Blues Fall Short Against Brisbane But There’s No Shame In This One
Well, I’ve watched a lot of footy at that ground since it was Waverley in spirit if not in fact, and last night’s tussle between my Blues and the Lions had me up out of the recliner more than a few times, mostly to yell at the umpires rather than cheer. Carlton went down to Brisbane in a match that had all the hallmarks of a proper contest, which is more than I can say for half of what passes for the game these days.
The margin flattered nobody by the end of it, and if you’d told me at half-time we’d be in it right to the death I’d have taken that, given how the Lions started. But start there we must, because the first term was as ordinary a quarter of footy as Carlton have played in this suburb of Docklands all year.
A start that had me reaching for the blood pressure tablets
Brisbane came out of the blocks like they had somewhere else to be, kicking the first three goals of the night before our lads had even worked up a sweat. The midfield brigade for the Lions were winning first use of the ball at a canter, and our defenders were left scrambling around like blokes chasing a train they’d already missed. Back in my day the VFL coaches would’ve had the runner out there with a message that wasn’t fit for print, but these days it’s all headsets and hand signals from the box, which I reckon takes half the theatre out of it.
Carlton settled eventually, as good sides do, and by quarter time the margin was respectable enough that you could still see a path back into the contest. It wasn’t pretty footy in that first term, more errors than polish from both sides, but Brisbane’s class told early and we were chasing the game from the first bounce.
The middle two quarters – where the game was actually won and lost
This is where I thought Carlton were entitled to feel a bit hard done by, and I don’t say that lightly because I’m not one for blaming the whistleblowers when the arm-wrestle simply goes against you. But there were a couple of contentious free kicks paid deep in Brisbane’s forward line that swung momentum right when our boys had found some rythm, and you could hear the Marvel crowd let the umpires know exactly what they thought of it. I won’t sit here and say it was deliberate bias, because that’s a serious call to make and I’m not making it, but plenty in the outer reckoned it looked soft, and I’m inclined to agree with the outer on this one.
Credit where it’s due, our midfield brigade lifted in the third quarter and started winning enough of the footy to at least make Brisbane work for it. There were stretches of ten, fifteen minutes where you’d have sworn Carlton were the better side, moving the ball with some real conviction through the corridor, which is the way I like to see it played rather than this endless bombing down the boundary line that some coaches seem to have fallen in love with.
Individual efforts worth a mention
A few of our players stood up when it mattered and deserve a pat on the back regardless of the final result. The pressure around the ball in that third term was as good as we’ve produced all season, and there were a couple of contested marks taken under real physical duress that had me nodding in approval from the couch. That’s the kind of footy that wins you flags in September, not the fancy stuff that gets all the vision on the telly.
Brisbane, for their part, have a couple of players who just seem to find the pill at the right moment time and again, and you have to admire that even as a parochial old Carlton man who’d rather they didn’t. Their forward craft inside 50 was a cut above ours on the night, and that’s the honest assessment rather than the biased one.
Where it all slipped away in the last
The final quarter was where the game got away from us, not through any lack of effort but because Brisbane have got the sort of experience in tight finishes that comes from being in the mix for premierships year after year. Carlton had chances to peg the margin back to within a straight kick and didn’t quite convert when it counted, which has been the story of our season in patches if I’m being fair dinkum about it.
There was a passage of play midway through the last where I thought the umpiring got away from both sides a bit, with the whistle blowing for all sorts of minor indiscretions that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow twenty years ago. I’m not one to blame the umpires for a loss, that’s a mug’s game, but I will say the modern interpretation of what constitutes a free kick has become so fiddly that even blokes who’ve watched forty years of this caper struggle to pick it in real time.
What it means going forward
Look, one loss to a genuine top-four outfit at this stage of the year isn’t the end of the world, and I’d rather see Carlton competitive against the best than flogging the bottom sides and kidding ourselves we’re further along than we are. There’s real substance in how our midfield brigade fought back into the contest, and that gives me a bit of hope for the run home, even if the ledger doesn’t show it tonight.
What worries me more than the result is the recurring theme of soft starts to matches, because you can’t keep gifting sides like Brisbane a three or four goal head start and expect to win consistently against the top of the table. That’s coaching and it’s also plain old application, and somebody in that box needs to have a hard look at why it keeps happening.
The final word
Carlton didn’t disgrace themselves against a genuine flag contender, and there’s plenty to admire in the fight shown across the middle two quarters, but soft starts and a few costly moments in the last term were the difference between a famous upset and another respectable loss. I’ll take the fight over the flattery any day of the week, but at some point this footy club needs to turn the fight into four full quarters, because finals footy in September doesn’t forgive slow starters, and neither, frankly, do I.
