rhino27 wrote:
Fev still shitty that Vossy ended his career. He's a good bloke but take what he says with a massive grain of salt.
a mate of mine who played seniors with uni blues asked me “if Fev played his career for collingwood would he even get away with bagging the pies in public?” what would the players from his era do to him behind the scenes to pull him into line the fist time he was a little sook who obviously didn’t get enough time out in his own room as a player?
what does that say about our past players? some are maybe friends of people on here. what does that say about the carlton culture, historically and today?
to me the biggest downsides of blues success in the past was we just raided SA and WA and bought premierships. sure, they needed to play a good brand of football but individual brilliance always lifts merely good teammates playing around them. the payments under the table to two of my favorite players of all time by Eliot was ugly. heck Eliot himself was a sleazy bloke on multiple levels.
the crony capitalism model suited a “we’re Carlton F%#€ the rest, we’re the best” won us some premierships for sure in the VFL era when i grew up watching three Carlton games every saturday. but i suspect we failed to evolve when the VFL became AFL and developed into a more sophisticated marketing and product focused institution.
we didn’t get the model was now some kind of socialist-lite meritocracy, not a winner takes all, private money talks kind of world anymore. salary caps for players and footy departments, the draft rewarding losers! was like the upside down world has come to town. we carried on thinking we could just buy our way to success and fill the admin with past great players (and Sticks, no5 , SOS and diesel were all exceptional players) and it would take care of itself. but they didn’t know this knew world. mates rates didn’t cut it anymore. drafting players and list management required real patience and consideration of a huge number of things to optimise for, win/lose to keep the fans buying memberships, developing players for the future, understanding the evolution of the game and players required for the game in five to ten years time. sometimes we guessed wrong, drafting for running/repeat sprint capacity over kicking skills and footy nouse. thinking we could invent 18 Koutas just recruiting raw athletes with no natural flair for AFL.
but end of the day we made Fev (i blame pagan a bit, did same to Carey pumping up his ego until it was out of control and he cared about nobody but himself and his vanity). and we are still letting him disrespect the jumper. there’s obviously no ties that bind as far as Fev is concerned, even though he was a super talent. what kind of club are we?
a thinking man's post.
great reminder of our past and I think you make a good point.
I'm hoping we have adopted the framework required for success in the new AFL. Salary cap kjeeps reminding me of the need to do so. I'm sure the same is with the executive.