Whitfield’s In, Blakey’s Out the Door — Trade Week Still Does My Head In

Trade week again, and every October it’s the same carry-on — players shuffled round the competition like a deck of cards at the local RSL, agents ringing club footy bosses at midnight, and some poor list manager standing in a car park somewhere explaining why a bloke who swore black and blue he loved the jumper has suddenly discovered a burning desire to ‘test himself elsewhere’. This year it’s Carlton landing Whitfield and North Melbourne picking up Blakey, who’s gone and told anyone with a microphone that he wants to ‘win back trust’ at his new home. Trust. In the VFL — sorry, the AFL, I’ll never get used to saying it — trust used to mean something. Now it’s just a word you say at a press conference before you jump on a flight.

Whitfield to the Blues — now that’s more like it

Let’s deal with the good news first, because there isn’t nearly enough of it going around Ikon Park in October as a rule. Getting Whitfield into navy blue is a genuine coup, the sort of move that actually makes sense on a footy department whiteboard instead of just making sense to whoever’s paying the player’s manager. He can run, he can find it in traffic, and from what I’ve seen he doesn’t go missing when the heat’s on, which is more than I can say for a few blokes we’ve carried through finals campaigns over the journey.

I’ll admit I had my doubts when the rumours first did the rounds — you hear a name linked to Carlton in September and half the time it’s just a journo filling column inches before the real business starts. But this one’s stuck, and fair play to the list management crew for getting it done. We’ve needed grunt and polish through the middle of the ground for a couple of seasons now, and if Whitfield slots in the way the judges reckon he will, we might finally stop getting run off our feet in the last quarter like a pack of blokes who’ve had one too many pies at three-quarter time.

Blakey’s trust talk — I’ve heard that one before

Now to the other big story of the week, and I’ll say straight up I’m not having a go at the kid personally, because plenty of good players have needed a change of scenery over the years and gone on to have the career of their life somewhere else. But this business of vowing to ‘win back trust’ after a move to the Roos — that’s a line we’ve heard a hundred times before from a hundred different players at a hundred different clubs, and half the time it’s more about the bloke himself than anyone else.

Back in my day — and I know, here he goes again — if you fell out of favour somewhere, you knuckled down at training on the Tuesday night, you didn’t need a media statement to tell the world about it. You just went out and did it on the park and let the form guide speak for itself. Now everything’s a narrative, every move’s got a redemption arc attached to it before the bloke’s even pulled the new jumper over his head. I don’t doubt Blakey means what he says. I just reckon ‘trust’ gets thrown around so loosely in trade week it’s lost most of its weight, a bit like ‘rebuild’ or ‘exciting four-year plan’.

What it means for the Blues’ list balance

Putting the Blakey business to one side, because that’s really North’s headache to sort through and not ours, the bigger question for us is what Whitfield coming in does to the shape of our list heading into next pre-season. We’ve got some kids who were starting to cement themselves in that midfield rotation, and the last thing you want is a trade like this knocking a promising young fella back to the twos — sorry, the VFL reserves, whatever they’re calling it this week — when he’s earned his chance at senior level.

• It adds genuine competition for midfield minutes, which is no bad thing this time of year.
• It takes some pressure off our younger onballers to be the finished product straight away.
• It signals the club’s still serious about adding proven quality rather than just hoarding draft picks for the sake of it.

You could argue — and plenty of Carlton people already are, down at the club and on the airwaves — that this is exactly the kind of calculated swing we needed after a few years of being a bit too conservative in this part of the market. I’m inclined to agree, though I’ll reserve full judgement until I’ve seen him pull on the boots in a proper contest rather than a highlights reel from his old club.

The AFL’s fingerprints are all over this circus

And here’s where I get my customary grumble in, because I can’t help but notice how this whole trade period has turned into even more of a pantomime than usual, with head office seemingly more interested in deadline-day drama and prime-time slots than the actual football substance of these moves. Every year there’s some tweak to the rules around free agency, compensation picks, father-son formulas — it’s enough to make a man’s head spin, and I say that as someone who’s followed this caper since before half the current commentators were born.

Back in my day a trade was a trade — two clubs, a phone call, maybe a bit of argy-bargy over a second-round pick, done by Thursday lunchtime. Now it drags on for weeks with leaks and backflips and players doing the full media rounds about their journey and their trust and their process, and head office sits back loving every minute of the extra coverage it generates. I don’t blame the players for playing the game that’s put in front of them. I blame whoever decided footy needed to be a soap opera as much as a sport.

So where does this leave Carlton heading into summer

All up, it’s been a solid week’s work from the list management crew, and I won’t pretend otherwise just because I enjoy a good grumble about the state of the modern game. Whitfield’s a addition that should genuinely help us next season, and that matters more than any amount of trade-period theatre surrounding other clubs’ business. Blakey’s welcome to go and rebuild whatever he needs to rebuild up at Arden Street, and I hope for his sake it works out, because a kid playing with a weight off his shoulders is usually a better footballer for it.

What I do know is this — come round one, none of this talk about trust and journeys and fresh starts will matter one bit. It’ll be about who can win the hard ball at half-back, who can hit a target under pressure, and who wants it more at the contest. Some things, thank God, haven’t changed since the old days, no matter how hard head office tries to tinker with everything else around it.