Thinking back only 5 years ago at this time of year.

We had just beaten Adelaide to set up a semi-final berth against Richmond - a game we went on to lose Kouta to a knee injury and also to lose on the scoreboard.

We had just had three reasonably good years of making finals and missing our opportunities to win our 17th flag.

WE weren't a great team but we were competitive and with a bit of luck who know's where we could have gone.

Come Round 1 2002, we were already a mess. Smashed by St. Kilda in Round 1 things just didn't get any better.

Had the playing list changed significantly? No.
Had the Board changed significantly ? No.
Had the coaching panel changed significantly? No.

Our playing personnel, our Board and our coaching staff were all pretty much the same as they had been for the previous 3 years.

My questions for those who apparently have "good sources" and someone "close to the board" is this.
What the hell happened during the summer of 2001-2002 to cause this club to plummet from lofty heights down to the bottom of the ladder.

What poison infected the club at all levels to cause this slide?

Where there rumours of bed-hopping shenanigans from the coach/captain/president etc a-la Wayne Carey?

Was there a Mr. Big in the drug trade occupying a seat on the Board?

Were there repurcussions from promises made by the President to a new State Government that finally came home to roost?

Did the Aboriginal curse placed on the club really have that great effect on its own?

WHERE and WHY did it all go so wrong. It was not something that we saw coming. It was sudden and it happened during that summer and it condemned us to a minumum of 5 years of mediocrity.

Forgetting the draft penalties, the $1M fine etc - whatever cursed our club happened BEFORE those things so I would hope that somone... anyone with any answers or even hints, rumours, gossip or innuendo about what really went on during that summer can shed some light on our current crisis.

The Board stoush in 2002 and subsequent mis-handling of the whole club in almost every respect is a direct consequence of what happened off the field during this summer and someone needs to find out what it was.

Any of the media who read this - get your thinking caps on and actually become and investigative journalist instead of re-hashing second hand rumours and get to the bottom of it.
I can smell a Wakely Award in this.

Our players got one year older?

Many short-sighted decisions from the past decade finally caught up with us?

Are you implying that without this mysterious "event" that caused us the problems of the past 5 years that our team would have just continued onwards indefinitely? Or are you taking the piss and I missed it?

I think it's a good question. Most clubs that slide do so gradually over a few years (eg. Essendon*, Brisbane, Kangaroos), not within a few months.

_________________
"I had to eat"

I think the main problem is that we relied too much on too few. We relied heavily on a couple of superstar players. Anthony Koutoufides, Stephen Silvagni, Brett Ratten and to a lesser extent on Scott Camporeale.

We lost Kouta to a knee, SOS retired and Ratten had an elbow injury and never regained his best form.

Unfortunately the rest of our list was poor and we couldn't do anything about that. We have a better list now and we should be better...but the question must be asked, why are we as crap now as we were back then?

_________________
"A good composer does not initiate. He steals."

- Igor Stravinsky

SOS retired and this left a gaping hole in our backline, kouta missed the first half of the season from memory, and because we'd been wasting so many draft choices on nothing it caught up with us in my opinion.

_________________
Last edited by true_blue3 on Mon Sep 26, 1981 5:07 pm; edited 92 times in total

We were tanking for draft picks that year

_________________
If you allow the Government to change the Laws in an emergency
They will create an Emergency to change the Laws

It happened post 1995. I remember having conversations with other Carlton people about the need for a clean out and it just never happened.

Why the change at the end of 2001?

As you said in your post - Kouta went down with a knee injury.

I reckon that one bloke (with a bit of help from SOS & co.) had been papering over a hell of a lot of the cracks for the previous few years.

Imagine the Roos without Carey.

Imagine the Cats without Ablett.

When a player as dominant as Kouta was at the time is out for an extended period you realise that what you're left with isn't quite what you thought you had. Doesn't mean we didn't still have some good players but the fact that Kouta was dominating in the way that he was made many of them better than they seemed previously.

We didn't have a generation of future Koutas to replace him. Imagine if at the beginning of 2002 we'd had players like Walker, Simpson, Murphy, Setanta etc 4 to 5 years into their development.

Imagine...

