Dangerfield Does A Dangerfield And Our Fairytale Cops It
For three quarters last night I let myself believe, and that’s always been my first mistake with this football club since about 1996. We had them, we genuinely had them, twenty-one points up with the ten best players on the ground wearing navy blue, and then a bloke who’s been knocking around finals since John Howard was in the Lodge decided he wasn’t ready to let this September belong to anyone else.
Twenty-one points and a false sense of security
I’ve watched enough of these Carlton sides over the decades to know that a lead is just an invitation for the football gods to have a chuckle at your expense, but even I allowed myself a bit of hope when the Blues piled on that early buffer. The kids were winning it at the source, the midfield brigade were getting first hands to it time and again, and for about forty-five minutes you could see genuine daylight between a fairytale and a full-blown premiership tilt. Geelong looked exactly like the Geelong of old that used to sleepwalk out of a bye rest — sloppy, off the pace, missing set shots that in their pomp they’d have slotted with their eyes shut. Back in my day a team that rusty after a week off got punished properly and sent home to think about it, not let off the hook by their most dangerous customer deciding enough was enough.
Dangerfield does what Dangerfield does
And that’s the rub of it, isn’t it. Patrick Dangerfield has been doing this to clubs like ours since he was still growing into that mop of hair, and last night he went out and kicked five goals in a final like he was reading from an old script he’d written himself years ago. You can call it class, you can call it experience, I call it a bloke who smells vulnerability the way a magpie smells a nest and simply will not let a contest go. He bent that elimination final to his own will in the second half, dragged his teammates into the contest with him, and by the time the final change came around our kids were chasing shadows instead of the flow they’d built. I’ve got no argument that he’s a champion of the competition — I just wish, for once, he’d have gone champion somewhere else against somebody else’s club.
The old failing that never quite left us
What gets me, and this is the bit that’ll have me grumbling into my VB for a fortnight, is that we’ve seen this movie before. Carlton get themselves into a position of real strength, get the front-runners doing exactly what they’re paid to do, and then somewhere in that third quarter the composure goes missing and the more seasoned outfit reminds you why finals football is a different beast entirely to the home-and-away slog. I don’t blame the kids for it — you can’t teach finals nous in a classroom, you earn it the hard way, usually by losing the way we did last night. But it’s the same soft underbelly that’s cost this club dearly for a generation now, and no amount of list rebuilding fixes it until you’ve actually banked a few of these bruising nights and come out the other side.
The umpires, the rules, and my usual gripe
I won’t pretend I sat there entirely convinced every fifty-metre penalty and dubious high tackle call went our way either, because a few of those decisions had me nearly putting the remote through the telly. I’m not saying it cost us the four goals we needed, I’m saying the modern interpretation of what constitutes prior opportunity changes depending on which ground you’re standing on and which commentator’s mate is coaching, and it does my head in every single week. Back in the old VFL days a bloke got tackled hard, played on or got pinged, and everybody in the outer knew exactly what they were looking at. These days I need a law degree and a subscription to three different podcasts to understand a deliberate out of bounds call, and I reckon half of head office couldn’t explain it consistently if you asked them twice in the same sentence.
Full credit where it’s owed, grudgingly
Now look, I’ll give the Cats their dues because that’s the way I was raised to watch this game, even when it’s against the old enemy giving us the shove out of finals. Fourteen goals twenty-three to eleven goals eight is a proper beating in the end, even if the story of the contest was much tighter for three-quarters of the night, and they earned that ticket through to the semi-final against the Dockers on the back of genuine composure under real heat. That’s what finals football rewards — not who’s had the better September, but who can find another gear when the walls are closing in — and last night it wasn’t us. Chris Scott’s mob have been written off plenty of times this year and they keep finding a way, and as much as it chews me up to say it, that’s the sign of a club that knows what it’s doing come the pointy end of the year.
Where this leaves the fairytale
So the fairytale run ends here, at the MCG, in front of a crowd that came expecting an upset and left with a familiar old feeling in the pit of the stomach for anyone who bleeds navy blue. It’s not a disaster of a season by any stretch — we got further than most reasonable judges tipped in the pre-season, and there’s genuine substance in this list that wasn’t there a few years back — but there’s a difference between building something and actually finishing the job, and last night showed us exactly how far that gap still is against the competition’s most battle-hardened operators. I’ll be back next week same as always, still grumbling about the interpretations, still wishing they’d never touched the deliberate rule, still convinced somewhere deep down that this club’s next flag is closer than the last one felt. But tonight, I’m just going to sit with the disapointment for a bit, because Dangerfield earnt every bit of that five-goal haul and there’s no use pretending otherwise.
