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I confess, I wanted to keep my club allegiance off limits here for no other reason than once it’s known who you support a raft of stereotypes and clichéd banter follows. It’s part and parcel of the AFL.
Inter-club rivalries are just one of the things that makes the game of Aussie Rules so great, especially between fans of the established Melbourne clubs.
So much history, so much banter, so much hate. And while most of it is pretty harmless and good natured, if you stop and think about it rationally it’s all pretty pointless stuff and by any reasonable measure not really based on any solid foundation.
Read the comments section after this article is published, you’ll see what I mean.
So here it is. I am Carlton!
Now, for all the non-Carlton fans I want you to think of the first three words that come to mind when you think of the Old Dark Navy Blues.
Okay, those of you who thought “salary cap cheats” put your hand up.
I’ll assume the rest of you thought “brown paper bags.”
We were guilty and we got our right whack. I was pissed off.
Pissed off at the AFL and pissed off at my club. I was pissed off at everyone.
But I was also part of the membership that mobilised to oust the board responsible for our self-inflicted wounds. I’m still quite proud of the way the Carlton members took a stand against those who sent us to the brink of collapse.
Make no mistake, we were almost gone. By any rational business measure we had no right to survive.
Deep down, I knew the AFL was right to punish us harshly, although I still think they went too far. But I would say that and I’m over it now.
It’s almost 11 years since Carlton was punished for its wrongdoings. Closing in on 4000 days. Alas, a conversation can barely go by today without non-Carlton fans referring to our previous sins.
We’ve paid the fine, sat out the draft for a couple of years and done our time. But everyone still says we’re salary cap cheats.
Never mind that almost every other club in the AFL has been sanctioned to some degree over the same offence. Big fines, draft penalties, yep, we’re not alone.
Never mind the reactions of the other clubs at the end of 2002 who were offloading players at the trade table like a closing down sale or asking their players to take pay cuts in fear of Ken Wood knocking on their door.
Chris Judd and the Visy deal? Yeah, I know, you think it was dodgy.
Never mind your own club probably had one or two players on a similarly structured agreement that had also been signed off by the AFL. Judd was at Carlton, so it just had to be salary cap cheating and no player from any other club could possibly have been benefiting from a similar deal.
Moreover, you’d never believe it if it wasn’t true, but one club has even been penalised for cheating the salary cap in a year they won a premiership. It wasn’t even us! You know who you are.
Actually, come to think of it, you probably don’t, which is why I’m here to let you know what the next ten years and beyond are going to be like.
Oh, that reminds me, I never could get the websites matthewlloyd.com or jameshird.com to load. I remember they were worth a lot of money back in the day. Maybe it was just me, you know how it was, dial-up was a bit unreliable in those days.
So, if the words most associated with Carlton are “Salary cap cheats” then Essendon fans had better prepare themselves for what is to come: allegations of ”drug cheats”.
It doesn’t actually matter what the real outcome is. It doesn’t matter what ASADA or the AFL finds when their painstaking investigation comes to a conclusion. It doesn’t matter what the penalties will be.
And there will be some. They will hurt and be salt into the wounds, for sure, but as far the average fan goes judgment day was back in February when Sir James was shocked to be sitting there.
The damage is done. The broader AFL fan-base will label your club as drug cheats for at least the next generation.
It doesn’t matter if you think Hirdy is a great bloke and it’s not fair. It doesn’t matter what you say in defence. It doesn’t matter what your club does to right its wrongs. It is now set in stone.
You should know, you and most everyone else have been slagging Carlton off since 2002.
As the days drew closer to what we Carlton fans refer to as “Black Friday” – when the AFL began to cruelly seal our fate just hours before the national draft – there were numerous stories in the media all with one purpose.
To shame our club into oblivion.
I couldn’t see it at the time of course, but we deserved it.
Caroline Wilson was the prime target of our rage. One of them anyway, there were quite a few if I recall. Every day there was a new article sending the club deeper into the mire. It wasn’t just Caro, of course, everyone was at it.
Grab a ticket, join the queue and give Carlton a whack. Even if you don’t want to, just do it because everyone else is!
Hell, this must be fun, they must have thought.
It wasn’t. It sucked. I hated it. And I wasn’t alone. We were a laughing stock. It was embarrassing.
Only Tony Shaw and Gerard Healy showed any sympathy of what was to come: years of ineptitude and failure.
The thing is, we had nobody else to blame. It was all the club’s doing.
Plus, for all of the talk from AFL house about not discussing probable penalties Caro’s infamous sources were bang on the money.
A massive fine and stripping of draft picks. She knew it all. Well before the AFL made it official.
Right about now I’m guessing the more reasonably minded Essendon fans out there – and despite some evidence to contrary in the current climate I do believe there are a few – will be thinking they have a lot more in common with the average Carlton fan than they ever knew.
Fans go through the following phases: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Me and every other Carlton fan have been there. All the while you were laughing at us, kicking us while we were down. We deserved much of what we got, but not that much.
Even though I’ve tried to give Essendon fans an insight into what lies ahead, like a lot of things in life, until you’ve lived through it, you have no idea.
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