It’s a bitter, cold winter’s day in the month of July and the crowd’s mighty roar like a Formula 1 racing car warms up the showcase of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. meat pie in hand and we’re set for a great game of Australian Rules football conduced with a 70,000 plus crowd between Carlton and Collingwood.
As the club song suggests “we are the navy Blues, we are the old dark navy Blues, we’re the team that never lets you down.” This was the case up until 2002. The tremendously successful Carlton Football club has an aura of no other sporting club in the world. Hailing from inner-city Melbourne the blues have a large following with the success of sixteen premierships which is an equal record for VFL/AFL history (with Essendon).
The Carlton football club boasts a winning record over most of their opponents including the big guns Richmond, Essendon and Collingwood which is a might fine effort as they can’t say the same thing. Those communist teams from Fremantle, Brisbane and Port Adelaide can only boast a better winning record. They don’t count anyway because they are interstate teams and they have a tendency to cheat as they steal Carlton’s players as they use to be able to recruit anyone across the plains but now that luxury has been given up all for powerhouse interstate teams.
Up until 2002 Carlton rarely finished outside the finals race, they had very few stand out players as the teams need were on the agenda before any personal glory is what Geelong did with Gary Ablett. Let me get one thing straight I hate it when people who wouldn’t know football if came up and punched them right in their smug little faces tell me that Carlton are a football team of poor quality. It usually goes like this:
“LOL! Carlton suck, they’ve always sucked, LOL, I’m so original
and funny, I know heaps about football, Carlton are lame.”
Then there’s those people who actually know what they are talking about, who know their football and would know football if it came up and punched them in their smug faces. They know about the 110 years of football before hand when Carlton dominated but they choose ignorance of over the truth just to gain a couple of minutes of personal pleasure from the first type of people I mentioned. They tend to say:
“Yeah, I agree Carlton have always been a bad team. I am saying this
For personal pleasure, I like selling out; I’m the Kyle Sandilands of football supporting.”
From 2002-2006 Carlton has had a lean patch of Australian Rules football. Here are there positions on the ladder from this particular period of time:
2002: 16th
2003: 15th
2004: 11th
2005: 16th
2006: 16th
I say when you’ve had 110 years of sweet success you’re due for a bad patch. Every team has had many bad patches; they get more than once in every 100 years so really it is just evening out the Kiel. This is backed up by a long time Carlton supporter Os Burger “All teams go through down patches; it is just a development process for the team.
For me it just tests your true colours and separates the true, hardcore fans from the posers”
Off field turmoil has contributed to Carlton’s downfall in recent seasons as the finances went down to Timbuktu and former champions retired. “In 2002 the club both underwent off-field and in-field turmoil. Mounting losses and accounting irregularities finally caught up with club president John Elliot. The club was in trouble with its finances, morale was depleted, old men were taking the field, and champions from the past were all gone” Wikipedia sums it up all in these sentences, with the once mighty Blues capitulating from being a major super power like the Australian cricket team to a minnow like the Dutch cricket team.
The board of any sporting team is meant to enhance the works of a club, keep finances intact and in general help the club be in a good all round situations.
Os Burger believes that the board of the Carlton football club have too much input into the club. That they should shut their mouths and stick to the football “the board should ‘get stuffed’; they have too much say in and just complicate matters further”
Let me get one thing straight I don’t dislike the Collingwood football club, I hate them. They hail from inner-city Melbourne, they smell funny, they are poorly-educated and all in all they are gambling, drunken Yobo’s and that my friend grinds my gears. They are smug and arrogant and disregard everyone else’s feelings, they somehow slur out some incoherent words mainly swearing, they milk cows and have an average intelligence of a Rodge times pi divided by Lachie with a sprinkling of Andrew O’Keefe. Why are we talking about Collingwood in this essay of Carlton predominance? Well these two proud clubs have formed the fiercest rivalry in Australian if not the world. I refer you to the first paragraph of this writing piece as this is a typical game of Australian Rules football for these two teams and believe me there is no better feeling when you hear the final siren and the crowd erupts in a thunderous roar and you realize that the mighty Blues have taken home the bacon and you see Joffa and the rest of the Collingwood cheer squad swallowing their unworthy pride. Os Burger also has an opinion on arch nemesis Collingwood “Collingwood are scum, they are under-educated gits, they have bad teeth, gambling, drunk idiots; all that is Collingwood is personified through Joffa which is a very bad thing.”
So what’s next for this famous club? Will they break down the barriers and return to form with a finals appearance in 2007? Or will the arduous task of the interstate clubs see to the bottom rung again? According to afl.com.au (Lerner, 2006) Carlton have got another few seasons of pain before any sort of finals appearance can be heard of and should be aiming for a minimum of five wins in 2007. His reasoning is that for a club that has only won 24 games out of its last 110 outings expectations must be low.
For me I agree with that to a certain extent but I also think that coach Dennis Pagan has a point “Look at where Fremantle were three or four or five years ago. You look at St Kilda. There's only one way you're going to get forward.” (Pagan, 2006) With the aptly named ‘super draft’ Carlton has three top twenty picks including the number one pick, they have Marc Murphy who impressed many until that blasted shoulder injury ended his season and Josh Kennedy a tantalizing prospect up forward. As long as we have the 2006 Coleman Medalist, Brendan Fevola a cornerstone up forward and Koutifidies leading the midfield with the likes of Heath Scotland and Nick Stevens and up back with Brett Thornton and Lance Whitnall who can forward as well.
Despite the recent seasons of trials and tribulations no one can deny the success before hand that the Carlton football club. They are an integral part of Australian Rules football, history embedded and still boast winning records that other teams could poke a stick at. In conclusion has the Carlton Football Club is the team that never lets you down whether they win or lose no one can me persuade otherwise. Bring on 2007.
