No Song And Dance, Just Wins: Fraser’s Made His Case

I’ve sat through enough Carlton coaching appointments in my time to know when the club’s about to embarrass itself with a fancy overseas presentation and a bloke in a tight suit talking about ‘alignment’. This time, mercifully, there’s none of that carry-on. There’s just a quiet fella from the footy department who’s gone and flogged the reigning premiers by 76 points, and half the club’s membership base is now wondering why we’d bother looking anywhere else.

Josh Fraser wasn’t meant to be anything more than a seat-warmer. That was the plan, wasn’t it. Get through the back half of the season, keep the group ticking over, don’t frighten the horses, and let the football department go off and find themselves a ‘name’ for next year, some bloke with three flags and a media profile who talks about ‘connection’ and ‘buy-in’ till you want to put your head through the telly. Instead we’ve got a fella who’s done the hard yards at Werribee and in the twos, who wouldn’t know a corporate buzzword if it bit him, and the players are playing like they’d run through a brick wall for him.

The Brisbane result wasn’t a fluke, it was a statement

Seventy-six points against the premiers is not something that happens by accident, not against a Brisbane outfit that’s beaten everyone worth beating over the last eighteen months. You don’t put a score like that on the reigning flag-winners unless something’s fundamentally shifted in the way your group is playing the game, and thinking about the game, and more importantly believing in each other out on the ground. I’ve watched enough demoralised Carlton sides over the journey — and don’t get me started on some of them, we’d need another six columns — to know the difference between a side going through the motions and a side that’s actually enjoying playing footy again.

This lot are enjoying it. You can see it in the way the young blokes are running off half-back, the way they’re backing themselves to take the game on instead of the sideways-and-backwards rubbish we’ve had to cop for years under previous regimes who shall remain nameless (though you all know who I mean). There’s a freedom about them that wasn’t there in the first half of the season, when half the group looked like they were playing with the handbrake on and the other half looked like they’d rather be anywhere else.

No aura, and thank god for that

The thing I keep coming back to with Fraser is there’s no aura about the bloke, and in this day and age that’s about the highest compliment I can pay a coach. We’ve had enough ‘auras’ at Carlton over the decades, enough blokes who walked in thinking the job was about them and not about the six 44 blokes out on the park every Saturday, or Thursday, or whatever ridiculous timeslot they’ve dreamed up this year to squeeze another dollar out of the broadcast deal.

Fraser doesn’t do the vows. He’s not out there telling anyone he’s going to ‘own it’ or ‘lean into the process’ or any of that guff you hear from coaches who’ve clearly had media training shoved down their throats by some bloke on six figures in the comms department. He just fronts up, does the work, and lets the players do the talking out on the ground. It’s very old school, and I mean that as the highest praise going, because there’s a lot to be said for a coach who’s spent time in the trenches at Werribee, learning his craft the hard way instead of parachuting in from some interstate club with a flag on his resume and a chip on his shoulder about how things are done at Carlton.

What the players are actually saying with their footy

You don’t need a translator to work out what this playing group thinks of Fraser. They’re saying it every week with the way they’re running out games, the way the younger brigade — and there’s a nice crop of them coming through now, which is more than I could say for a few years there — are taking the game on instead of playing like they’re terrified of making a mistake. That fear, that tightness, it’s gone. A demoralised group doesn’t turn around and put 76 points on the premiers. That takes trust, and trust takes time, and normally it takes a lot more time than Fraser’s had.

There’s a solid body of evidence building here, and it’s not built on spin. It’s built on wins, and on a playing group that looks like it actually wants to be at the club.

Head office will want to overthink this, they always do

Now here’s where I get my customary grumble in, because you know the football department upstairs, with all their algorithims and their high-performance consultants and their whiteboards full of arrows pointing at each other, will be sitting in some meeting room right now trying to convince themselves that a proven senior coach from interstate is the safer option. That’s how it always goes at this club. We overthink the bleeding obvious until we’ve talked ourselves out of the thing that was staring us in the face the whole time.

Back in my day — and yes, I’m allowed to say that, I’ve earned the right after forty-odd years of members’ tickets — you didn’t need a psychology degree and a wellbeing coordinator to work out whether a bloke could coach a footy side. You looked at whether the players ran through him, whether the side improved, whether they turned up each week with a bit of steel in them. By every one of those old-fashioned measures, Fraser’s ticked the box. He’s not going to give head office a flashy unveiling with lights and smoke machines, but since when did that ever win us a flag.

The case, in the end, makes itself

I don’t reckon Fraser needs Trev Whitlam or anyone else banging the drum for him at this point, because the ladder position and the percentage and the look on the players’ faces after the final siren against Brisbane are doing plenty of talking on their own. But I’ll bang it anyway, because that’s what I’m here for. Give the bloke the job, drop the interim tag, and let him keep building what he’s started without some new fella coming in over the top and undoing eighteen months of hard-won trust.

The VFL days taught me one thing above all else — the clubs that overcomplicate the simple things are the ones that stay in the wilderness longest. Fraser’s kept it simple. The results are there. Don’t let head office talk themselves into stuffing it up.