Opinion The Rebuild Thread

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Rebuild smebuild.

All the talk is about how we don't have any depth, our midfield is weak, forward line is non existent and we have no good kids.

In 2011 we were a kick away from a prelim final and we had the following names play that evening against a red hot eagles side at Subiaco: O'Hailpin, Thornton, Joseph, Davies, Duigan, Ellard, Armfield and Laidler.

Our key forwards were the big irishman and T Bird and we lost T bird before half time. We also had Gibbs and Kruezer out.

What does this tell me?

That it is not always about the cattle that run out on to the park but its about the game plan and the players adhering to it, the willingness of the players to have a go, the pride in pulling on that navy blue jumper with the white CFC monogram that most of us would give up our left aggot to wear.



That team that played in 2011 was as far away from being a premiership team as today's is. Having a look at the names you came up with proves the point. None of those players were good enough to be premiership players. The difference between that team and today's is that the top players in that side were at their peaks and three years later they can no longer carry the rest as they did then.

If you want a comparison in our history compare the 1993 and 1995 grand final teams. The reason we were able to win in 95 was that the bottom 6 or 7 players in the 95 team were better than those we had in 93 and the top end players were still performing at a higher level.

If my memory serves me correctly we never beat a top 4 team in 2011, so whether we were 3 points away from a preliminary final or not is largely irrelevant, we weren't capable of mixing it with the top sides anyway. If we made the grand final we would have been exposed big time and most likely have been beaten by a massive margin.

People need to stop referring to 2011 as if it was some great achievement. That team at it's peak was only ever good enough to finish 5th.
 

blueboy25

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If my memory serves me correctly we never beat a top 4 team in 2011, so whether we were 3 points away from a preliminary final or not is largely irrelevant, we weren't capable of mixing it with the top sides anyway. If we made the grand final we would have been exposed big time and most likely have been beaten by a massive margin.

People need to stop referring to 2011 as if it was some great achievement. That team at it's peak was only ever good enough to finish 5th.

The team that won the GF who we would have met in the Prelim was Geelong and we lost to them by 2 points which was the game that Warnock missed from the goal square late in the game.

We lost to Hawthorn by 12 points and Collingwood by 19.

That's not exactly copping a hiding from the top 4 teams or being too far out of our depth.
 
The team that won the GF who we would have met in the Prelim was Geelong and we lost to them by 2 points which was the game that Warnock missed from the goal square late in the game.

We lost to Hawthorn by 12 points and Collingwood by 19.

That's not exactly copping a hiding from the top 4 teams or being too far out of our depth.


I still think that had we met any of those teams in a Grand Final they would have beaten us easily, the bottom end of the team wasn't good enough to win a premiership.
 

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CUG81

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For sure...we were never going to win the premiership that year. We did well and were unlucky with injuries yet again under Ratten, but we lacked a defensive game...and you need to have it all to win although I reckon Ratten knew this and decided the best way for carlton to win and go far was to attack and hope you score more than your opponent does.
 

ItsAllAboutMe

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For sure...we were never going to win the premiership that year. We did well and were unlucky with injuries yet again under Ratten, but we lacked a defensive game...and you need to have it all to win although I reckon Ratten knew this and decided the best way for carlton to win and go far was to attack and hope you score more than your opponent does.

It was probably the worst thing that could happen to us, Ratten got a false sense of our list and thought we were far closer than reality.. He didn't make any trades and cut the minimum players he could, thought our list didn't need any improvement and started the trouble we are in now.
 

CUG81

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It was probably the worst thing that could happen to us, Ratten got a false sense of our list and thought we were far closer than reality.. He didn't make any trades and cut the minimum players he could, thought our list didn't need any improvement and started the trouble we are in now.

I completely understand where you are coming from with this BUT.....If you are coach and make it that far and lose by a small margin to a team like WCE in Perth with key players missing then you can't go thinking that the list is terrible and not good enough to continue in the coming years. We had some hacks in that team and to be fair have since been moved on. The players who were performing well are still at this club.
 

ItsAllAboutMe

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I completely understand where you are coming from with this BUT.....If you are coach and make it that far and lose by a small margin to a team like WCE in Perth with key players missing then you can't go thinking that the list is terrible and not good enough to continue in the coming years. We had some hacks in that team and to be fair have since been moved on. The players who were performing well are still at this club.

Yes you can.. Hawthorn realised they were still not good enough so go Brian Lake, Geelong went and got Caddy and tried to get Boak, Freo this year realised they were a key forward short and got Gumbleton as well as Sylvia.. They understand that if you stand still you will be passed by.... unfortunately we didn't realise this.
 
