MICHAEL Williamson: “It’s a fantastic sight here, an electrifying atmosphere ... Bobby Skilton, you’ve noticed changes.

Bob Skilton: “Quite a few changes, Mike ... McKay’s gone to a back pocket, Waite to a half-back flank picking up Richardson, Nicholls has opened in the forward pocket, Jones has opened in the first ruck, Armstrong has gone to the centre, Chandler to a half-forward flank ... Carlton has literally changed almost half the selected side.

Williamson: Do you see any changes for Richmond?

Skilton: (pause) ... not so far Mike ...

As Bill Deller raised the Sherrin to signal the start of the 1972 Grand Final, Bob Skilton, South Melbourne’s triple Brownlow Medallist, spelt out the sheer audacity of Carlton’s game plan in his call for Channel 7. As he called the opening moments of the frenetic of the history-making match, Skilton saw that the Carlton brains trust, led by first year captain-coach John Nicholls, had thrown caution to the wind to shell-shock a much-reviled Richmond opposition that it had been unable to counter in four previous contests that year.

The war that was the Carlton-Richmond Grand Final of 1972 was waged 50 years ago this Friday - not on the last Saturday of September but on the first Saturday in October, the legacy of the drawn second semi-final at VFL Park. The draw was as close as Carlton came to knocking Tom Hafey’s Tigers over in ’72, having lost both the round four and 14 home and away encounters and copped an ignominious 41-point belting in the semi-final replay.

And it was in the aftermath of the replay that the plan was first hatched.

The late Keith McKenzie, League footballer, senior coach and general manager, described the outcome of the 1972 Grand Final “a brilliant, strategic triumph”. That particular afternoon, when Nicholls headed to the goalsquare to welcome Ray Boyanich to his nightmare, McKenzie took his place in the coach’s box alongside Bert Deacon, Jack Wrout and Kevin McEncroe.

“Those were very exciting times. We had very smart people on the match committee,” said McKenzie in a previous interview with this reporter. “Jack Wrout was a great chairman of selectors, and the committee had experienced much more success than I had in football, but we all had a great rapport. We just clicked and ‘Nick’, of whom I’ve always been a great admirer, was very confident in all of us …”

How well McKenzie remembers the planning process for the ’72 Grand Final.

“We had a meeting at the house of Kevin McEncroe, who was one of the selectors. Bert Deacon was there, as was John Nicholls, Jack Wrout and myself, and we swung the side around,” McKenzie said. “We had some feeling about it and on the day it all worked. Richmond were red hot favourites and couldn’t see themselves getting beaten, but we started chalking up this massive score and we knew that ‘Hafe’, who has been a great coach and very successful, had great faith in his players, which was why he probably didn’t swing them around.

“I’ve often spoken to ‘Sheeds’ [Kevin Sheedy] about this and he said that he remembers saying ‘Let’s change the bloody side ... put me on the ball ... do something’. And that was a big loss for Richmond, who came out and won it the year after in very different circumstances.”

“Big Nick” takes up the story: “We were very poor in the replay of the second-semi and we knew we had to beat St Kilda in the prelim to get another crack at Richmond in the Grand Final. I still felt that we could beat Richmond but I realised after four or five years, back in Barassi’s time, that whenever we were four or five goals up on Richmond, Richmond would always get up and beat us by kicking well over 100 points. We’d been trying to screw them down to 80 or 90 points, but we’d gone too defensive and I knew we couldn’t beat them that way so we had to outscore them.

“After the debacle against Richmond in the second-semi we all turned up to training in disgrace. So I got out there and reminded them that yesterday’s gone and this is what we’re going to do for the Grand Final, but what we can’t do is show our hand.

“For a fortnight I told the players that we were going to change it around completely for the Grand Final, but we couldn’t let people know by changing it around for St Kilda. So I said, ‘We can beat St Kilda playing our orthodox game’, and we did. We struggled through, beating them by two and a bit goals in the prelim and all our players knew what we were going to do for the Grand Final.

“These sorts of things can leak out but our group of senior players, with whom I had a great affinity – Walls, Jesaulenko, Kevin Hall and these guys – they knew what the thinking was and they helped implement the plan, which went like clockwork.”

Throughout 1972, and free from the exacting pressures of seven years as senior League coach, Barassi committed his energies to the fourth estate. ‘Barass’ remembered selecting his old team to win most of its contests that year, the notable exception being the Grand Final itself. On the big day, Barassi, like Skilton, took his place alongside Williamson in Seven’s commentary box, but not before he made a cameo appearance in the Carlton rooms pre-match.

“I can remember going into the Carlton rooms before the game to offer my best wishes and, boy, were they souped up,” Barassi told this reporter some years ago. “They just looked straight through me and it had nothing to do with the fact that I’d tipped against them. I just knew that they were in the zone. I immediately changed my tip – not publicly because I couldn’t do that, it was too late - but I remember thinking, ‘Oh boy, are they on the job’. And as we know, they thrashed them.”

