Thursday night at the Adelaide Oval saw Carlton, for the first time all season, stripped back for the footy world to see.
There was no red-hot start to mask inadequacies after quarter time. There was no final-term fadeout from an opposition that slackened off to make the scoreline look respectable.
Jacob Weitering walked wounded, Patrick Cripps looked for all the world like a man whose mid-week illness should have prevented him from playing.
And this is the result. A rabble 50 points worse than a Port Adelaide team with a similarly under-the-pump coach, coming off a similarly disappointing loss at home last week, which at times this year has seemed in a similar state of disrepair.
Perhaps the only positive to come out of it for the Blues is that there can be no excusing, sidestepping or explaining away what unfolded. This was the performance of a team broken, and with no idea how to fix it.
The look on Michael Voss’ face throughout the evening, both up in the coaches’ box and when he moved to the interchange bench to witness the carnage up close, was that of a man whose footballing life is flashing before his eyes.
The lack of a response from his team to a week of scrutiny – and even worse, an actual regression in pressure, structure and perhaps commitment as well – would have been a death knell to many a Carlton coach over the last two decades. This is a more stable, less reactionary club off-field these days, but it may well prove the moment Voss’ tenure became untenable for 2026.
It’s difficult to know where to begin in analysing the wreckage. But perhaps the most concerning is the Blues’ defence, their strongest suit by a mile for the first half of this season, being shredded for the second week in a row.
Weitering’s regression, surely the result of his ankle injury on Thursday night, has simultaneously ripped out the most reliable pillar down back for the Blues, and showcased how vulnerable the edifice was to begin with if that’s all it took to bring it crumbling down.
Opposed for much of the night to Mitch Georgiades, the gun Blue was a step off the face from start to finish – unable to go with the Power star in the air, on the lead or on the ground, the sight of Weitering flailing, eyes off the ball, in the back pocket, missing the footy entirely and letting Georgiades snatch a mark virtually at ground level, was as unedifying as any moment in his career.
For a while now, Weitering has been expected to be the be all and end all for the Blues down back: both their chief intercept marker and certified monster-stopper, not even the emergence of Jack Silvagni as an AFL standard key defender has shared any of that load.
The midfield has long had sizeable issues with a surfeit of ball-hunters and a simultaneous lack of both role players and breakaway pace, the latter exacerbated by the absence of Sam Walsh and the former crippled by Cripps’ slump into genuine mediocrity.
Like Weitering, Cripps has had to shoulder an intense burden for many years; as captain and as designated contested ball monster, he has looked as broken as the rest of his team for much of 2025, less than a year after smashing the Brownlow Medal votes record into smithereens.
Opposed for much of the night to Miles Bergman, the Power’s strategy was remarkably disrespectful to Cripps’ standing in the game: Bergman’s tagging duties began and ended at the coalface, with his task from therein to look to punish the Carlton skipper with his biggest weakness – pace.
With six inside 50s and two goals, Bergman was arguably best afield on Thursday night – the contrast to Cripps, whose game-high eight clearances only yielded him and his team 191 metres gained and 17 disposals, was stark. Cripps barely had a meaningful disposal at the Adelaide Oval; Bergman seldom had one that wasn’t.
Structurally, the Blues are all at sea, with the reliance on battling stars growing more profound with every passing week.
The ease with which Port were able to make mincemeat of the Blues’ set-up behind the ball was glaring, none more so than this fast break from half-back that saw the Power chain handballs through Blue after Blue nominally clogging up space, with the spare behind the ball compelled to sprint up and fail to smother Mani Liddy’s kick inside 50, thereby leaving a leading lane perfectly clear for Georgiades to burst into.
By this point, Weitering had been relegated to minding resting ruckman Dante Visentini; that he likewise led the Blue to the ball is tremendously troubling.
Port’s slick hands were given ample time and space all evening, allowing them to repeatedly slice the Blues open with sheer pace and turnovers at a minimum.
Readily apparent with every handball, though, was the Blues’ inability to shut it down; in the below play, the Carlton of old would have forced a turnover or a stoppage from either Zak Butters’ or Bergman’s handballs in congestion, only for this time, the seas to part and allow the Power access into the corridor.
