Footy Fix: From pathetic to pummelling Port in 34 days - how breathtaking Blues have become footy's hottest team

Imagine if someone had told you, the night Carlton were smashed to smithereens by Essendon a little over a month ago, that four games on Carlton would lose Harry McKay to an ankle injury after ten minutes against a red-hot Port Adelaide – and still beat them by 50 points.

This was a win to confirm that all the promising signs in recent beatdowns of Gold Coast, Hawthorn and Fremantle were real, and not just taking the long handle to lesser teams. To so thoroughly dismantle one of the two leading premiership contenders in an otherwise even season, on a ground they have come to regard as a home and away from home, might just be the most emphatic performance anyone has produced in 2023.

It’s also unquestionably Michael Voss’ finest hour as Blues coach, and a vindication for all those at Carlton, publicly and privately, who backed him amid intense scrutiny during their dire six-match losing streak.

34 days after that fateful night of June 11, the Blues have won four on the trot, all between 50 and 60 points; they’ve ended the Power’s 13-game winning streak; and most preciously of all, they now sit just two premiership points outside the top eight.

It’s been quite a month for Carlton fans – and you can bet that right now, Collingwood supporters are looking at their upcoming blockbuster under the Friday night lights in two weeks’ time a little more nervously than before.

Jack Silvagni celebrates a goal. (Photo by Daniel Pockett/Getty Images)

The elephant in the room is, of course, the ball movement. Virtually every criticism about the Blues from a month ago – that they’re turnover merchants in defence, unwilling to take risks, chipping the ball sideways and then bombing it up the line – has vanished in a puff of smoke.

They are now ruthless, aggressive, and always coming at their opposition at fearsome pace.

In the first quarter alone, the Blues had 15 disposal chains starting in their defensive 50. Six of them ended with an inside 50 – that’s 40 per cent, almost three times the AFL average. Most teams can’t cope with that level of speedy transition – and Port are no different.

What was notable, though, was that even though six of their first 10 inside 50s found a teammate – again, a substantial increase on the AFL mean – it translated to only three marks inside 50.

Ordinarily, this might have presented as a problem for a Blues team with two major spearheads far and away ahead on their goalkicking charts in Charlie Curnow and Harry McKay, especially with the latter struck by injury. But on Saturday afternoon, Port’s greatest danger was at ground level.

This is another benefit to quick ball movement – even if the ball in doesn’t find a chest, there is more space for crumbers to operate in than when stagnant ball movement ends in a long, hopeful ball inside 50, with ample defenders back to clog things up, tackle, spoil and force a stoppage.

It was the first time all season the Blues have had one of Curnow or McKay kick multiple majors and not finish as their leading goalkicker: Curnow’s three wasn’t even enough for a top-two placing.

Instead, it was late in Jesse Motlop – who has surely played himself into a permanent spot in the best 22 – and the always on the fringes Jack Silvagni who were the chief destroyers of the Power, with four each.

The pair are very different footballers and kicked their goals in very different ways – but both benefitted enormously from the greater space afforded to them by the Blues getting it into attack quickly, deep and with purpose.

Silvagni, with a mismatch for much of the evening against the smaller Miles Bergman, was a menace in the air, clunking two strong marks inside 50 in his bag and proving too strong for Xavier Duursma in this tussle near goal for the Blues’ first.

Silvagni is the sort of footballer that needs this style to thrive: excellent in 2022, he has found himself drifting to the outer this season, as a lot of third tall forwards do at struggling clubs. He’s not the aerobic monster that Charlie Curnow is, nor a man mountain like Harry McKay, and as a result, he’s often got lost in the swamp of players that has been the Blues’ attacking 50 for much of the year.

But give him an opportunity one out against a third key back like Bergman, and his strong hands and good size make him a dangerous aerial opponent, and his follow up grunt work and surprising turn of pace suddenly make him quite a difficult match-up.

Motlop is a classic small forward – with that surname, how could he not be? It’s just about the toughest job in footy these days, requiring both goal nous in tight spaces and ferocious pressure without the ball – all without the praise the sharpshooters get.

It’s often a low-possession, low-scoreboard impact role: think Charlie Spargo or Jason Castagna of recent premiership players, or Gryan Miers to some degree. Charlie Cameron has been the standout small forward in the game for years precisely because the Lions modify their forward line to give him the best chance at kicking goals, a luxury no other proper small in the league is talented enough to command.

Motlop, one day, could be another. No doubt he was helped greatly by the predictability of the Blues’ ball movement going inside 50 – it was either hitting up a target, or straight to the hot spot, 25 or so metres out and all but directly in front – but you’ve still got to be good to time perfectly your run for the ball to make the most of the split seconds of opportunity that come your way.

Motlop’s third and fourth goals were so eerily similar as to prove both those points perfectly. For his third, a long kick inside 50 targets Charlie Curnow, 15 metres from goal, one on one with Aliir – the sort of contest that strikes fear into the heart of any key defender in the game. It’s also what the Blues were either unabling to or unwilling to set up in the early rounds (or both!), for reasons we may never properly know.

Aliir is good enough to prevent Curnow marking outright, but with one arm stretched up, the big Blue brings it to ground, with Lachie Jones flying across as the third man up to offer his teammate aerial support. At ground level, though, it’s a three on three, soon to be a four on four, and the evenness of the numbers leaves the Power at the mercy of the bounce in a way that would be far less likely if they’d had the time to set up more bodies inside defensive 50.

Motlop is Jones’ man, and him leaving to impact the contest means he needs to get the Sherrin to safety, or suffer the consequences. He can’t, and with the ball bouncing away from the oncoming Tom Jonas, Motlop has enough time to gather, roll onto his right foot, dodge a would-be tackler, and slot a stylish-looking but ultimately pretty straightforward goal.

