There’s a chance, if you didn’t watch a minute of Saturday afternoon at the MCG, you could look at the final score and think an 11-point loss to North Melbourne isn’t all that bad for Carlton.
To counter that, I offer a 46-point three quarter time deficit to a team with three wins and a draw on the board for the season, three goals in two and a half quarter on a beautiful afternoon for footy, and the sight of miserable Blues fans across the MCG, including one young fan in tears during the third quarter – and they were just the ones that stuck around.
North Melbourne lacking the desire to go for a complete kill, not scoring in the last quarter, and giving up three goals in the final two minutes to allow the Blues to add respectability to their scoreboard, shouldn’t let them nor Michael Voss off in the least.
This was a performance to justify fans’ frustrations after infinitely unimpressive recent wins over Essendon and West Coast, which exposed the major frailty with the Blues’ increasingly safe, boring game plan.
Everything that was in evidence in those two games, in which they dominated the first quarters and didn’t seem remotely interesting in continuing on for the remaining three, was on display against North Melbourne – with the obvious exception of being just nine points ahead at the first break this time instead of 39 and 33, as it was against the Eagles and Bombers.
Michael Voss looks despondent during Carlton’s loss to North Melbourne. (Photo by Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)
From there, they faced a Kangaroos team that sensed a kill – and especially around stoppages, Alastair Clarkson’s men wreaked havoc.
Some critics might point to this resting on the players alone – indeed, listening to Fox Footy in the immediate aftermath, the majority of the debate was around individuals choosing against fighting the fight, as if not wanting it enough is the reason for their troubles.
Maybe that’s the case – but to my eye, far, far more of it is around two aspects of the Blues’ set-up – structure and system. And both those things rest squarely on the coach.
Once again, as it has been for most of their last 18 months, the Blues leaked like a sieve from stoppages – the Kangaroos scored five goals from forward half stoppages, the area where most teams are on high alert and bunch numbers around the ball to make scoring directly from clearance wins tough.
The sixth of North’s second-quarter goals to break the game open, via a rampant centre bounce win, epitomised this.
Typically, teams will have a defensive sweeper at the back of a stoppage, or else push a half-back up to the ball, to deny Luke Davies-Uniacke the chance to burst out the front of the stoppage like this.
The Blues don’t until it’s far too late – Ollie Hollands comes off his line to make a despairing lunge – but the key issue is Patrick Cripps and George Hewett’s positioning. Both of them have been sucked up to the stoppage, with Cripps too close to allow for any change in direction from Davies-Uniacke and block his path, leaving him needing to take a despairing lunge to try, unsuccessfully, to hunt him down.
Not in comparison how far to the defensive side of the stoppage George Wardlaw is for North, even though they’ve won the clearance. Had the ball been going the other way via Cripps or Hewett, the Roos had the back-up plan that Carlton so obviously lacked.
This second forward half stoppage goal in the very same quarter – that came mere seconds before the centre bounce goal above – is a glaring example not just of the frailties in how the Blues defend at stoppages, but in mass confusion around where they are breaking.
Teams like Collingwood, the Western Bulldogs and Adelaide have set plans at their stoppages – watch them closely and you’ll notice how in sync they are, with designated lanes for set players, predetermined plays in which they flick the ball backwards, to the side or forwards, and as a result, they’re deadly at setting up scoring chains when it’s them winning the footy.
When Hewett picks up the ball, facing the Blues’ way, watch Blake Acres and Adam Cerra see him gain possession and immediately break forwards. With no one in front of him, Acres’ positioning suggests Hewett is meant to run forward, at the North sweeper, Finn O’Sullivan, and handball over the top to release one or even both of them.
That’s not what Hewett does, though: instead, he immediately goes backwards to Sam Docherty. It’s an offensively null move to start with, because not only is he under pressure, he’s running into congestion – all he’ll be able to manage, realistically, is the sort of high, hacked ball under duress that Blues fans have come to hate in recent years.
When Docherty fumbles, suddenly there are two Roos – Cerra and Acres’ opponents – goal side, and prepared to pounce. When Cerra comes back inside to try and win it back, or at least force a draw, out comes one of them, Colby McKercher, on the overlap to drive through a killing goal.
