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There are two distinct schools of thought on what the Carlton Football Club should do with their embattled coach – some say he is the best person to lead the team through a rebuild and should be given another lengthy contract to get the job done, others want him sacked yesterday.
Up until very recently I was willing to continue down Mick’s path – concerned that jettisoning him now would simply waste the work he has done to this point as another coach builds the team in their own image.
I have now changed my mind.
1. No plan B
We all know Mick’s game plan, as he has had the same one for close to a decade now.
It revolves around long kicking, scrambling the ball forward in anyway possible (i.e hacking it forward from contested situations) and staying as close to the boundary as possible. But we are now in the third year of implementing this game plan, the results are getting worse, and we have seen no changes in strategy.
It seems Mick is prepared to keep turning over players at each year’s end until he has a team that can do what he wants, rather than adapt a plan to suit the team he has.
The really odd thing about this lack of plan B is that his predecessor copped all sorts of grief for not being able to go to a plan B when a game started going against him – Malthouse won’t adapt after two seasons going against him!
2) Selection
Given Malthouse’s game plan requires a forward able to crash packs and take contested marks, questions have to be asked why Levi Casboult wasn’t selected for Round 1 and why he was dropped for Round 5 so the Blues could play Cameron Wood and Robert Warnock in the same team. The line trotted out as to why he was dropped was so that he could get some confidence, which makes perfect sense as nothing gives a player confidence like being dropped!
The other major issue with selection is the opportunities provided to young players – Carlton are supposedly rebuilding this year and in the entire time Malthouse has been in charge it has been obvious we need to get games into some of our younger players so that they can improve and provide a platform for the future. Yet Nick Graham is still playing VFL, despite being in the best players 17 times from 21 starts, Dylan Buckley has never been given more than three games in a row despite winning a rising star nomination last year and many plaudits for his game against St Kilda this year, and Nick Holman was given just one game last year where he was played out of position in a side Port flogged by 20 goals.
On top of that even when these young players are selected they are routinely used as the sub and given limited game time before being sent back down.
What makes this treatment of young players even more curious is that Malthouse is selecting players like David Ellard and Dennis Armfield, who while they are good soldiers (and I have a lot of time for their effort) are 28 and 26 and are probably the definition of list cloggers.
3. Lack of performance
This is the biggest issue, a lot of people who defend Malthouse say that he couldn’t be expected to do any better with the list he has, but if you look at the 2011 semi-final side that lost to West Coast by under a goal you will see 12 players still on the list, with Bryce Gibbs and Matthew Kreuzer not playing the West Coast game due to injury.
The players missing are Jeff Garlett, Mitch Robinson, Eddie Betts, Jeremy Laidler, Heath Scotland, Nick Duigan, Bret Thornton, Setanta O’Hailpin, Aaron Joseph and Marcus Davies.
The first four have moved on under Mick’s reign and are currently performing adequately at other clubs, with the blues receiving essentially Dale Thomas and Clem Smith in return, the next two retired and the final four were delisted.
Now people can make their own judgements about the ranking of the replacements in today’s AFL, but the players who have come in are the equal of those who they replaced and the argument could be made that they are slightly better.
Some will observe that Jarrad Waite was not included in the 2011 side and for completeness I should point out that he only played 12 games in 2011 and kicked just 16 goals.
Now the question for me becomes if Brett Ratten could take that 2011 side to within a whisker of a preliminary final (after taking similar sides to finals in 2009 and 2010), why can’t Malthouse take the list he has out of the bottom four? And if the answer is that we have lost all of our best goal kickers since then whose fault is that – we lost Betts because his money was used to recruit Thomas (whose relationship with Mick is self evident), Mick delisted Garlett (who didn’t seem happy under Mick anyway) and Waite was in and out of the side under Malthouse and took job security at North.
For me if the the coach is unable to adapt, is unwilling to play the younger kids to build for the future, and unable to get the best out of his list he can not be kept on.
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