2024 AFL Season Previews: Carlton
Can the Blues prove last year's surge wasn't a fluke?
I’m kicking off my 2024 season previews by looking at the eight teams competing in Opening Round. Let’s see how the Blues are poised.
2023 ladder position: 5th (13 wins, 9 losses, 1 draw – eliminated at preliminary final stage)
2023 best-and-fairest: Jacob Weitering
Senior coach: Michael Voss
Story of the season
After an encouraging (albeit ultimately heartbreaking) 2022 season, expectations were high among pundits and Carlton fans heading into 2023. Lots of pundits predicted a top-four finish.
For the first month, the Blues were winning, if not exactly impressing. Three wins and a draw had them second on the ladder. And then things fell apart. The Blues lost eight of their next nine games, with the only victory coming against an abject West Coast careening towards one of the worst seasons in AFL history. Carlton huffed and puffed. But they just couldn’t convert territory into scores. For more than a month, they couldn’t even hit 60 points in a game.
A truly grim defeat to Essendon on June 11th looked like the end of the road for Michael Voss. But the Sword of Damocles never fell. Instead, the players and coaching staff circled the wagons. They implored each other to dig a little deeper and dare a little more. And an extraordinary thing happened: Carlton’s moribund season came back to life. After the Essendon nadir, the Blues won nine games in a row, including against heavyweights Collingwood, Melbourne and Port Adelaide. The final win in the streak confirmed Carlton’s place in the finals for the first time in a decade.
Nailbiting wins against Sydney and Melbourne in the first two weeks of finals meant the journey went a little longer. And, after Carlton kicked the first five goals in the preliminary final against Brisbane, it looked like it might never end. Ultimately, the Lions prevailed by 16 points. The Blues weren’t Premiers, or even Grand Finalists. But they were still winners.
Summary of game style
Carlton have two big strengths: contested prowess and dynamic key forwards. Which makes it especially weird that, for the first half of the 2023 season, the Blues played in a way that nullified those strengths. They chipped it around or bombed it aimlessly to contests on the wing. The centre corridor was lava. By the time it got inside attacking 50, if it ever did, Charlie Curnow and Harry McKay were swamped by opposition defenders. The Blues looked weighed down by the fear of failure.
The realisation that a season was slipping through their fingers normally prompts a coach to change things around. Voss and Carlton did the opposite: they doubled down on their strength in close. In the second half of the season, the Blues’ points from stoppages differential was nearly three times as good as the second-best team. There were some other changes. The defensive line pushed higher without the ball. Jack Martin’s return to the side provided a perfect link between the midfield and forward lines. But Carlton’s renaissance was mostly down to their ability to muscle the ball out of a stoppage and score, usually courtesy of Charlie Curmow or small forwards like Jesse Motlop and Matthew Owies. By season’s end, Carlton ranked #1 in the AFL for contested possession differential, contested and intercept marks, and fewest opposition scores per inside 50.
List changes
In:
Ashton Moir (2023 National Draft, pick #29)
Billy Wilson (2023 National Draft, pick #34)
Matthew Carroll (2023 Rookie Draft, pick #15)
Elijah Hollands (traded from Gold Coast)
Orazio Fantasia (delisted free agent)
Rob Monahan (International Rookie)
Out:
Paddy Dow (traded to St. Kilda)
Zac Fisher (traded to North Melbourne)
Josh Honey (delisted)
Lochie O’Brien (delisted)
Sam Philp (delisted)
Ed Curnow (retired)
Lachie Plowman (retired)
List profile
Number of top-10 draft picks: six (tied for eighth-most)
Average age at Opening Round: 24.8 (tied for sixth-oldest)
Average number of games played: 65.3 (seventh-fewest)
Unless I’ve made a counting mistake somewhere along the line, Carlton’s list is the only one in the AFL without a single player who’s played more than 200 games. Even Hawthorn, who aggressively culled their list after the 2021 and 2022 seasons to fully commit to a rebuild, can’t claim that. And the two clubs are at very different stages in their cycle. On their current trajectory, the Hawks will be competing for flags in three to four years. Carlton believe they can win now.
But there’s something else unusual about Carlton’s list which this graph doesn’t tell you. Their senior list is the sixth-oldest, tied with the Bulldogs. But it’s only the 12th-most experienced. No other club has such a big discrepancy, in either direction, between age and games played. There are two reasons why. The first is that Carlton have a lot of players who’ve missed significant chunks of their careers because of injury. In a fairer world, guys like Charlie Curnow, Jack Martin and Sam Docherty would be closer to the 200-game mark. The second is that Carlton have given chances to lots of guys who were close to the AFL scrapheap, like Mitch McGovern, Alex Cincotta, and Matthew Owies. It’s a credit both to those guys and Carlton’s recruiting department that they’re now making solid contributions.
The end result of Carlton’s list-building strategy is that they have a core group of young and peak-age stars, complemented by role players, with an unusual age profile: just two players over the age of 30, but an incredible 18 between 26 and 29. In theory, this list is absolutely cherry-ripe.
Line rankings
Defence: Elite
Midfield: Elite
Forward: Above Average
Ruck: Average
The case for optimism
In reviving their 2023 season, Carlton have already achieved what most observers thought was impossible. By comparison, taking the next step doesn’t seem so daunting.
