Humble Kid Not Too Sure About Pick 1? Good. That’s How It Should Be

Some kid, barely old enough to buy a beer at the club function, stood in front of a microphone this week and said he wasn’t too sure about being Pick 1. Didn’t skite, didn’t carry on like he’d already signed the contract and picked out his locker — just said it’d be “super cool” if it happened. I nearly fell off me chair, and not because the recliner’s on its last legs, though it is.

A bit of humility goes a long way

You don’t get that much anymore. These days half the draft crop come through looking like they’ve already done media training with a bloke in a lanyard, all polished answers about “taking it week by week” and “trusting the process” — process, I ask you, like footy’s a soufflé. So when a young fella fronts up and says, straight out, he’s not fussed either way about the top pick, you sit up and take notice. It’s the most honest thing I’ve heard out of draft season since, well, since they actually used to call it a draft and not a three-month infomercial.

Back in my day — and yes, I know, here we go — you didn’t even know who was getting picked where until the VFL, as I still call it whether the kids like it or not, read your name out on the night. No countdown clocks, no draft combine with blokes running in their undies getting timed to the hundredth of a second, no recruiters leaking mock drafts to journos for a month beforehand. You turned up, you played, and if you were good enough, someone rang your mum.

The draft circus has gotten too big for its boots

I don’t mind admitting the modern draft does my head in a bit. It’s become this whole production, like the Logies but with more cargo shorts and parents crying in the crowd. Everyone’s ranked, re-ranked, and ranked again by blokes who’ve never kicked a footy competatively in their life but reckon they can pick a gun from a bust by the way he taps his boot before a set shot. Half these kids are being talked about like they’re the next Chris Judd before they’ve even played a senior game, and that’s a hell of a weight to put on an eighteen-year-old’s shoulders.

So when one of them has the good sense to play it down rather than play it up, good on him. It tells me he might actually have his head screwed on right, which in this caper counts for more than a good vertical leap or whatever number they clock him at on the beep test.

Pick 1 isn’t the be-all and end-all anyway

And here’s the thing the draft experts never seem to mention on the telecast — Pick 1 doesn’t guarantee you anything. We’ve all seen top picks who never quite got there, and we’ve all seen some bloke taken at 38 or rookie-listed who ends up best and fairest three years running. Footy’s littered with examples both ways. The club that gets Pick 1 this year will be rapt if he turns into a contested ball winner and a leader, but they’d be just as rapt with a kid at Pick 15 who does the same thing without the fanfare.

Carlton’s had our share of high picks over the journey, some of whom delivered the house and some who, let’s just say, didn’t quite live up to the number next to their name. That’s not a knock on the kids — it’s a knock on the whole carry-on around the number itself. The pick is just a number. The player’s the player. Head office loves slapping a big number on a kid’s forehead because it makes good television, but it doesn’t kick a goal from fifty on the siren.

Head office tinkering hasn’t helped

Mind you, I reckon the AFL — sorry, the competition, the “V/A/FL”, whatever they’re calling it this week in the boardroom — hasn’t done the system any favours either. Academies, father-son bids, father-son matching, bid-matching points, trading future picks for picks that haven’t even been picked yet. It’s gotten so complicated my own father, rest him, wouldn’t recognise it as the same game he dragged me along to as a kid at Princes Park. Every year they tinker with something, add another layer of complexity, and every year some poor family sits there not knowing if their boy’s going to their first-choice club or getting shipped off interstate because of a bidding formula only three people in the building understand.

No wonder a kid getting asked about Pick 1 just shrugs and says he’s not sure. Half the time the kids themselves don’t know what’s going on until the names start getting read out, same as it ever was I suppose, except now there’s a lot more spreadsheets involved.

What I want to see from the kid at Pick 1, whoever he is

What matters to me, and I reckon to most old heads around the traps, isn’t the number — it’s whether the kid can actually play, and whether he’s got the temperament to handle it when it doesn’t go his way in round four of his first season and the keyboard warriors are already calling him a bust. The ones who last are rarely the ones who talked themselves up the loudest in October. They’re the ones who kept their head down, did the work, and let the footy do the talking — the old-fashioned way, if you don’t mind me saying so.

So if this young fella really isn’t too sure about Pick 1, I say bottle that attitude and keep it for when he’s twenty-five and some panel show is asking him to spray an umpire decision. A kid who doesn’t need the spotlight is usually a kid who’ll still be playing good footy in year eight or nine, long after this year’s draft hype has moved on to next year’s crop of wonderkids.

Whoever ends up Pick 1 this year, Carlton or otherwise, I just hope he gets left alone long enough to learn the game properly before everyone decides whether he’s a superstar or a flop. That’s all any of them ever needed, back in my day and now. Give the kid a guernsey, a locker, and some time — the rest usually sorts itself out.