Hewett is having an excellent season, but often in recent weeks he has seemed stuck between roles – is he the defensive midfield stopper in the Josh Dunkley mould sitting on the opposition’s best midfielder, or is he expected to burst through stoppages and drive the Blues forward himself?
If it’s the former, he shouldn’t be looking for one-twos like he does with Jesse Motlop in the below clip, running himself into trouble and turning the ball over trying to be too creative in the corridor; if it’s the latter, his first instinct shouldn’t be to run backwards, which he does an awful lot.
Defensively, there’s a similar layer of confusion in how the Blues set up, leading to some truly ugly-looking passages on Saturday afternoon.
None were worse than this nightmare on the goal line in the second quarter, when Nick Larkey roved to give the Kangaroos a lead they wouldn’t relinquish.
This is almost entirely on the players, in particular Adam Saad, who clearly wasn’t anticipating Cam Zurhaar’s snap to fall short, and was made to look silly when Jacob Weitering’s despairing spoil right on the line only succeeded in handing a goal to his direct opponent.
At the same time, Weitering is desperately unlucky to have parried the ball back attempting to touch it through, buffeted as he was by Larkey at the last second.
All the same, you don’t see defensive lapses like this at Collingwood all that often. Or Geelong. Or, really, just about anyone except the true dregs of the competition.
Saad is an experienced head in defence, yet it doesn’t seem to have been drummed into him to be defensively accountable right until the moment the ball crosses the line. Is that a him problem, a problem with the message coming from above, or both?
Adding to these woes without the ball is what the Blues do with it: there’s surely not a slower-moving, more conservative team in the AFL, and with so many of the best teams in the league, including the current top two, playing with far more aggression and backing their skills to slice through their opposition, Carlton stick out like a sore thumb.
The Blues are the third-highest kicking team in the competition, behind only the Cats and Lions; they’re top-four for inside 50s, third for marks behind those other two again. Yet they’re in the bottom four for metres gained per disposal, and an even more alarming second-worst for kicking efficiency, ahead of only West Coast.
Effectively, they’re playing slow footy, not moving it forward, and turning it over. If the former is to try and avoid the latter, then it’s certainly not working.
Against North, the Blues racked up 113 marks, and finished with 14 more inside 50s. But the identity of their highest mark-takers tells you something about how they played: Sam Docherty tops the list with 16, Nick Haynes next with 11, and Jacob Weitering next with 10. All defenders, and none with more than 313 metres gained for the afternoon despite that volume of ball.
It’s a stark comparison to, say, Colby McKercher from North, who backed himself to run and carry the ball, and in the process gained 636 metres for his side from his 29 disposals.
The result was that a North Melbourne team with a famously leaky backline, against whom the Blues themselves kicked 24 goals back in Round 6, gave up just five goals up until the final quarter, at which point the Roos actively tried to shut down the game (and nearly shot themselves in the foot doing so).
It’s the same thing that saw them kick seven goals in the first quarter against West Coast and five for the rest of the game; or six against the Bombers to quarter time and then five more again in the final three terms: crippling, dangerous conservativism, embodied best by the repeated switching of a spare tall behind the ball late in quarters or whenever North Melbourne got a run on, in the process leaving them even more incapable of attacking moving forward. In a game, mind you, they were already well behind in, and actively needed to attack to swing things in their favour.
In all of this, it’s Voss who should be chiefly held responsible.
The Blues have not had an easy run on the injury front this year, but there is still a tremendous amount of talent in the resouces at hand, even on Saturday.
This is Voss’ fourth year at the helm, and it’s the same problems that still persist. Giving up scores from stoppages. A midfield with minimal defensive accountability. A backline that relies on Jacob Weitering to do far, far too much. A forward line that struggles to apply sufficient pressure despite having no surfeit of smalls.
And perhaps worst of all, a tactical inflexibility that has thus far proved incapable of fixing any of it, or finding solutions to counterbalance them with their many strengths.
It’s at this point when the Carlton of old’s tolerance would have run out, and Voss unceremoniously sacked.
It’s not a ploy that has served the Blues well in their two decades of near-constant misery – but having overseen the most talented squad this club has assembled in the 21st century, with just two single-figure finals wins and a likely bottom-eight finish in 2025 to show for it thus far, just how long do you give a man to turn something around he hasn’t been able to for four years?