In general, I’m going to try and refrain from attributing to psychology things which can be better explained by tactics. But in Carlton’s case, change came from between the ears as much as it did from the whiteboard. So many times, early in the season, we heard a puzzled Michael Voss explain in a post-game press conference that he was trying to get his players to take more risks with ball in hand. And yet, they just weren’t. Maybe an inexperienced coach wasn’t getting his message across. Or maybe the weight of the famous navy blue guernsey was a little too much for the players. Turning their season around took a lot of guts. What the Blues managed to achieve between July and September should give everyone involved with the club massive amounts of confidence. They now know that their style and their list hold up in pressure situations.
Any team which performs respectably in a preliminary final loss is theoretically only a five percent relative improvement away from winning a Grand Final. This puts Carlton in an enviable and, for them, unusual position: they don’t need to rip everything up and start again. They just need to tinker. Organic improvement from their young stars, steady performances from their veterans, improved ball movement and a forward structure that gets slightly more out of Harry McKay could be enough to win the flag. And it should all be within Carlton’s reach. They just need to grasp it.
The case for pessimism
It’s easy to look at Carlton’s stirring resurgence and assume that all their problems are suddenly fixed. But I think that’s a mistake. Because they’re still worryingly dependent on just two things: scoring from stoppages, and the two towers up front. Every side has their way of doing things (I’m not saying “one wood”). But if that’s all you have, or almost all you have, then you’re at risk, because it’s easier for opposition coaches to plan for. Michael Voss has to assume that his team’s advantage in scoring from stoppages will be whittled away – and therefore, he has to make Carlton a more diverse attacking threat. That starts with better ball movement that pulls the opposition defence apart instead of just bombing it on top of Charlie Curnow’s head. The Carlton spearhead was targeted 151 times last season, more than 50 times more than the second-most targeted forward. I understand the temptation. But it made the Blues too predictable. Solving that isn’t just a challenge for Voss and Jordan Russell. The other forwards – including Harry McKay – must step up and shoulder more of the scoring load.
Every player’s growth curve is different. But the basic idea is this: young players get better as their bodies and brain mature. However, past a certain age, the benefits of experience are offset by the ravages of age. None of Carlton’s key players are standing on the edge of the cliff. But the pessimist might ask a different question: with so many players in their peak years, how much improvement is left in the Blues’ squad? Sam Walsh is just 23, but he’s already performing at elite levels. How much better will Tom De Koning get? Ollie Hollands looks a likely bet to improve, but will it be by enough to move the needle? Carlton only need to improve a little. But is there enough improvement left in their list?
Throughout this preview, I’ve assumed that Carlton’s revival in the back half of 2023 will give them the confidence to go to the next level. But what if that’s not entirely true? The Blues climbed out of a deep hole last year. But climbing out of deep holes is exhausting. Who’s to say that Carlton’s players and coaching staff can muster that sort of extreme physical and psychological effort again? Especially when, by most measures, Carlton have a tougher draw this year than they did in 2023. There’s a precedent for what I’m describing. In 2018, Melbourne produced a fairytale finals run that was only stopped by an interstate powerhouse in a preliminary final. The next season, they finished 17th. In sport, confidence is the elixir of life. But you only ever get a couple of drops of it at a time. If Carlton lose their first couple of games, the familiar old doubts could resurface.
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Breakout player
Not many Blues fans were expecting Ollie Hollands to debut in Round 1. Or get 20 touches in Round 2. Or play 19 games in first season of AFL. But he kept on proving everyone wrong. Hollands stands out in this Blues team right away – he's the smallest one out there. But what really makes him stand out is his disposal and running ability. With the benefit of a full pre-season and the arrival of his older brother Elijah, I'm expecting Ollie to go to the next level. If Carlton are serious about improving their ball movement, they need to put it in his hands.
Most important player
It wouldn’t be much fun, but Carlton could withstand an injury to Patrick Cripps. They could probably (with some hardship) withstand one to Jacob Weitering. But, based on the evidence of last season, I don’t think they could cope with one to Charlie Curnow. Curnow isn’t just one of the elite key forwards in the AFL. He’s absolutely fundamental to how the Blues play. He took the most contested marks (and most per game) and was second in score involvements across the entire league. Carlton need to wean themselves from their Curnow dependency. But you can understand why it exists in the first place.
Biggest question to answer
Is the improvement we saw last season sustainable? The Blues almost made it to a Grand Final based on cranking their ability to score from stoppages all the way up to 11. You can’t bank on that happening again. Instead, Voss needs to develop other parts of Carlton’s style – most notably, their ball movement. The progress made last year should make the task seem less formidable.
What success looks like
By virtue of being one of the Melbourne Megaclubs, Carlton have always been an important club. But for about 20 years there, they weren’t a serious club on the field. They need to prove that last season wasn’t a fluke. They need to win at least one final, ideally two. And they need to show the rest of the competition that the Blues are back – for good.
In a nutshell
Carlton have a solid defence, a clutch of elite contested midfielders, and two of the league’s best key forwards. They also have the thing they’d lacked for so long: belief. But they also lack something you traditionally need to win a flag: multiple different ways of scoring.
Agree? Think I’m a fool who’s biased against the Blues? Share your thoughts in the comments.