Don’t Get Ahead of Yourselves, But the Blues Are Breathing Again

Five wins on the trot and suddenly every Carlton supporter in the country is dusting off their navy blue scarf and pretending they never once googled ‘AFL wooden spoon odds 2025’. I know because I was one of them, and I’m not proud of it.

But here we are. The Blues are alive. Genuinely, unmistakably, uncomfortably alive. And now — because footy never gives you a moment’s peace — the club faces a decision that would keep a board of directors up until three in the morning arguing over a whiteboard.

Where This Season Was Headed

Let’s not airbrush history here. Not long ago, Carlton was wandering around in the kind of fog you only see at Junction Oval on a Tuesday morning in July. The coaching staff was gone. The list had all the spark of a wet match. The press conferences had taken on that particular tone — you know the one, where a senior player stands at a microphone and uses the word ‘accountable’ so many times it loses all meaning.

Back in my day, when things went wrong at Princes Park, you got a serve from the commitee and you went away and fixed it quietly. Now you get a twelve-step media strategy and a consultancy firm. But I digress.

The point is, Carlton’s 2025 season had the look of one of those years you quietly bury. The kind you don’t mention at the reunion. Five wins in five games under Josh Fraser has changed that conversation entirely, and fair play to the players and the caretaker coach — they’ve earned the right to have that conversation.

What Fraser Has Actually Done

I want to be careful here, because the temptation when a team wins five straight is to attribute it all to the new bloke and declare him the messiah. Carlton supporters have made that mistake before — more than once, and at some considerable emotional cost.

What Fraser appears to have done, from what I can observe from the outer and the television, is simplify things. Get the ball moving. Let the footballers play football rather than execute a seventeen-phase press-and-hold structure designed by someone with a laptop and not enough games of actual VFL footy in their legs.

The midfield brigade has looked cleaner. The forward entries have had purpose. And the backline — which for much of the earlier part of the year resembled a revolving door at a busy city pub — has settled into something approaching a unit.

Whether that is Fraser’s coaching or whether the players have simply exhaled after the pressure valve was released, I honestly couldn’t tell you. Probably a bit of both.

The GWS Game Is Still Nagging at Me

Here’s the thing that sticks in my craw, though. Carlton should have beaten Greater Western Sydney earlier in the year — a game that, had they won, might have changed the entire narrative of the season. They didn’t. The lead evaporated. The momentum swung. And the Blues were left shaking their heads while the opposition ran through them like a hot knife through a Footscray pie.

That inconsistency — that habit of being in a winning position and finding a way to make it complicated — hasn’t fully disappeared. You see little echoes of it even in some of the five-in-a-row victories. A quarter where the foot comes off the pedal. A stretch of play where it all looks a bit ordinary before someone forces it back under control.

A genuine finals contender doesn’t do that. Not consistently, anyway. So before we start ordering the September hospitality packages, let’s keep one eye on the fundamentals.

Patrick Cripps Deserves Better Than Another Rebuild

I’ll say this plainly: Patrick Cripps is one of the genuinely great players of his generation, and every year he runs out wearing that navy jumper and competes like his life depends on it, regardless of whether the team arond him is functioning or falling apart. He is a Carlton man in the truest sense — the kind who would have won Brownlows in the old VFL and never blinked.

He is not getting any younger. Neither am I, for that matter. But the point stands. If this five-game stretch is anything more than a sugar hit — if there is something real being built here — then the people running Carlton football owe it to Cripps to make sure that it sticks this time.

No more half-measures. No more half-baked list management decisions that make sense on a spreadsheet and fall apart when the football is bounced. If Josh Fraser, or whoever ends up coaching this club beyond this season, can build on what has happened these past five weeks, then Cripps and the other senior players who have kept turning up deserve to see it through.

The Decision Nobody Wants to Make Aloud

And here’s the awkward bit. Carlton now has to decide what to do with the coaching job. Do you hand it to Fraser permanently? Do you go to market and bring in someone with a bigger name and a thicker CV? Do you wait until the end of the year and let the results make the argument for you?

Every option has a catch. Give Fraser the job now and you might be closing the door on someone better. Go to market and you risk undermining the very momentum that has brought you to this point. Wait, and you create uncertainty that can fester through a dressing room faster than a leaked trade rumour.

Head office has not always covered itself in glory when it comes to these decisions. I’ll just leave that observation floating in the air and let history fill in the details.

What I will say is this: the decision should be driven by football, not by public relations, not by what looks tidy on a press release. If Fraser is the right man, back him. If he’s not, then be honest about it and do what’s needed. Carlton supporters have been patient — some of us perhaps more patient than our constitutions were ever designed to handle — and we deserve a decision made for the right reasons.

Cautious Optimism From a Man Who Has Learnt His Lesson

So where does all of this leave me? Honestly? Cautiously optimistic, which for a Carlton supporter of my vintage is basically the equivalent of dancing on the roof.

Five wins in a row is not nothing. It is, in fact, the most un-nothing thing that has happened at this football club in what feels like a very long time. The players look like they enjoy each other’s company. The football has had some genuine quality through it. And for the first time in a while, watching Carlton on a Saturday afternoon hasn’t felt like a duty I perform out of loyalty and morbid curiosity.

Could it still come apart? Of course it could. This is Carlton. We have a proud tradition of snatching a degree of despair from the jaws of cautious optimism.

But right now, in this moment, the Blues are breathing. The season is alive. And even a grumpy old man who still writes ‘VFL’ in his notes by force of habit will admit — that counts for something.

Don’t stuff it up, fellas. We’ve been waiting a long time.