FOR OVER 12 months, Carlton’s best footy has been when the team has prided itself on some key factors.
The first - evidently - is their contest and pressure, and their ability to consistently apply it over four quarters. The second is absolute commitment to roles.
As the Blues adorn the collared guernseys this weekend for their Heritage Game, they could very easily look in-house for some inspiration at those who have done that to a high degree in years gone by in Navy Blue.
One of those is Matthew Hogg, the premiership player who arrived from Footscray at the end of 1991 who became one of David Parkin’s most-trusted players throughout his tenure on Royal Parade.
Poetically, Hogg was buddied up with a Blue who lives those values in the modern day - Lachie Fogarty - on SEN on Tuesday.
“Whether it’s junior football or senior football, you’re only as good as your bottom six. That’s one of the areas the Club really focused on after losing the 1993 Grand Final,” Hogg said.
“We had superstar players like ‘Diesel’, ‘Braddles’, ‘Sticks’, ‘SOS’. We had some really good bookends to cover off both ends of the ground, our midfield won a lot of the footy, we had some speed on the outside with the wings. The missing pieces of the puzzle were those bottom four or five that we could really top up to make an impact, and that’s what we did.”
Hogg was forced to bide his time at stages, but was a player who the coaches knew they could totally trust when he pulled on the Navy Blue jumper over the course of 114 games. But, crucially, patience was a virtue.
Fogarty was in a similar boat. He admitted that a little over a year ago, he was planning for what life would look like post-football — but now he’s entrenched in the Carlton team and a critical part of Michael Voss’ plans in a hotly contested close to the home-and-away season.
Hogg wasn't the first classic Carlton role player that Fogarty has linked up with in recent weeks, having lengthy chats with Hogg's 1995 premiership teammate Dean Rice - another player who arrived from another club - at the launch of the Club's Heritage guernsey last month.
“Probably about 14 months ago, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen with my football career. The reality was I might not have been getting a contract,” Fogarty said.
“It was a similar thing [to Hogg] where I was waiting for my opportunity to come, and making sure I did everything possible. I was annoying the coaches a little bit, but it was so when the opportunity did come, I was ready to perform.
“I was drafted [to Geelong] as a midfield and that was all I really played, I hadn’t played much half-forward in juniors. Everybody wants to be that 30-possession player in the centre bounce, but you’ve just got to accept your role and understand that’s your job as best as you can perform it.”
That wasn’t the only link between Hogg and ‘Fog’, with one former Blue having a shared history with both — or, in Lachie’s case, quite the connection in the present day.
Mark Arceri was playing for Carlton in Round 2 of 1992 when Hogg made his Navy Blue debut. He was also the Blues’ solitary goal kicker on an infamous day in 1991, when Carlton only managed to kick its first goal in the dying minutes of a game at Whitten Oval — a game in which Hogg was playing for Footscray.
As Fogarty knows, it’s a story which Arceri gets plenty of mileage out of over 30 years later.
“I date Mark’s daughter, Emily — I’ve been with her for five years. He still mentions that goal down at Footscray very often,” Fogarty said with a laugh.
Hogg followed up: “it was an absolute mud heap. Steve MacPherson certainly copped it afterwards [for conceding the free kick]. It was an interesting day.”