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Yes you can.. Hawthorn realised they were still not good enough so go Brian Lake, Geelong went and got Caddy and tried to get Boak, Freo this year realised they were a key forward short and got Gumbleton as well as Sylvia.. They understand that if you stand still you will be passed by.... unfortunately we didn't realise this.
We went out and got Thomas, Docherty & Everitt. If that's not trying to improve i don't know what is?
 

ItsAllAboutMe

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We went out and got Thomas, Docherty & Everitt. If that's not trying to improve i don't know what is?
I was talking about at the end of 2011, where we did not make 1 trade.. No one came in and no one went out.. The only players we delisted were O'halpin, Mark Austin and Cachia who we redrafted anyway.. We just stood still and I reckon the rot that we are feeling now started right then.
 

CUG81

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Yes you can.. Hawthorn realised they were still not good enough so go Brian Lake, Geelong went and got Caddy and tried to get Boak, Freo this year realised they were a key forward short and got Gumbleton as well as Sylvia.. They understand that if you stand still you will be passed by.... unfortunately we didn't realise this.

And those teams only needed a minor tweak and top up and were not still building like we were in 2011. We made it far that year but were not premiership contenders like the teams you mentioned above. For us to be at their level we needed our core players to step up and take their game to the next level and none have done that.
 

ItsAllAboutMe

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And those teams only needed a minor tweak and top up and were not still building like we were in 2011. We made it far that year but were not premiership contenders like the teams you mentioned above. For us to be at their level we needed our core players to step up and take their game to the next level and none have done that.

I tend to disagree to an extent, Murphy, Gibbs, Judd, Waite were far superior players back then than now and a little tweak may have pushed us up that 10% we needed to be a contender, but we did nothing and have gone backwards quickly.
 
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I was talking about at the end of 2011, where we did not make 1 trade.. No one came in and no one went out.. The only players we delisted were O'halpin, Mark Austin and Cachia who we redrafted anyway.. We just stood still and I reckon the rot that we are feeling now started right then.

This.

At the end of 2009 things were pretty exciting. We were arguably very close to a well balanced list that could challenge at the pointy end.
We went short-term and inert.

Forget 2012, this is the reason Ratten is gone.
 

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We went out and got Thomas, Docherty & Everitt. If that's not trying to improve i don't know what is?

And as Mick rightly pointed out on Footy Classified, all 3 of these guys are first round picks.
Daisy was always going to take some time to get going, Doc got injured during the preseason and Everitt has been ok in the first 4 rounds.

Can see us really making some big changes to the list at seasons end.
 
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We went out and got Thomas, Docherty & Everitt. If that's not trying to improve i don't know what is?

Plus Cripps, Giles, Holman and Reynolds as promising youngsters to add to Graham, Buckley & Menzel. I suspect at least 5 of these will make it. Hopefully they all will.

It is the first step. In two years when they have 25-40 games experience each we will look very different.

Nail the next draft with say 2-3 future 200 gamers, snaffle a GWS kid. Rinse and repeat.

We are on the way to building a list with appropriate quality and age cohorts.
 

CUG81

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I tend to disagree to an extent, Murphy, Gibbs, Judd, Waite were far superior players back then than now and a little tweak may have pushed us up that 10% we needed to be a contender, but we did nothing and have gone backwards quickly.

I agree with what you are saying but Ratten didn't have a crystal ball to think murphy, gibbs, kruz and so many more wouldn't continue to develop. This is the problem, we can look at the fringe players not being good enough and we can look at younger players not developing quick enough but names like murphy, kruz and especially gibbs being in their mid 20s were the ones who were meant to be the core group driving this team and this core group, many more players included, haven't done the job.

The club could have brought in some names but others would have had to be sacrificed...hindsight is a beautiful thing and maybe we should have traded gibbs and kruz to get boyd during the break, and maybe we should have traded others in the summer 2011/2012 who were tipped to be the next best thing in their position and so on but Ratten was building a team and managed to get it far that year. We lacked finals experience and that was a stepping stone for the group. The year after we suffered major injuries and ratts got the arse and in came mick with a new game plan and everything else he wanted and we have gone backwards.
 
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I was talking about at the end of 2011, where we did not make 1 trade.. No one came in and no one went out.. The only players we delisted were O'halpin, Mark Austin and Cachia who we redrafted anyway.. We just stood still and I reckon the rot that we are feeling now started right then.
See i don't think our squad is as bad as is being made out. At the moment we're in a perfect storm or injury, so many interrupted preseasons, poor form plus other things. Are we as bad as our ladder position suggests? Definitely not. What we need is for all these guys with niggly injuries to get fit, guys like Tuohy & Garlett to find form, and before you know it we'll be winning games.