Those Carlton supporters, whose great fortune it was to be part of the 112,393 at the MCG on Grand Final day, still talk about the perfection of performance in Carlton’s play that afternoon, with Peter Jones turning in the game of his life as the No.1 ruckman, Bruce Doull totally negating Richmond’s matchwinner Royce Hart, and Alex Jesaulenko, Robert Walls and Nicholls himself contributing no fewer than 19 goals in the team’s record scoreline of 28.9 (177) to 22.18 (150).

“That score has stood for a long time and it will probably stand for a while longer, too,” said Nicholls, “and there were two reasons for it. We had a pretty good side, number one, and number two we caught them by surprise. They had a coach, Tom Hafey, who was set in his ways and had been getting away with his style of play forever.”

Geoff Southby, whose revolutionary rebounding out of the last line orchestrated so many of the Blues’ telling forward sorties, capped off an outstanding Grand Final in ’72 by taking out the Robert Reynolds Trophy for the second year running. Southby, who would again savour Grand Final success under the watch of a captain-coach in ’79, agreed that of all the games in which he participated, “the team’s performance in ’72 was as near perfect as you could possibly get”.

“I reckon a huge proportion of players were in the so-called zone on that particular day. Everything went to plan – our midfielders and forwards were fantastic, with ‘Jezza’ kicking seven and ‘Nick’ and Robert Walls kicking six each, and Nick as the playing coach,” Southby said. “It was an incredibly attacking game. From a defender’s point of view there was a fair bit of work to do, with us kicking 28 goals and them 22. Few games in the history of the competition have seen 50 goals kicked.

“Nick and his match committee did a magnificent job in producing the element of surprise with some of the selections and some of the strategies that we came up with. We just jumped out of the blocks on the day and we destroyed them. We had 18.6 on the board to half-time, and Richmond had played some good footy, too. It was a magnificent game of football, particularly from our point of view, having won it, and it was my first Grand Final, so was always very special to me. That was the pinnacle of my experience in Australian football.”

In an interview to mark the 40th anniversary of the game in 2012, Skilton concluded that “the biggest surprise of all was that ‘Nick’ started forward”. “It was no surprise that he kicked goals because he used to kick goals when he went forward. The real surprise was that he started there,” Skilton said.

Skilton stood at Nicholls’ feet in so many contests, whether wearing the red V or the big white V, and so saw the genius first-hand. “At one stage I was asked at South Melbourne what I’d do and I said ‘Sell our grandstand to get Nicholls,’” Skilton said. “You only had to play with him to realise what a football brain he had. Most ruckmen were only ever interested in hitting the ball out, and then it was everybody else’s worry, but when you played against Nicholls, if you sharked it he would then stop hitting it to the rover and he’d hit it to the wingman, or whoever else.

“Nick was a wonderful thinker – not just about his own game, but the whole thing – and when you played with him in the Victorian side you realised that he wouldn’t just tap it to you, he’d stop other blokes chasing you. Nick has always been very knowledgeable about the game, which is very unusual for a ruckman.”

For Nicholls, a five-time club champion, two-time premiership captain and the most capped Victorian representative in the history of the game, the 1972 Grand Final was arguably the pinnacle of his long and illustrious career, for he knew then that the end was nigh. “It was difficult being captain-coach because my body was nearly gone and when you’re captain and coach, your mind is on so many things during the week that you probably don’t train as well as you should. You’re coaching more than getting yourself fit,” he said.

“In the end I was so glad when I retired. I was finding it harder and harder to get up for a game, my ankles were shot and I was basically getting cortisone injections every week to stop the pain. So it was good to finish up and not have to worry.”

On a very pleasant Sunday morning, just hours after the ’72 Grand Final, the Carlton people converged on Princes Park. Later, as they gathered at the footsteps of the Ald. Gardiner Stand, men, women and children burst into spontaneous rapture when Deacon introduced the captain-coach as “the architect of one of Carlton’s greatest ever victories.”

VFL Grand Final, Carlton v Richmond - Saturday 7 October 1972 at the MCG

Carlton                 8.4          18.6        25.9        28.9 (177)
Richmond            5.4          10.9        15.15     22.18 (150)

Best
Carlton: Walls, Nicholls, Jones, Jesaulenko

Goalkickers
Carlton: Jesaulenko 7, Nicholls, Walls 6, Keogh 3, Jackson 2, Hall, Gallagher, Chandler, Dickson

The Carlton team

B:           John O’Connell †            Geoff Southby                 David McKay
HB:         Vin Waite †                    Bruce Doull                     Paul Hurst
C:           Ian Robertson                Barry Armstrong              David Dickson
HF:         Neil Chandler †               Robert Walls                   Syd Jackson
F:           John Nicholls (cc)            Alex Jesaulenko              Trevor Keogh
R:           Peter Jones                    Kevin Hall                       Adrian Gallagher
Res:       Andy Lukas                     Garry Crane
† deceased