Rd 17 Match Day Gallery
Click Here
Have Your Say
How do you rate the win over the Western Bulldogs.
Share your thoughts with other Blues fans.
Click here to Have Your Say
AN ELATED Brett Ratten has rated Carlton’s stunning 28-point victory one of the best he has been involved with in his time at the club.
Staring down the barrel of a 37-point deficit in the third quarter, the Blues rattled home the last nine goals of the match to romp away from the highly-fancied Bulldogs.
“It's right up there. I think our style of play and our ball movement … was outstanding,” Ratten said.
“Our patterns were pretty clear from the box and the players were adhering to instructions. We just couldn’t finish some of our work early, but we got the reward late.
The result looked highly unlikely with Brendan Fevola well-held and the Dogs’ running game kicking into high gear in the first half, but Ratten praised his players for their determination to stick to the plan.
“We squandered our chances in front of goal when we could have put them under some pressure and we talked about our inside 50 kicks and how we used the ball [at half time]. We had to change that up and we did and we got the result,” he said.
“I think we went a little bit longer in the last and we got some one on ones because of that, but they were zoning off and trying to get back into Brendan’s space.
“To the boys’ credit we got our hands on the ball around the stoppages and away we went and we used the ball very well.”
Ratten admitted he ‘might’ have sent the runner out to his enigmatic spearhead after an indifferent first quarter, but was delighted with the response he received with Fevola finishing with six goals.
Chris Judd and Simon Wiggins were both important players in their respective 150th and 100th milestones, and Ratten expressed his delight for Wiggins, whose road to 100 has not been easy.
“I was just so pleased for Simon Wiggins. He’s a player who has gone through the ups and downs of football,” Ratten said.
“He gives everything he’s got, he lays it on the table and he says, ‘When I walk off the ground I’ve given 100 per cent’. Sometimes that will be good and sometimes that will be bad, but today he probably played his best game of footy for the club in his 100th.”
The win, coupled with some favourable results elsewhere, leaves the door ajar for the Blues to play finals this season, but Ratten wasn’t keen to look too far ahead.
“There’s obviously a traffic jam there, there’s no doubt about it, there’s a lot of teams and it’s who can really get up and play the best footy in the last month of the year and get their heads above water,” he said.
“But what we said before the game was that we needed to improve both as a team and individually and we put some things on the board that our players had to be accountable for and we’ll go back and see if we did improve.
“When you win by four and a half goals there are some fantastic parts of it, but early in the game we could have gotten a little bit better in our execution of the footy.”
