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There are two key storylines out of Friday night at the MCG – and they both look like having a major bearing on the rest of the season.
And I’m honestly not sure which one will prove to be the most significant.
Let’s start with Carlton: it’s official, there are now no excuses left to not have this team as a certainty for finals, and an honest-to-God premiership dark horse.
Who knows what the next five weeks have in store – this is Carlton, they certainly don’t need any help to spectacularly screw things up – but right now, they have won six games in a row, and beaten both the top two in the last three weeks, the latest a 17-point outmuscling of a full strength Collingwood that had none of the potential riders you could attach to their dismantling of a weakened Port Adelaide.
This is the Blues that everyone expected to see at the start of the season, the one I still thought was a chance of returning when I wrote in the middle of their six-game losing streak that opposition supporters should ‘enjoy every second of Carlton’s mediocrity… because I’d be surprised if, sometime in the near future, it doesn’t all come together’.
They handed the Magpies their biggest contested-possession belting of the season – it was 138-107 by full time, the lion’s share of the damage inflicted in a game-turning second quarter, and achieved despite not a single player having more than 11 individually.
They got back to their roots of dominating from clearances and generating scores from them – the Baggers bagged six goals to one from stoppages for the night, while winning 10 more clearances with a load spread across 14 different players.
Along the way, they burst through the front of stoppages and attacked with daring, speedy play again and again to divide and conquer the Magpie back six – in the second quarter, when they kicked four goals to one to take a stranglehold on the game they never relinquished, they averaged 35 extra metres gained per stoppage on the Magpies, famously the AFL’s most bull-at-a-gate team.
That’s the Carlton that tore teams to shreds from the coalface in the first half of last year. Little wonder they kicked six goals to one (a Magpies season-low) from stoppages to make the most of their contested ball dominance.
Jesse Motlop celebrates a goal. (Photo by Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)
They got full use out of Charlie Curnow, who looked every inch the destroyer of worlds he manifests into whenever the Blues get on a tear. Against an opponent in Darcy Moore who seldom loses a contest and gets taught a football lesson even more rarely, he had 2023’s most miserly defensive unit panicking with every touch, winning a swathe of unnecessary free kicks almost on presence alone, so menacing did he look every time he went near the ball.
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They completely and utterly shut down the Magpies’ trademark run and gun from defence, in no small part due to the frenetic tackling pressure of a group of smalls in Lachie Fogarty, Jesse Motlop and David Cuningham (two tackles inside 50 each as part of 12 for the game as a team, 10 of them in the first half).
At half time, the Pies had exited their defensive 50 26 times: they were able to bring the ball from end to end just four times. That makes nearly 85 per cent of the time the Blues were able to pressure, corral, harass or otherwise impede the ladder-leaders into a turnover or stoppage, which on the way they played, was effectively a turnover in itself.
They did what few teams have been able to do all year and withstand the inevitable Magpie burst in the third quarter, in which they launched 17 inside 50s to 6 while matching the Blues at stoppages for the first and only time all night.
The Blues’ defence has never been a weak spot this year, but with Jacob Weitering hitting peak form in the past five weeks, it is now a machine capable of suffocating even the most dangerous forward lines of all shapes and sizes.
And most impressively of all, not only did Weitering and co. restrict the Pies to two goals from that swathe of entries, but kicked three themselves to actually extend their lead amid the dominance. That’s a victory of the highest order for Michael Voss.
The most significant accomplishment of all? They did this without Sam Walsh, and Harry McKay, and Jack Silvagni, and Matthew Kennedy, and with Adam Cerra, best afield for the first two and a half quarters, pinging a hamstring and finishing the game on the bench and with a likely absence looming.
If a Magpies team with only Bobby Hill of its first-choice line-up, a raging juggernaut two games clear atop the ladder, can’t stop them, then who the hell can?
Hopefully that acknowledgement of everything the Blues did right at the MCG, and the fairly held opinion that they are right now the third- or even second-best team in the competition, is enough to satisfy readers of a Carlton persuasion that their magnificent performance has been given its due.
Because the equally significant storyline out of Friday night has little to do with them – for perhaps the first time since Craig McRae took over 18 months ago, the Pies’ luck went against them.
If Ken Hinkley was watching, and I’m sure he was, then you could forgive him hurling the remote at the TV with how Collingwood kicked in the second half, having nailed every half-chance at the Adelaide Oval last week.
Across the first 19 rounds, the Pies have been the second-most accurate team in the game with a strike rate of 57 per cent, behind only Fremantle, while also having their opponents rank as comfortably the least accurate, down at 46 per cent.
Part of that is due to the way the Pies play, regularly getting open goals or marks in the hot spot where set shots are easiest with their run and gun through the corridor and usually excellent kicking inside 50; in contrast, their heavy pressure and intercept marking ability often forces teams to take lower-percentage shots than they’d otherwise like, whether it’s from marks in the forward pocket or long hopeful pot shots.
But for all of that, goalkicking remains more of a lottery than most people realise or give credit to – and on Friday night, the Magpies kicked like they’d never seen a football before.
Jamie Elliott, the master of the clutch goal who nailed two blinders in the last quarter to sink the Power, sprayed them everywhere, finishing with three behinds. Brody Mihocek had two shots for the night and missed them both, the last a hugely gettable one in the last quarter to let the Blues off the hook just when it seemed a trademark comeback was about to ensue.
Dan McStay, Beau McCreery and even Nick Daicos all flubbed eminently sinkable shots – the Bronx cheers that rang around the MCG when Daicos sprayed out of bounds on the full deep into the last quarter perfectly summed up their conversion in front of goal. By the time Jeremy Howe was sent forward to kick three straight in the last quarter, it was too late.
The Pies kicking 10.16 is so much of an anomaly that it’s hard to read anything into this game, as well as Carlton played. Every comeback attempt hit a reef with a bad miss that instantly took the pressure off the Blues; in contrast, thanks partly to a few 50m penalties but also just through nailing every shot they should, the Blues made sure there was no avenue back.
Let’s put it this way: the Magpies, in Round 23 last year, kicked 5.1 in the last quarter, including this McCreery ripper, to break every Carlton supporter’s heart; the Blues, in that same term, kicked 0.6.
Luck manifests itself in many ways in footy, and part of being a good team is being able to ride it when it’s going your way, and react when it isn’t.
That’s one thing McRae has never had the need to sort out among his charges, who time and again have turned momentary blips of good fortune into an inescapable wave of momentum. Its complete absence on Friday night will surely have every other team in the AFL watching on interestedly.
If there’s one thing we learned about the Magpies, it’s this: they aren’t invulnerable. Their error-riddled defeat to the Blues might have come too late to cost them the minor premiership, but all it takes is a repeat in September to make things very interesting.
And right now, Carlton, having risen to fifth, are every chance of being in a position to capitalise should Lady Luck desert the Pies again when it matters most.
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