Because we lost a pre-season Mickey Mouse Cup match.
The reality is you need to give coaching panels time, just as you do with individual players. Ratten has only had 2 and a bit years in the top job.
The risk with giving a coach time, of course, is the playing group can under achieve if not coached to their optimum. Therefore, the truth is we won't know for certain if Ratten and his gang can coach for another year or two I guess. That should be the point where the planets align insofar as playing talent being at their prime and the coaching staff having the time to develop said playing talent.
I can understand why there is criticism of Ratten. At times our club appears to be poor at things that other clubs seem to have less problems with – kick ins being the obvious example here. I do believe that this is in part due to the simple fact we do struggle at kick ins, but also in part because we (as a collective) focus on every minute detail of what Carlton does as compared to other clubs. That is, we live and breathe the cock ups of Carlton, but pay no more than a cursory glance to the mistakes of other teams.
On a basic level Ratten has got the team improving if you look purely at win/loss ratios, but I accept this year will be the first true test of his abilities. I fully support the trade of Fevola, but in 2010 we will learn a lot more about Brett Ratten than we will about our playing list.
