Then you’re a fool.
There are 18 clubs vying for 8 finals positions, 10 clubs are always going to miss out. Building a list that can compete in and win finals is not something that can be done overnight, and there’s no magic formula to doing so, and anyone who says otherwise is selling you something that it’d be a really bad move to buy.
We are right now rebuilding after a dreadful period from 2013-2019, in which we a) lost two years worth of high draft picks, in drafts which yielded the likes of Bontempelli, Brayshaw, Salem, Macrae and Cripps, then b) gambled on selling another three years worth of high draft picks for readymade players to compete while our topclass defence of Hurley/Hooker and our top forward line of Daniher/Fantasia/Tippa was in their prime, only to c) lose all those strengths to repeated major injury, age, and poor management between 2018 and 2020. Given all that, last year was heavily above realistic expectations. This year has been significantly below realistic expectations, and I want to know why.
I have high expectations for effort, discipline, cohesion, and committment on and off the field, and these expectations are not being met right now. But these are things that the club, the coaching staff, and the players can control in the short term, and i understand that even if sometimes a club in a list situation like ours with a week to week 22 as young and hole-filled as ours, is going to get overpowered by top teams. I DON’T have high expectations from a simple results point of view right now. Partly cos that’s not the list position we’re in right now, and partly because if you take care of the effort, discipline, coherence, and committment, the results will start to take care of themselves.
Simply popping online and preaching how you have high standards and don’t tolerate mediocrity and finals every year must happen is pissweak and deluded. Exactly what does ‘not accepting mediocrity’ even mean, in actual, concrete terms? You reckon Rutten should just show up to training this week and say “hey boys, bit of a change today, can you open your copy of the gameplan to page 22 and cross out the line where it says ‘accept mediocrity’ ok?” I assume you’d want to sack Rutten and retire Heppell for starters, and probably drop a bunch of the blokes who played this week. So who do you play instead?
And then when you delist 15 blokes at season end and we go into 2023 with 5 debutants in round 1 and a dozen blokes on the list from the ■■■■-end of the 7th round of the draft, and we lose by 100 points week on week and blokes like Merrett start saying ‘I’m not going through another poorly planned rebuild, I’m out of here’ then what do you do? Are you going to delist ANOTHER 15 blokes? Cos after all, you’re the guy who expects to play finals every year and doesn’t accept mediocrity, right?
Anyone serious has to actually understand the nuts and bolts of what’s going wrong, then work out a long-term plan to fix it, and have the wisdom and understanding that the plan will take a while to show consistent fruit. Shouting about toughness and mouthguard-in sessions and hufflepuffing about ‘accepting mediocrity’ is easy mode, and it’s basically step 1 on the Carlton train of leaping frantically on saviour after saviour and going nowhere. Real solutions are hard, and take time and patience. But if you’ve got any real solutions to suggest and want to put your money where your mouth is, I’d encourage you to run for the board at the end of the year.