_________________
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace turns into a circus.”
Turkish Proverb

I'm not taking the piss on this one.
I know that all players were a year older, that SOS retired, that Kouta was injured etc. We traded Massie and picked up Eccles and Gallagher etc and that is indicative of the pathetic way we had drafted and traded for years.
That is not in dispute and has been a constant criticism of mine sine 1986-7.

I am trying to identify the underlying causes for the pathetic behaviour of the Board (and President especially) as a reason why the whole club (not just the playing list) began to underperform and basically became a sham.

This is why I am asking those who allegedly have inside sources.

Whatever the cause, it is something that is buried very very deep within the club and may even go higher than that. (Dr. Sherrin - what do YOU know or surmise?)

Call me a conspiracy theorist but....

Surely the answer is not as simple as making the players responsible - whether it be because of age, injury or just not up to it. We still had a hell of a lot of players in 2002 that had played finals in 2001.

One prtoblem with a bloke like JE is that by the time they have finished you have a vacuum to fill and few quality people around to step in.

_________________
This type of slight is alien in the more cultured part of the world - Walsh. Its up there with mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun!

"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence." - Napoleon Bonaparte

I think you're looking way too hard for something that isn't there. Take 4 or 5 of the best players out of a team lacking depth and it's always going to struggle. Look at how few players from the 2001 list are still playing AFL, with any team.

Off field, we'd been covering over problems for a long time and again it caught up with us. The club was massively run down off the field, without the cash flow to cover the expenditures. Just because it all became public in 2002 doesn't mean that suddenly all occured in 2002.

I'm not saying that better decisions (especially in hindsight) couldn't have been made since 2002. I think we could have done better in many ways, but to look for a single root cause of it all is simplistic.

Have you ever heard of the "snowball effect".

_________________
Just because I'm offended, doesn't mean I'm wrong.

13 or 14 rounds into this year Neil Craig was an absolute genius and was taking coaching to new heights. His club copped some key injuries and then won something like 1 out of 8.

The difference between winning and losing isn't that great and when it's backed up by managerial incompetence you're really screwed.

_________________
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace turns into a circus.”
Turkish Proverb

...ask StKilda next year, they'll know

_________________
“Every single element of the Club has to be the best in the league, meticulously and methodically, and only by doing this will we be elite and challenge for number 17.”
Greg Lee

When Kouta, Silvagni and Ratten went down the responsibility for lifting the team fell on the shoulders of Camporeale, Beaumont, Allan and the like. We know where these guys all ended up. The experienced heart of the team was ripped apart in one fell swoop and as mentioned earlier, our recruiting left us in no way ready to rectify this.

_________________
In WADA we trust

We were tinkering on the edge for a couple of years. Losing SOS and Kouta and a majority of other senior players destroyed us.

Shite management left us with absolutley no plan to rebuild quickly, it wasn't in the Presidents vocab. Livo was supposed to replace SOS and Hammil but obviously never ever got close.

The lost picks have us where we are today.

_________________
end of message

http://www.blueseum.org/cfc/tiki-read_a ... rticleId=5

Alot of the demise of 2002 can 'obviously' be put down to injuries, and injuries to key players. Note through the article the injuries to our extractors and ask how can any team cover that.

Look underneath the demise of 2002 and you can see that the list was heavily dependent upon a handful of very good senior players. The undercurrent of younger players to replace those was not good enough, and our trading for McKernan and Murphy although on the surface looked OK both players were in fact near the end of their Carlton careers, and should have been close to the end of their AFL careers. We had no emerging young group and with the injuries to the key players, well, we were left with nowhere else to turn.

That's great Molsey, so tell us how this is Pagan's fault - we MUST be able to find a link somehow .

_________________
end of message

It is clear to me that Pagan's victory over us in the 1999 Grand Final titillated us into thinking we were a supreme premiership chance in 2000 and 2001, promoting a vicious overconfidence in the list that prevented us from rebuilding when we should...

How's that?

Correct!! And the fact that he had a falling out with McKernan and in-so doing trading him to Carlton for Porter knowing full well he'd be at Carlton in 2003 and have to trade him back again while paying much of his over-priced contract

_________________
end of message

whitehead, Christou and Sexton also hurt.

_________________
This type of slight is alien in the more cultured part of the world - Walsh. Its up there with mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun!