Another Off-Season Headache: Carlton Stands Down Derksen
I’ve seen some ordinary off-seasons wearing the navy blue in my time, but this one’s starting to feel like it’s got its own momentum, and not the good kind. Carlton have suspended defender Wade Derksen after he was charged with high-range drink-driving up in the Northern Territory, and fair dinkum, you’d want to check the calendar to make sure we’re not still in the finals hangover from last September.
What actually happened
From what’s been reported, Derksen was pulled over in the NT and charged with high-range drink-driving, which for those not across the terminology is about as serious as it gets on the scale before you’re looking at proper criminal court strife. The club moved quickly, which I’ll give them credit for, standing him down from all football activities while the matter works its way through the courts. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I know every detail of what went on that night, because I don’t, and neither does anyone else carrying on about it on talkback radio. The courts will sort out the facts and the penalty, and until then it’s a charge, not a conviction, no matter how bad the number might look when it’s splashed across the back page.
The club’s response
Carlton have done the sensible thing here, by the sounds of it, taking swift action rather than letting it drag on and become another slow-burn saga for the footy media to pick over for a fortnight. Indefinite suspension, no football activities, cooperating with whatever needs to happen on the legal side. That’s roughly what you’d expect from any club with half a brain these days, and I don’t doubt the people running our footy department now are a different breed to some of the blazer-wearing committee men I grew up watching make a hash of things at Princes Park. But doing the right thing after the fact doesn’t erase the fact that it happened in the first place, and that’s really what’s got me grumbling this week.
A summer we didn’t need
Because let’s be honest, this isn’t the first headline of its kind for our club this off-season, and you start to wonder whether there’s something in the water, or more accurately something not in the water and plenty in the glass instead. Back in my day — and I know, here we go, the old bloke’s about to start — players lived in the same suburbs as the blokes who watched them from the outer on a Saturday arvo, and if you played up you heard about it from your own clubmates before head office even got wind of it. These days the players are managed within an inch of their lives, surrounded by welfare officers and leadership programs and player development managers, and yet somehow we’re still reading about blokes getting themselves into strife that a five-minute conversation with a mate or a quick call for a cab could’ve avoided entirely.
I’m not having a go at Derksen the person here, because I don’t know him from a bar of soap outside of what I’ve seen him do in a Carlton guernsey, and by all accounts he’s been a solid honest trier down back for us. But blokes on AFL list money, in this day and age, with ride-share apps on every phone and clubs practically begging players to just ring them any hour of the night if they need a lift home, getting behind the wheel after a skinful is about as avoidable an error as you’ll find in the game. High-range too, not just a touch over, which tells you it wasn’t a close call gone slightly wrong.
The welfare system that’s meant to stop this
This is where my grumble really kicks in, because we’ve spent the better part of two decades building up all these so-called player wellbeing structures, cultural reviews, leadership groups, and for what, if blokes are still ending up in the back of a divvy van on a Territory highway. I’m not saying chuck the whole system out, mind you, because some of it clearly does good work and I’d never go back to the days when a bloke’s off-field strife just got quietly swept under the carpet by a club secretary with a mate on the local paper. But there’s a difference between having the structures in place and actually having them work, and every time one of these stories pops up it makes you wonder whether the AFL and the clubs are more interested in having a policy document to point to than actually stopping blokes from making these calls in the first place.
You can have every welfare officer under the sun on the payroll, but at some point it comes down to the bloke himself making a decision at midnight, and no amount of head office tinkering changes that.
What it means on field
Footy-wise, losing Derksen from the backline for however long this drags on is a genuine headache, not a minor one. He’s been a reliable type down there, not the flashiest name on the list but the sort of honest defender who does his one-on-one work and doesn’t need his name in lights to do his job properly, and those blokes are harder to replace than people think. If this stretches into the pre-season proper it’s another selection puzzle for the coaches to solve on top of everything else they’re already juggling, and it’s another reminder that building list depth isn’t just about recruiting talent, it’s about having bodies available when the unexpected inevitably turns up.
Where this leaves the Blues
I’ll say this much for the club’s sake: standing a bloke down quickly and letting due process play out the right way is exactly what should happen, and it’s a far cry from some of the bungled handling I’ve seen clubs do with these sorts of situations over the decades, where everyone gets a please-explain six weeks too late. But from a supporter’s seat, you just want a summer where the only headlines are about who’s kicking goals in the practice matches and whether the new recruit looks the goods, not another round of explaining to your non-footy mates why your club’s back in the news for the wrong reasons.
The courts will do what they do, and Derksen will presumably cop whatever penatly comes his way under the law same as anyone else would, club suspension or otherwise running alongside it. What Carlton need now, more than another statement or another review, is a quiet summer the rest of the way, because frankly we’ve earned one, and so has everybody who’s stuck by this footy club through thin and thinner over the years waiting for the good times to properly arrive.
