Hollands, Carlton, and the End That Nobody Wanted to Dance On

Elijah Hollands has been shown the door at Carlton, and rather than spit the dummy about wasted picks and second chances, I find myself just hoping the young fella is alright. That’s not a sentence I write about every delisted player, but this one’s different, and if you’ve followed his time at the club you’ll know exactly why.

The news came through that Hollands is at peace with how it’s ended, that he’s realised there are bigger things in life than kicking a Sherrin through big sticks on a Saturday arvo. Fair enough too. I’ve sat in the outer at Princes Park – yes, I still call it that, sue me – since before some of these kids’ parents were born, and you develop a fair sense for when a story is more than just form and output. This is one of those.

A Talent Nobody Doubted

Let’s get the footy side out of the way first, because it matters even if it’s not the main game here. When Carlton picked up Hollands in that trade with Gold Coast, plenty of us in the stands reckoned we’d nabbed a bargain. Big body, silky hands, the sort of player who back in my day would’ve been called a ‘ball magnet’ by some leathery old timer with a form guide in his coat pocket. He had size, he had touch, and every now and again he’d produce a moment that made you sit forward in your seat and think ‘here we go, this is the bloke who fills that hole through the middle’.

But footy careers aren’t just built on the highlight reel. They’re built on availability, on training, on turning up week after week when your body and your head are both willing. And for whatever reason – and it’s not really my business, nor yours, to play armchair diagnosis on a young man’s private struggles – that consistency never quite arrived for Hollands at Carlton. The output tapered, the opportunities dried up, and eventually list management does what list management does.

The Old Days Weren’t Kinder, Just Quieter

Now I’ll admit I’m the sort of grumpy old goat who thinks the VFL – sorry, the AFL, force of habit – has lost its way on plenty of fronts. Too much interchange rotation, too many rule tweaks from head office types who’ve never held a footy in a contest that mattered, and don’t get me started on the way they fiddle with the deliberate out of bounds rule every second season like it’s a broken telly. But on player welfare, I’ll concede the game has come a long way, and not before time either.

Back in my day, if a young bloke was doing it tough away from the footy, the general attitude from the club was to toughen up and get on with it. There wasn’t a lot of talk about mental health, about life outside the four white lines, about a player needing space to sort himself out as a person before he could ever be right as a footballer. We lost good players to that hardness, blokes who probably just needed someone to sit them down and ask if they were okay rather than accusing them of not trying hard enough. So when I hear that Hollands himself is framing this release in terms of perspective, of bigger things than footy, I don’t hear a failure. I hear a young man who’s had the courage to be honest about where his head’s at, and that takes more guts than kicking four in a final quarter.

What Carlton Owes Him Now

Carlton as a football club has a duty here that goes beyond the standard thanks-for-your-service press release with the photo of the player in club gear looking wistfully at the horizon. The Blues recruited this kid, invested in him, and by all reports have tried to support him through some genuinely difficult periods. That support shouldn’t just switch off the day his name comes off the official list. If the club is fair dinkum about the words it uses in these statements, the door needs to stay open, the welfare staff need to stay in contact, and someone at Ikon Park needs to check in on him in six months, not just issue a farewell tweet and move on to the next name on the whiteboard.

I’d also say this to my fellow Carlton supporters, the ones who like to grumble in the outer about wasted list spots and ‘another one who didn’t have it’ – have a bit of perspective yourselves. We’re quick to demand accountability from players on the field, and rightly so, footy is a results business at the pointy end. But when it comes to a young man’s mental health and personal battles, the loudest thing any of us should be doing is offering good wishes, not running our own commentary on what he ‘should’ have done differently.

Where To From Here

Whether Hollands gets picked up elsewhere on the rookie list, has a crack in the state leagues, or steps away from footy altogether to sort his life out, that’s his call and his alone. The game will always have a place for talent like his if he wants to keep chasing it, clubs love a project with upside and there’s no shortage of list managers who’ll run the tape back on his form from a few seasons ago and think there’s still something there worth a punt.

But if he doesn’t come back, if this is genuinely the end of his time chasing four quarters at the top level, then good on him for knowing his own mind and choosing himself over the club jumper. That’s not weakness, whatever the keyboard warriors reckon. That’s the sort of clarity plenty of blokes twice his age still haven’t found.

• Carlton’s list turnover continues into another rebuild phase under the current coaching group.
• Player welfare support post-delisting remains an area every club, not just Carlton, needs to sharpen up.
• Hollands leaves with talent unfulfilled, but with his health, hopefully, the main priority now.

The Grumbling Old Man’s Final Word

I’ll go back to grizzling about deliberate out of bounds and interchange rules next week, don’t worry, this old bloke hasn’t gone soft on head office’s tinkering. But on this one story, about this one kid, I reckon the whole footy community – Carlton people included, especialy – should just let him walk away with a handshake and a genuine ‘all the best’, rather than a scoreboard review of what might have been.