Cripps Lets It All Out — And We All Felt It

There are moments in this game — the VFL, the AFL, call it what you like — when a footballer stops playing football and starts playing something closer to fate, and last Saturday Patrick Cripps gave us one of those moments so raw and unfiltered that even a grumpy old so-and-so like me had to put down his tea and just watch.

When the final siren sounded and Cripps bellowed into the Carlton night air, fists clenched, veins in his neck doing things that probably alarmed his doctor, it wasn’t just relief. It was a man purging something. A season, a club, a decade of disappointment all compressed into one glorious, ugly, beautiful howl.

The Weight This Man Has Carried

People who didn’t live through the dark years — and there were very dark years, make no mistake — don’t quite understand what Patrick Cripps has absorbed on behalf of this football club. He has been Carlton’s best player through some of the worst footy the club has produced since the days when we could still claim a flag within living memory. He has fronted the cameras after floggings. He has said the right things when the right things tasted like ash. He has turned up every single week and emptied himself completely into the contest, and for long stretches of this era there wasn’t much of a contest to be had.

Back in my day — and I’m talking about the era when you could get a pie and a Coke for under two dollars at Princes Park — a captain carried the club on his back and the club carried him. For too long, Cripps has been doing all the carrying and the club has been doing a lot of stumbling. That’s not a criticism of the players around him, by the way. It’s just the brutal arithmetic of rebuilding.

When Adversity Ignites the Very Best

There’s a pattern here that even the most casual Carlton watcher would recognise. Cripps plays his best football when the pressure is at its most unbearable. Cast your mind back to 2019, after Brendon Bolton had finally been moved on from the senior coaching role. You would have forgiven Cripps for being a shell of himself heading into that game. Instead, he produced the kind of one-man performance that made Brisbane’s Dayne Zorko, a champion in his own right, shake his head and say it was probably the best individual effort he’d ever witnessed on a footy ground. The numbers that day were astonishing, but — and this is the thing about Cripps — the numbers never quite capture the full truth of how he plays. The will, the mongrel, the refusal to cede an inch of territory. You can’t put a number on that.

Last Saturday had that same flavour. Something was bubbling underneath the surface before the bounce, and when it came out it came out at full volume. Rage, relief, release — all three tangled together in one of the more visceral captaincy displays this competition has seen in some time.

What the Stats Miss (Again)

Now, I’m not going to sit here and reel off a string of numbers like some kind of analytics merchant from Docklands, because I think we’ve all been seduced too easily by the spreadsheet brigade. What Cripps does that doesn’t show up in the Champion Data printout is organise. He shepherds. He sets the tone in the corridor and the contest and the stoppage. When he’s dominant, the blokes around him play three kicks better than they should. You watch young Nick Haynes or whoever it might be coming off a Cripps clearance and they’re running onto a target, they’re hitting a contest with confidence. That’s captaincy. That’s the thing you can’t manufacture and can’t really measure.

The raw numbers from last Saturday were eye-catching, sure. But the emotion afterwards — that wasn’t performance, that wasn’t media training, that was a man who has spent years grinding through the machinery of rebuilds and coaching changes and boardroom drama and finally, finally had something he could celebrate without an asterisk attached to it.

A Word on Coaching Upheaval

I’ll say this carefully, because I’ve got no interest in kicking the lads who gave their time to the club. But it is curious — and I don’t think it’s coincidental — that Cripps finds another gear when the coaching structures around him shift. I’m not suggesting instability is good for a football club, because it absolutely isn’t, and Carlton has had more than its fair share of upheaval in the head coaching department for anyone’s liking. What I will suggest is that Cripps carries a kind of banked-up energy that gets unleashed when circumstances create a vacuum, when there’s no-one else to step up and he simply decides that he is going to be the answer to the question nobody’s asking yet.

That’s not ordinary. That’s not what most footballers do. Most footballers, when the scaffolding falls away, shrink a little. Cripps expands. He’s always been that way, going back to his early days in Navy Blue when the hair was a bit longer and the team was a lot worse, but you could see there was something unbreakable inside him even then. It’s taken some years for the team to start catching up with the man.

The Supporters Who Stuck Around Deserved That

I want to say something on behalf of the long-suffering Carlton supporter, because we cop it from every other fan base in the competition and we generally wear it with reasonable grace. The people who sat through the bottom-four finishes, the Monday morning media hammerings, the constant question marks about the future — they deserved a moment like last Saturday just as much as Cripps did. When he screamed, half the people in the seating bowl screamed with him, and the other half had something in their eye. It happens.

Back in my day, you went to the footy expecting certain things. A physical contest. Blokes who looked like they’d worked a real job during the week. You went expecting your team to either win or lose on the basis of skill and hardness, not on the basis of cap exceptions and positional rotations and synthetic surfaces. Some of that’s gone now and you won’t get it back, I know that. But the raw emotion of a champion player who’s been through the fire — that part of footy never changes. You can tinker with the rules until the cows come home, you can put the Marvel Stadium roof up and down like some kind of magic trick, but you can’t manufactuer what Cripps showed on the weekend.

What Comes Next Matters More

Here’s where I’ll put a little cold water on myself, because I’ve been a Carlton man long enough to know that one brilliant performace doesn’t rewrite the narrative. What matters is whether this club, right now, has the structures around Cripps to make these big moments count towards something in September. He’s not getting any younger. Neither am I, frankly, and the prospect of him lifting a premiership cup before I’m entirely decrepit is something I’d very much like to see happen.

The talent’s there. The captain’s unquestionably there. What Carlton needs to prove is that the machine behind him is finally worthy of the man in front of it.

Last Saturday gave us every reason to think it might be. Let’s not waste it.