Coach sackings are rarely edifying affairs but every now and then – Collingwood and Nathan Buckley spring to mind – they’re handled with a modicum of class and decency. Yet they’re almost always acrimonious. Stuart Dew’s sacking felt particularly grubby. It was a dog’s breakfast, really. He was made to look like a mug. They backed him, then sacked him.
The press release announcing his departure was farcical, even by footy departure standards. It made him sound like he’d just passed away. Footy coaches aren’t building orphanages or splitting atoms, but they’re entitled to some basic dignity. On his weekly radio slot with Neil Mitchell, Gil McLachlan said it “feels like a club that has decided to grow up in my view.” If that’s the view from the top, and to the best of my knowledge he’s still running this competition, then it’s a rather sad state of affairs.
The leaks, the bloodlust, the weasel words – they rarely reflect well on the industry. As a Guardian AFL columnist, the only leaks I’m getting are coming from my five-month-old daughter. But everyone’s blades are sharpened. A month ago, I was far too quick to write off Michael Voss. I was like a Footy Classified panellist or Gold Coast Chairman Bob East, who exited customs, flicked his cowlick, fielded the call from league headquarters, and sacked Dew. Michael Voss, I wrote, didn’t have a signature victory in his time at Carlton. Six weeks of shanks, sideways dinks and psychotic talkback rants had swayed me – the coach had to go.
In my defence, I was hardly on my Pat Malone. But there were several prominent media figures who backed him in. “I understand that (sacking him) if you just want to look at the win-loss sheet, which in the end is the thing that hires and fires,” David King said. “But if that’s all you’re looking at, then you’re going to bounce around and change with the breeze every two weeks.” Voss, he insisted, was actually coaching well. Their problems, he said, simply came down to execution. I remember listening to that thinking: “David, we’re watching two completely different sports.”
But a month later, it holds up. In the second quarter of the Gold Coast game, an enormous weight was lifted from Carlton. They’d scratched and poked around in the opening term, and the visitors probably should have cashed in. But the next half hour was a giant exhale. The Blues kicked 9.3, eight of those from centre clearances. Voss said he’d been expecting that sort of football for two or three weeks, “There’s been a storm on the outside and calm on the inside,” he said. The 29,000 or so Blues fans who turned up deserved to see football of that quality. Like a Test cricket crowd, they stood and applauded the players as they walked off at half-time.
So what changed? How could a team playing execrable football six weeks earlier turn up on Saturday and wallop a Port Adelaide side coming off 13 wins in a row? Voss says it comes down to greater pressure and an even spread of contributors. Jack Martin, Lachie Fogarty and David Cunningham have certainly added a bit of class, speed and mongrel to their forward set up. Blake Acres and Jack Silvagni both probably played their best games for the club. The view persists, particularly outside of Carlton, that Silvagni has been gifted an AFL career by virtue of his surname. But he’s hardly blessed with an abundance of natural talent. He’s an old school grafter, a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none. He was superb on Saturday. So too Patrick Cripps, whose tackling and smothering were phenomenal. Again, his turnaround tracks back to the first few seconds of the second quarter in that Gold Coast game.
On Saturday night, Voss was asked how he would handle expectations from here on. “I hope we give it as much attention as we gave it six weeks ago,” he said. “The reality is, whether people are saying bad things about you, or good things about you, you have to treat it the same.” All the coaches speak like that. They all echo Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’. It’s all well and good until the Bob Easts of this world tap them on the shoulder and tell them their time is up. One minute they’re preaching “it’s never as good as it seems, and it’s never as bad” and the next minute they’re being farewelled in a press release that reads like an ‘In Memoriam’ notice.
It’s a pitiless caper. Gil McLachlan says sacking Dew was a “hard-edged football decision” and the sign of maturity. A month ago, I would have said the same thing about Voss. Carlton ignored the noise – from pokies magnates, from ledge loiterers, from membership microwavers, and from Guardian columnists - and were rewarded with the best football of the Michael Voss era.
