Brian Cook was in charge at Geelong during one of the most tumultuous years in the club’s history. In 2006, the atmosphere at games, around town and in the boardroom was poisonous. The nadir came when they squandered a nine-goal lead at home to the eventual premiers, West Coast. Ben Cousins and Daniel Kerr played two of the great individual halves, the late Adam Hunter kicked the sealer, and the local fans nearly tore the grandstand down.
After every loss, Cook would receive thousands of emails and handwritten letters. Fans would send RIP notices. They’d enclose photos of players passed out in nightclubs. One offered free acupuncture and energy meridian flow assistance. Cook collated them all, including the pro bono acupuncturist, in a file labelled “assassins”.
As James Button wrote in his wonderful history of the club, most people expected Mark Thompson to be sacked. The majority of members, the media and several board members thought he should go. At that point, the favourite to replace him was Daryn Cresswell, who ended up in prison for fraud offences a few years later.
Thompson had been at Geelong longer than Michael Voss has coached Carlton. But there were similar trajectories and similar frustrations. Both had issues with their conditioning boss. Both had lost preliminary finals two years earlier. Both had lost elimination/semi-finals a year prior – one in freak circumstances that left the playing list shellshocked for a year, the other a systematic dismantling that exposed every fault line, from coaching and conditioning to selection, depth and talent.
But Thompson had several things that Voss can only dream of. He had an entire generation of champions who were ready to pop. He had Gary Ablett (22), Jim Bartel (23), Steve Johnson (23), Joel Corey (24), Paul Chapman (24), Corey Enright (25) and Cameron Ling (25) – all in their prime, but all with considerable improvement in them.
Crucially, he had a core group of senior players who backed him in. They thought he was bonkers, but they knew he could coach. They supported his decision to implement a new gameplan, a counterpoint to the grim, attritional style of Paul Roos’ Swans, a plan reliant on what Thompson called “mini versions of me” – senior players who could think on their feet, stem a tide and not play into opposition traps. And he a had a crack group of assistants, three of whom would go on to be senior coaches. He won two of the next three flags. The club played in 13 of the next 19 preliminary finals.
Like Geelong heading into 2007, the Blues are remaining positive. Indeed, the only thing consistent about this current Carlton team is the messaging after games. “I’m very bullish with what we can still do,” Patrick Cripps said. “Nothing changes,” George Hewett said. “Things change quick. Get a win, get that feeling back and it’ll be right.” “You just keep chipping away,” Sam Walsh said. “If we get better each week, then I know we’ll have a good, finished product.”
All this echoes the thoughts of the coach. Voss was in full LinkedIn mode after the Collingwood loss – “we have to own that”, “we have to step into that”, “I tend to stick on behaviours”, “we see problems, we solve them together”. It was similar after the Hawthorn loss, a game that said so much about the respective teams and coaches. The Blues threw the kitchen sink at the Hawks that night, and copped the rough end of the umpiring, but lacked the talent, the skill and the nous to match it with them. Sam Mitchell knew what Luke Beveridge knew, and what Craig McRae knew – that you need to be patient and willing to adapt when you play Carlton. You run them into the ground, you punish them on the outside and you change things up if necessary. Because you know Carlton won’t.
Immediately afterwards, Voss gathered his players in a circle, the club’s media team at the ready. Nothing would change, he said. Don’t go moping. We’re on the right path. Keep winning the contest. Keep pounding the rock. It was exactly the sort of speech he would have made in a Brisbane jumper, Nathan Buckley said.
That sort of talk is common whenever the Blues are analysed. There’s talk of effort, of fitness, of mental application, of “tough conversations”. There was an interesting discussion on SEN’s Crunch Time, where the panellists diagnosed what was wrong with Carlton. “It’s psychological and it’s fitness,” Luke Hodge concluded. “I think it’s competence,” Gerard Whateley countered. The players, he said, lacked the skill, and the coaches were unwilling and unable to tactically adjust during games.
That’s what Cook will be grappling with right now. In 2006, he quickly ascertained what the problem was – the players weren’t fit enough, they were partying too much, and the coach was trying to do too much. In 2025, his problems are less a matter of culture, and more a matter of competence. Principally, has he backed the right horse here? Which players have improved on Voss’s watch? Has he demonstrated an ability to adapt his game style, within quarters, within games, within seasons, that suits the way the modern game is trending? Does Carlton have the ability to win using different modes – indoors and outdoors, fast and slow, from stoppages and from the way they move the ball? And are the qualities that made Voss such a magnificent player and captain – his single-mindedness, his refusal to yield – ultimately working against him as a coach?
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