The Australian economy might be in freefall, but Carlton is back in business - and Brett Ratten knows it.
As the Blues’ Senior Coach recently noted, key performance indicators suggest both club and team are well on the way.
Sitting with his back to the great space that was once the Heatley and Harris stands at Visy Park, Ratten reflected on the Carlton metamorphosis of the past two years. He thought about the recent recruits Chris Judd and (more recently) Robbie Warnock each declaring Carlton as their preferred club of choice, which he said reflected a renewed respect for Carlton and a genuine faith in where it was headed.
“We were the sleeping giants when Dick Pratt came out and almost single-handedly got back the people who had been sitting behind the scenes waiting to see what would happen,” Ratten said.
“In him [Pratt] just doing that, notwithstanding his outstanding other support, he helped restore some of the faith for everyone at the club . . . now you can see that the old stands are demolished and we’re putting up an $18million facility there, and people can see that we’re heading the right way.
“Dick got the ball rolling, Swanny’s [CEO Greg Swann] done a magnificent job, and hopefully now the team can get Carlton back into the finals and repay some of that faith.”
Ratten, a club champion in his team’s last premiership season (can it really be 13 years?) knows better than most that ten wins in a season does not a season make. True, there were some meritorious showings in 2008, but losses to eventual finalists Hawthorn, Geelong, St Kilda and Sydney provided sobering reminders of where the team is at despite how far it’s actually come.
Which is why the culture that made Carlton great must surely be restored.
“Carlton’s always been the one that was expected to win all the time. That was drummed into me as a kid and that’s something I’ll never let go,” Ratten said.
“Sometimes that made you play with fear, knowing you had to win to keep the board happy and the president and the coach, and that’s part of playing at the Carlton Football Club. It’s not just go out there, play, get your money and walk off – it’s ‘Bust your backside and work as hard as ever to get the four points’ . . . and we’re starting to get that back as a group.”
Ratten is first to concede that the vagaries of the draw might have worked in Carlton’s favour in 2008. As he said: “Maybe we were lucky we didn’t get to play Hawthorn and Geelong more than once because of the way they played and how they beat us”.
“But there was still significant improvement,” Ratten said of the home and aways. “Against Adelaide we were right in both games, especially the second time where we kicked 3.6 in the last quarter to lose by eight points. And against Sydney, which had been our bogey team for a long time, we kicked 5.5 in the first quarter and had our chances, but lost by two points. So the improvement came in the way we competed, and that was one of the things we needed to do, to become a competitive unit.
“We achieved ten wins, and it wasn’t just the ten wins, but how we won them too. It was very character building for the players to be behind by five goals and get on a march – that shows a lot of confidence and self-believe in the group, which is a great plus going into 2009. The players should now start to believe ‘Yes, we can play some very good football and no matter where we sit in the game we stand a good chance to win’.
“But it’s another year in which we didn’t make the finals. It’s seven years now, so that’s something we need to deal with as a group to make sure ‘Okay this was a foundation year, we got a lot of things right in place to go forward and we’ve need to improve our growth by 20 to 25 per cent as a team, because everybody else will lift the bar a little bit more, and we need to catch them and pass them to get into the eight’.”
Ratten was quick to acknowledge the significant contributions from everyone at the Club, in particular the Football Department, and the role they play in ensuring players are prepared.
“This is a team within a team and everyone has an important role to play, particularly with such a young team. This was highlighted by the expanded development team and the fitness and medical team. The new structure and the individuals involved had a profound imprint on the players’ conditioning and provided greater benefits to individuals that we could have achieved previously.”
“To see what the youngest team could do, in running over teams in the last quarters in the back end of the season was amazing to me – you don’t usually see that. Usually it goes the other way and you drop off,” Ratten said.
“Our players understand now the preparation required to take us to the next level so we don’t have six weeks of the season where we drop off. If we fully maintain our fitness and approach to the game then we’ll get better results going forward.”
It is here that Robert Harvey’s presence as Development Coach will be coveted. Of that recent appointment, Ratten grinned as he reminded that he and Harvey were once Teal Cup teammates. “He’s just retired and I feel like I’ve been out of the game for ten years,” Ratten said.
“What you see with ‘Harves’ is what a quality individual he is, the games of footy that he played, how much respect is there for him and his knowledge of the game.
“Harves has just come out of the game and he’ll be able to tell all our players how he got his longevity out of the game, and other little things we might not know about. It will be very interesting.”
Few footballers in the game have raised the bar to the stratosphere, but Chris Judd is unequivocally one of the few. So how did Ratten compare/contrast his man with the incumbent Carlton President and the game’s longest-serving captain Stephen Kernahan, who hoisted the club’s 15th and 16th premiership cups to the heavens back in 1987 and ’95.
“They’re very, very different,” Ratten said. “It is also a different era now and they do have similar traits in their knowledge of the game and getting the best out of themselves and the team. I’ve no doubt that in time when we look back we’ll reflect on Chris Judd and regard him as one of the great captains of the Carlton Football Club.”
Though Judd is already among the game’s elite, Ratten is in no doubt that the presence of Warnock – who at 206 centimetres joins Justin Madden as the tallest Carlton footballer in history – will markedly change the dynamics.
“The thing with Warnock is that he’s got the athleticism, his skills are very neat for a ruckman and he wins his hit-outs. We’ve really improved in the area of goals for and against at stoppages except the centre bounce, and that’s where we really need to get our hands on the footy. That’s where we least touched the ball and where we got our biggest score against, so he’ll give us a big improvement in that area,” Ratten said.
Like Judd, Ratten has now comfortably negotiated his first full season, albeit in a vastly different capacity. As Senior Coach, he has learned to delegate, because he now knows what he can and can’t take on himself.
“If you tried to take it all on from go to whoa then you might have a life span of two years because you’d be very fatigued and your energy levels would be sapped,” Ratten conceded.
“Coaching’s about energy and if I turn up win, lose or draw, and I’m very flat then the danger is that will be replicated by the players out on the field. That’s the secret, to make sure that when you come into the club you’ve got bounce and spirit, because in that environment the players can then learn – and that’s very important.”
Mens sana in corpore sano you might say.
Ratten also knows that he is in the entertainment industry. So does he shoulder any responsibility for the aesthetics of the game?
“The philosophy of the coach is that he wants the players to play the way he wants them to play and if that takes on an entertainment factor and looks good, then that’s a bonus,” Ratten said.
“We try and play a fast-moving free-flowing game so it’s the other side of the game that we need to improve upon – when the ball’s not in our hands and we need to have more of an impact on what the opposition team is doing . . .
“At the end of the day we’ve got to win games.”
The bottom line for Brett Ratten is that the members of his young team continue to grow at Carlton, as it launches a genuine assault on the final eight.
“We’re setting up a team that is one of youth. Next year will be a lot tougher for us to get that growth that we want, but gee, I really see us taking some steps forward in how we play the game, how we understand it and maybe not concede as many goals as we have,” Ratten said.
“As we showed last year, we were competitive in most games and we need to ramp that up a little bit more. We’ll take another step forward. Our aim is to make the finals, like any team, but I think our growth will really take off.
“We want the Carlton people to walk a little bit taller through the streets. Even now I look at people pre-game and I see that sparkle in their eye. They’ve come with their voice to chant with us because they know we’re in this game because that spirit is back.”