A lot of the cries earlier in the season for Carlton to be more aggressive with ball in hand came in regard to them maximising the Curnow-McKay combination and giving them ample marking chances near goal, but this shows that the positive effect it has goes beyond just those two. Which, should McKay’s ankle injury prove serious, becomes even more crucial as September looms.

Motlop’s fourth, a minute and a half later, might as well be the first on repeat: again it’s a long kick inside 50, and again Curnow has been isolated against Aliir, with four Blues teammates rushing in for crumbs four Port players arriving to help Aliir.

Curnow even brings the ball to ground with another one-handed palm, Aliir continuing to pull his left arm down through methods either shrewd or illegal – I’m yet to decide. It doesn’t matter much anyway.

At ground level, the bouncing ball is again misread by Power defenders, with both Jones and Jonas watching it tumble out of their grasp, but Motlop is drawn to the footy as if it’s magnetised. Lightning quick, he gobbles the opportunity up, skidding through another goal from 30 out.

Cue pandemonium.

The Blues kicked goals like this all day, scoring nine majors to three from general play to run the Power ragged. Add to that 14 marks inside 50 from the times they were able to find a chest or a strong mark – mostly from Curnow – and little wonder the Blues bagged 18 of them.

It helps as well when you have a spearhead like Curnow who’s just as dangerous in the air as at ground level: indeed, while Aliir was mostly his equal under the high ball, as soon as the ball hit the ground the 2021 All-Australian looked woefully out of his depth.

And one more example just for good measure – over to you, Jack Silvagni.

But that’s just one part of the story – the Blues’ attack has been great, but it’s achieving it without compromising an already watertight defence that has been Voss’ greatest achievement in the last five weeks.

Up until the end of Round 13, the one positive you could take out of Carlton’s season was their defence. Voss was originally brought in as coach for David Teague to work on the Blues’ structure without the ball, which was just about nonexistent under his predecessor.

35 games into his tenure, and the Blues had the fifth-best defence in the league, for all their flaws elsewhere. Just twice in their first 13 games – to Adelaide and Brisbane – did they concede more than 86 points in a match. They just couldn’t score.

But it’s one thing to just flick the switch and be more aggressive, and another to stop it biting you in the backside when it doesn’t work out. We’ve seen that with Fremantle this year: their switch to a more attacking, handball-happy game mid-season briefly turned their year around, but as teams grew wise to their approach turnovers have become more frequent, and over their last six games have conceded more than 94 points per match – 10 higher than in their first 11.

As of Round 18, that hasn’t happened yet with Carlton: indeed, with Jacob Weitering in vintage touch, Adam Saad slowly returning to his All-Australian best and Nic Newman having a career year that is totally flying under the radar, they’ve got the personnel to hold firm with their current ranking of the AFL’s fourth-stingiest defence.

Indeed, conceding 62 inside 50s to a Port Adelaide team chock full of stars in midfield, with seven on the deadly boot of Connor Rozee, and yet conceding only 10 goals is arguably the most impressive part of the whole show.

A big part of it is pressure on the ball-carrier, most readily obvious in the Power’s number of handballs. With a kick-handball ratio of 1.59:1 heading into Saturday evening, Port have kicked the ball this year with more regularity than any team in the competition bar Brisbane and Gold Coast.

It’s a key reason for their success. Where they smothered themselves last year with mountains of ineffectual possessions, similar to the Blues of earlier this year – the most galling example having 74 more disposals and 12 more inside 50s than Hawthorn in a match and still losing at home by 10 goals – this year they are fast, direct, and deadly.

At half time, though, the Power had 199 disposals to their name – on track for their second-most for the season by a sizeable margin – though only 101 of them were kicks. That’s nearly a kick for every handball.

The reason why? The Blues locked down on the Power’s ball movement from all angles, preventing them from moving the ball with their usual fluency and dare: where the Blues ran at six from 15 defensive 50 chains to inside 50s in the first quarter, Port sat at zilch from 10.

Instead of Rozee or Zak Butters bursting out the front of centre bounces with murderous intent, here it was Willem Drew and Ollie Wines being forced into pressured handballs out the back, with each subsequent pass only upping the Blues’ ante. By the time the ball eventually found it’s way into a dangerous Port position, up the wall had been set, with Weitering, McGovern or the emerging Brodie Kemp taking full advantage with swathes of intercepts.

This is even an improvement on 2022, where the Blues mostly needed to dominate clearances outright to win, losing four of the six matches they were shaded in the count and going 1-4 in matches where they won it by less than five. Port actually ended with more clearances for the evening, despite Patrick Cripps collecting 10 himself: the difference was efficiency.

The die was cast in the early minutes, where the Power won four of the first five centre bounces but couldn’t score from any of them. It’s one thing to get first use, and quite another thing to actually benefit from it.

It’s this factor that is most frightening about what Carlton did to Port Adelaide at Marvel Stadium: because with the awesome talent and depth they have amongst midfielders, to dominate a premiership contender while giving up more inside 50s AND more clearances suggests that what they’re doing isn’t just sustainable, but actually IMPROVEABLE.

Right now, you could make a convincing case that the Blues are playing like a top-four side in the comp: their early season losses have likely put paid to finishing that high, but everything from fifth down is still wide open.

And wherever they finish up, if the Blues can hit September in this sort of form… look out. McKay or now, Carlton are back in the hunt, and Port will surely not be the last quality opponent to feel the wrath of the Baggers at full flight in 2023.