Im pretty happy with the year. The new crew of players are at the club. Need to keep phasing out the old and the hopeless.

I am a little worried about how easily our gameplan got picked apart by teams that showed a bit of dash. Turning our inside 50's into their goals.
Hopefully Bolton is on to it and knows exactly what is required to keep our score against down.

Next year can easily produce a lot less wins than this year. After that we should start to see improvement with results.

May have been a 'reset' year (will have that confirmed in 3, 4, 5, 6 years...) but on its own, was quite a failure.

Wins against Brisbane, Essendon***, Melbourne, Port, Geelong, Collingwood and Freo.

I predicted before the season started, based on the list, the new coach's statements and the overall feeling around the joint that with a good run on the injury front, we could finish as high as 10th.

Had we won the two games against 17th and 18th as we should have, we might have finished 12th, depending on percentage. I would have taken that seeing as we went without Murphy for half the season, Curnow, who looked promising and McKay for the year.

In the first half of the year we beat Essendon*** and Brisbane. In the last three weeks they beat us easily. In other words, either we went downhill against them as yardsticks or they improved more than we did over the course of the year.

The season to me was a season in two halves. In the first half we played with verve, derring-do and ran the football until it all clicked and we won those games we won with run and carry and pressure on the ball and the man. I think that surprised everybody, perhaps including the match committee because for some reason, unexplained by all and a mystery, therefore to most, we changed our way of playing to the old style of chippy chippy turnover and maintained it for the rest of the season with just one notable exception, against a team we had beaten during the year. So for me the first half of the season was a step forward and the second part a step backwards.
I have been critical of Bolton's game plan in the second half to the point where people have told me they are sick of reading about it so I won't go on about it here BUT.....

There have been some really good outcomes for the year, notwithstanding the poor win/loss ration of the second half of the season. 1-11 is not good. Had we started 1-10 and then finished 6-11 people would have been screaming for someone's head in June and calling for a canonization in September, I suppose.

The emergence of Weitering, Docherty, Byrne, Silvagni and cameos by Curnow and Cunningham is what we were all looking for. Whilst I think it is too early to be hailing McKay as the future savior of the forward line, he may turn out OK.

Elite players we have but few. Cripps may well turn out to be the best player ever to play for Carlton.
Gibbs had a good year but I wish he would vomit after every game.
Murphy had a horror year but will be like a new recruit next year.


The second tier players were generally more consistent. Simpson elevated himself to perhaps the best player in the team after Cripps and Docherty. He will be almost impossible to replace, not just for his stats but the way he gets them.
Touhy had a good year.
Armfield is a burst player and played like one. Great soldier but his time is coming.
Ed Curnow may be the most underrated player on the list. He does a great job week after week shutting down the opposition's best midfielder.
The recruits from GWS had a mixed bag but Plowman and Phillips are probably the best of them.
Buckley finished off well and if he takes that form into the preseason and beyond he will be a good player but he has to back himself and the coach has to release him.
Boekhurst is an enigma. He can play, is quick and a great user of the ball but he can't get hold of it! I think he is on thin ice.
Wright was a good pick up. Sumner will make it but he needs to take a hit when his turn comes. I think Kerridge was a good get as well, despite his sometime wayward kicking.
Kreuzer was Kreuzer. You get what you get. He is not the answer in the ruck, though. Tall midfielder maybe.

The rest you can throw a blanket over in terms of whether they stay or go.

The season as a whole was an advance on last year and that is what we are looking for. It's up to SOS now to play the hand he has as best as he can.

I am an advocate for trading Gibbs. I know I am in the minority but if we want to trade into the first round we have to provide something worth a first round pick and Gibbs is about it. Maybe Touhy but I think Touhy will stay. And Gibbs for that matter.

I may have come across as very negative over the past month or so since I got back from Australia. I was hit for six by the crap performance I saw against Collingwood and the crap way they were playing since then. I have been watching footy now for 55 years, since I was ten years old. I played for twenty years and I have coached a bit. Not footy but other sport at high level and I think I am a hard marker. You have to put up with that mindset if you read my posts. Also you young whippersnappers might have ten years to wait for the next coming but not all of us are as young. The advantage of old age, though is that I have seen the shit days before 1968 and I have seen the glory days and now the shit again. It irritates me to see a club like Hawthorn usurp our mantle when they were a rabble fifteen years ago.

Next year we have to jump again. We will have four new recruits in Murphy, Curnow, Cunningham and McKay. We will get pick 5 whom I hope is a super quick, tall, outside midfielder who kicks goals. I would also like to see us pick up a gun forward. Someone like Patton or Lynch, Moore or Daniher who can grab a game by the throat and turn it. There must be one out there. Maybe it's McKay but his NB form doesn't suggest it, even on the back of a year off with injury. Not Vickery. Reiwoldt I could cope with but.

We simply can NOT allow Brisbane, Essendon*** and Freo to overtake us or we will end up 15-18 again.

Thanks to everybody on TC for making the distance between Mexico and Carlton seem so much less than it is. I have enjoyed reading your stuff, I have enjoyed sparring with some of you and I don't mean anything personally, nor do I take it personally. At the end of the day we all see the club through different eyes but we all love the club and we all want success.

Here's to a great off season and improvement in 2017.

Contrast that to Damien Hardwicks year and even yesterday .

He's made excuses for his team, laughed and joked about the season and goes on to say how good the list is and virtually guaranteed playing finals next year.

His team were humiliated yesterday and he turns up at the presser like he's high!

The Tiger fans are pulling their hair out.

what concerns me about 2016 is the manor in which we lost our games

We were in a pretty good place at the time