help out Hollands to impact the contest and stop the move forward.
He even gets a lucky break when, standing in no-man’s land, Moore’s kick wobbles straight to him, but he fumbles it, lets it past, and from there Jack Ginnivan can gather, dish to Watson, and watch a goal sail through.
As an aside, I’d also argue Weitering’s position is faulty here: stationed in the goalsquare, he’s too far back to make any attempt on the high ball that came in first, which should be his bread and butter to defuse either with an intercept mark or a timely spoil. His opponent, Finn Maginness, simply needs to wait at the top of the square once the ball is in dispute, knowing that his mere presence there will deter the Blues’ best defender from impacting the contest at all – and the Hawks are too clever to blaze aimlessly at that one-on-one.
Other tactics were dumb in more nuanced ways. Take Blues’ handball-happy style in the first quarter, which netted them 41 handballs to 39 kicks and yet only 65 per cent disposal efficiency and seven marks, none inside 50 as the Hawks harassed and pressured them into turnovers galore; and which they swiftly abandoned from there, notching 153 kicks and just 81 handballs for the remaining three terms.
Or the use of Cripps as a defensive 50 ruckman, rather than literally anyone else (one of the key defenders, like Young or McGovern, maybe); that didn’t contribute to ALL Hawthorn’s five goals from stoppages in the first half but really felt like it did.
My main gripe with it, essentially, is that it takes Cripps almost completely out of the play. In the above goal, he has no involvement in competing with the ball once the tap is sorted, and it’s virtually impossible (actually, illegal for a lot of it) for his Blues teammates to block for him to allow him to do what he does best; win the ball and do something productive in close quarters.
Blake Acres, who won the ball at ground level only for his kick to be smothered and ricocheted to Moore, would be a better option, surely – almost as tall as Cripps, he could at least compete to the same degree, and then allow the Blues their strongest, best body to dispute the ball wherever the tap goes.
It’s system errors like this that explain how the Blues, despite dominant clearance numbers – 51-39 on Thursday night, to be exact – can score five fewer points from stoppages than the Hawks. When they win the ball, it’s bombed aimlessly forward to an outsized bunch of attacking options and a half-fit Curnow; and when they don’t, holes open up everywhere.
The Blues are also prime ‘bees to the honeypot’; look at any disputed ball and note how many navy jumpers swarm the footy, all trying to win it themselves. The Hawks, meanwhile, fan out, trusting Jai Newcombe or Conor Nash or Will Day to win it and then either be fed outside when they do, or clamp inwards to prevent clean Blue breakaways when they don’t.
I can’t sum up better the problems this creates than Seven and Nick Riewoldt did with their post-game explainer.
Then there’s the kicking: the Blues don’t half butcher the ball, do they?
Perhaps my favourite stat from the MCG was the two teams’ kicking efficiency in the final quarter, with the game up for grabs. The Hawks sat pretty at 81 per cent, including probably the kick of the year from Massimo D’Ambrosio to set up an outrageous end-to-end goal; the Blues were down at 43 per cent, and duly went goalless to snuff out a victory chance that looked strong at three-quarter time.
This was not as painful a watch as the Blues’ loss to Richmond – there were no mind-bendingly bad errors, no horror defensive lapses, no efforts so pitiful as to make your skin crawl.
But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t more of the same from footy’s dumbest team.
There’s more than enough quality at Carlton to turn around this 2-0 start; just look at the second quarter, when they piled on five consecutive goals against footy’s hottest team, dominated the stoppages, pressured ferociously and hit the scoreboard with abandon.
But until they smarten up in every facet, from team selection to tactics to positioning to decision-making, all we’re going to see of the Blues’ undoubted, fearsome potential is glimpses that are even more frustrating than if they really were just plain bad.