From where, of course, questions like ‘how is Travis Boak goalside of four different Blues and in a paddock of space on the edge of 50?’ and ‘what on earth are the backs meant to do?’ feel almost moot.
Compare the absence of pressure there, then, to Port’s, whose excellent performance will be but probably shouldn’t be masked by the Blues’ inadequacies.
Bergman’s relentless harassing of Adam Cerra in the below play turns a likely Blues clearance into a loose ball; for him to re-enter the fray quicker and find himself perfectly placed to slot a long goal was just the luck he deserved.
Again, though, it’s hard to know what on earth the Blues’ plan was here. At the start of the play, Tom De Koning deliberately sags off his opponent, Jordon Sweet, remaining ten metres ahead of the ball – an ideal space if the Blues can win a clearance and move the footy forward.
But as Cerra, running backwards, struggles to gather, there’s no zippy half-back running past for the handball receive: Ollie Hollands, the closest thing to that, is being closely checked by Darcy Byrne-Jones, in the end merely clogging up space around Cerra and having no impact on the contest.
The result is that it’s Byrne-Jones who wins the footy, drawing George Hewett, and allowing for an easy over the top handpass to Hewett’s now free man in Butters. It’s an outnumber always likely to result in a deep entry, all due to the weak link that is De Koning staying forward of the ball without sufficient Blues representation pushing up into that contest to replace him.
The result? 16 Power goals on the board, including three from centre bounces in the third quarter alone, and half their majors from defensive half.
And much of the damage came, most debilitatingly of all, during the period the Blues actually began to get on top around the ground, albeit with the horse having well and truly bolted.
This newfound defensive frailty makes the Blues’ crippling inefficiency going forward themselves even grimmer, and makes it all the tougher to be a Carlton fan at the moment.
Where Georgiades was repeatedly hit up on the lead by laser-like Power kicks inside 50, the Blues blazed, bombed and hacked away themselves, giving Charlie Curnow precious little chance no matter how hard he worked.
In the middle two quarters, the Blues actually had two extra inside 50s on the Power, yet managed just four goals from 27 attacking entries – all the while, Port racked up intercept marks, with 13-2 the tally at half time.
The funniest moment of the night was the one occasion the Blues doing this actually worked – and the only reason it did was because Curnow was so busy fighting two Power defenders, including Aliir Aliir, that it took both out of the game, letting the footy get out the back from the kick inside 50 with Aliir arriving moments too late.
Then there’s the finishing – having been comprehensively outplayed for the first three quarters, the final gut-punch for Blues supporters was a final term largely dominated, only to largely go to waste due to some comical kicking for goal.
Even here, though, signs of the team’s mass confusion as to both their roles and, let’s be honest, basic footy IQ, is glaring.
Mitch McGovern’s unfathomable out on the full here, for instance…
Most of the blame here will be aimed at either Curnow’s sloppy kick inside 50 with two teammates clear, or McGovern’s horror shank with the open goal in front of him.
But I want to talk about Sam Docherty. With a free goalsquare ahead of him, and McGovern clearly set to get to the footy first no matter how it bobbles, the right move would be to continue to run into the open goal, and allow his teammate to freely pass to him, or else draw the attention of the oncoming Connor Rozee for long enough to let McGovern close the angle himself.
Instead, Docherty stops, turns away, executes possibly the worst shepherd in footy history on Rozee that neither slows him nor allows McGovern to get past, and the result is that by the time McGovern kicks, he has the Port captain closing in, and has been hemmed into an angle that means a certain goal is now anything but.
In a similar vein, in the final minute, while Charlie Curnow strolling in under no pressure and spraying another kick out on the full was amusing…
… I’m still trying to work out why Blake Acres is kicking some 40 metres backwards after taking the mark in space right next to the goalsquare, with plenty of space to turn himself to goal and try to snap through on his left foot.
This is a team that, if they weren’t already broken, were shattered into smithereens by Port Adelaide on Thursday night.
And the most brutal truth of all for Carlton? It might be at the point that, even if Voss is indeed made the scapegoat for what is increasingly looking like an annus horribilis, this playing group is too far gone to turn things around with its most talented generation the Blues have seen this century.