You are right though, around that time we were rather stagnant which definitely didn't improve us, but i don't think its hurt us to the extent of our current performances.
 

The Flying Doormat

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Plus Cripps, Giles, Holman and Reynolds as promising youngsters to add to Graham, Buckley & Menzel. I suspect at least 5 of these will make it. Hopefully they all will.

It is the first step. In two years when they have 25-40 games experience each we will look very different.

Nail the next draft with say 2-3 future 200 gamers, snaffle a GWS kid. Rinse and repeat.

We are on the way to building a list with appropriate quality and age cohorts.

So the rebuild has begun. Long live the rebuild. It's all part of the process.
 
I was talking about at the end of 2011, where we did not make 1 trade.. No one came in and no one went out.. The only players we delisted were O'halpin, Mark Austin and Cachia who we redrafted anyway.. We just stood still and I reckon the rot that we are feeling now started right then.
Why we didnt have a higher turnover of players during the Ratten years I have no idea... unless the coach was such a mate to the guys that he was trying to coach that he didnt have the minimals to pull the trigger and get rid of players who were not going to be a part of the next premiership.

We always seemed to be delisting just enough guys to ensure that we had the minimal number of picks in a draft.

Mick came in and at the end of his first season pulled the trigger on a bunch of guys... this year he is going to do the same again.

We have been stagnating with player turnover for too long under Ratts and it's put our list into a s**t position.
 
Plus Cripps, Giles, Holman and Reynolds as promising youngsters to add to Graham, Buckley & Menzel. I suspect at least 5 of these will make it. Hopefully they all will.

It is the first step. In two years when they have 25-40 games experience each we will look very different.

Nail the next draft with say 2-3 future 200 gamers, snaffle a GWS kid. Rinse and repeat.

We are on the way to building a list with appropriate quality and age cohorts.
The 2015 draft is going to be an interesting one for us... potentially 3 F/S selections.

And thanks to the AFL changing the F/S rules and allowing other clubs to try and pinch them, we could potentially only get one of them. (Bailey Rice is an iffy prospect anyway because the Aints have dibs on him as well).
 
The media can all GOGF - they delight in putting the boot into Carlton and now doubly so because Malthouse is at Princes Park. Yeah there are still too many list cloggers - next year there will be far far less - that is ground zero for me, watch the improvement go exponential from there.

No one wanted to hear what the realists have been saying about the Carlton list for the last three years- it was not good enough - now no one believes that the side can be turned around as quickly as it will.
 
Something tells me that by the end of the 2015 draft/trade period... the Carlton side will look nothing like it does now.

There will still be a couple of familiar faces, but on the whole, we should have turned over at least 50% of our list.

Lets see the w***ers in the media have shots at us then.
 

AndyLucimitis

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So the rebuild has begun. Long live the rebuild. It's all part of the process.




The funny thing is - we are probably closer to a flag now that we were 6-8 weeks ago.

Our list was not up to it (ie: a premiership) so we re-stack the list. The worst thing that could happen was we just stagnated around 8-10 wins a year, finish mid-table and trick ourselves into thinking we were close (in my opinion)
 

Roy71

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Carlton’s drafting from 2001 – 2013 makes for interesting reading. If supporters are looking for answers and need a reality check, then read on.

2001:
National 39 Justin Davies

National 46 Jarrad Waite

National 75 Sam Cranage

Rookie 11 Bret Thornton (188)

Rookie 27 Ezra Bray

Rookie 42 Jordan Doering

Rookie 53 Michael Davis

Rookie 60 Adam Mathews

2002:
National 45 Kade Simpson

National 60 Cameron Croad

National 72 Brad Fisher (99)

National 79 Karl Norman

National 84 Michael Martyn

Rookie 1 Jonathon McCormick

Rookie 17 Laurence Angwin

Rookie 33 Mark McKenzie

Rookie 49 Tom Hedge

Rookie 62 Michael Stinear

Rookie 68 Sean O'Keefe

2003:
National 2 Andrew Walker (Priority)

National 57 Ricky Mott

National 63 Glen Bowyer

National 69 Jordan Bannister

National 72 Adrian Deluca

National 75 Stephen Kenna

Pre-Season 2 Nick Stevens (104)

Rookie 2 Andrew Carrazzo

Rookie 18 Murray Boyd

Rookie 34 Adam Bentick (68)

Rookie 49 Sam Pleming

Rookie 62 Setanta O’hAilpin (80)

2004:
National 9 Jordan Russell (116)

National 25 Adam Hartlett

National 41 Luke Blackwell (Father/Son)

National 73 Chris Bryan

National 77 Anthony Raso

Pre-Season 3 Eddie Betts (184)

Rookie 6 Daniel Batson

Rookie 22 Jesse Smith

Rookie 37 Nick Becker

Rookie 50 Aisake O'hAilpin

2005:
National 1 Marc Murphy (Priority)

National 4 Joshua Kennedy

National 20 Paul Bower

National 36 Jake Edwards

Pre-Season 1 Dylan McLaren

Rookie 1 Ryan Jackson

Rookie 17 Craig Flint

2006:
National 1 Bryce Gibbs

National 17 Shaun Hampson (Priority) (63)

National 19 Shaun Grigg

National 35 Mark Austin

National 51 Clint Benjamin

National 67 Joe Anderson

Pre-Season 1 Cain Ackland

Pre-Season 9 Cameron Cloke

Rookie 1 Sam Jacobs

Rookie 17 Michael Jamison

Rookie 32 Ross Young

2007: Ratten’s Appointment
National 1 Matthew Kreuzer

National 36 Steven Browne

National 46 Dennis Armfield

Pre-Season 2 Darren Pfeiffer

Rookie 2 Aaron Joseph (73)

Rookie 18 Lachlan Hill

Rookie 34 David Ellard

Rookie 48 Michael Shields

Chris Judd + 46 > (Carlton), Josh Kennedy + 3 + 20 > (West Coast)

Richard Hadley > (Carlton), 52 > (Brisbane Lions)

2008:
National 6 Christopher Yarran

National 40 Mitch Robinson

National 65 Rhys O'Keeffe

National 80 Caleb Tiller

Pre-Season 4 Christopher Johnson

Rookie 6 Jeff Garlett

Rookie 22 Luke Stanton

Rookie 37 Greg Bentley

Rookie 51 Darren Pfeiffer

Rookie 65 Lachlan Hill

Rookie 76 Sam Jacobs

Robert Warnock + 69 > (Carlton), 24 + 56 + 72 > (Fremantle)

2009:
National 12 Kane Lucas

National 43 Marcus Davies

National 59 Rohan Kerr

National 72 Sam Jacobs (Rookie Promotion)

National 83 Aaron Joseph (Rookie Promotion)

Rookie 15 Jaryd Cachia

Rookie 31 Joseph Dare

Rookie 44 Levi Casboult

Rookie 56 Simon White

Rookie 66 Joshua Donaldson

Rookie 73 Zach Tuohy (International)

Rookie Peter Labi (International)

Brendan Favola + 27 > (Brisbane Lions), Lachlan Henderson + 12 > (Carlton)

Brock McLean > (Carlton), 11 > (Melbourne)

2010:
National 18 Matthew Watson

National 34 Patrick McCarthy

National 42 Luke Mitchell

National 67 Andrew McInnes

National 70 Nicholas Duigan

National 85 Jeff Garlett (Rookie Promotion)

National 99 David Ellard (Rookie Promotion)

National 108 Simon White (Rookie Promotion)

Rookie 18 Edward Curnow

Rookie 35 Rhys O'Keeffe

Rookie 51 Wayde Twomey

Rookie 66 Mitchell Carter

Rookie 78 Blake Bray

Shaun Griggs > (Richmond), Andrew Collins > (Carlton)

2011:
National 22 Joshua Bootsma

National 44 Sam Rowe

National 62 Dylan Buckley (Father/Son)

Rookie 14 Tom Bell

Rookie 32 Nick Heyne

Rookie 50 Frazer Dale

Rookie 67 Matthew Lodge

2012: Ratten’s Dismissal / Malthouse’s Appointment
National 11 Troy Menzel

National 35 Tom Temay

National 54 Nicholas Graham

National 89 Levi Casboult (Rookie Promotion)

National 102 Zach Tuohy (Rookie Promotion)

Rookie 9 Jaryd Cachia

Rookie 23 Andrew Collins

Jordan Russell > (Collingwood), 71 > (Carlton)

2013:
National 13 Patrick Cripps

National 39 Cameron Giles

National 51 Nick Holman

National 89 Edward Curnow (Rookie Promotion)

National 94 Tom Bell (Rookie Promotion)

Rookie 12 Luke Reynolds

Rookie 28 Cameron Wood

Rookie 43 Blaine Johnson

Rookie 53 Heath Scotland

Rookie 60 Ciaran Sheehan

Rookie 64 Ciaran Byrne

Shaun Hampson > (Richmond), 28 > (Carlton)

Sam Docherty > (Carlton), 33 > (Brisbane Lions)

Andrejis Everitt + 39 > (Carlton), 32 > (Sydney Swans)

Dale Thomas (FA) > (Carlton), Eddie Betts (FA) > (Adelaide)
 

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