ON A day of historic off-field announcements for the Club, Carlton CEO Cain Liddle said the Blues’ on-field hopes hadn’t deviated.
On Monday morning, Carlton - while also announcing a membership record - revealed that it had wiped its historical debt for the first time in 25 years.
Consistent with the Club’s objectives in its strategic plan The Carlton Way, Liddle said the end game was all about winning premierships across Carlton’s AFL and AFLW teams.
When it came to aspirations for the 2021 season, Liddle said “expectation needs to meet experience”.
“If you’re going out each year saying you’re going to win the premiership and you’re running 16th or 17th, expectation isn’t meeting experience: I think we’ve managed that well over the last few years,” Liddle said on SEN Mornings.
“Our Board initiated a complete rebuild which we all acknowledged was going to take some pain, but now we’re coming out the other end.
“Do you immediately jump from 18th to 16th to 11th to a premiership? History will tell you that doesn’t happen often. Are we aspiring to do that? Absolutely we are.
“Anyone who wants to tie me up and mix my words that we’re not aspiring to win premierships won’t be successful, because that’s exactly what we’re trying to do.
“We’ve gone 18th, 16th and 11th: we want to continue to build on that and I certainly agree that the period for development is over.”
Liddle addressed a number of key Carlton topics in the 17-minute interview: here’s more of what he had to say.
On this Saturday’s John Nicholls Medal:
“We made that decision while we were in the hub last year. We had two of our greats, Kade Simpson and Matthew Kreuzer, both announce their retirements.
“We put our heads together and we had this real fear that two of our greatest players were going to go out with a sayonara over a Zoom call which no one felt all that comfortable about. We made the call at the time to push it back to February and hope that things have improved in our ability to get everyone together.
“We took a bit of a punt and it’s still a watching brief, because we don’t want to be putting anyone at risk. We’re anticipating we’ll be able to get our club together this Saturday night.
“We’re using a room that can take 1500, government regulations allow us 1000 and our team have reduced that to 700 to reduce the risk as much as we can and spread everyone out. It’s been a huge piece of work by our events team behind the scenes where we’re comfortable enough to go ahead.
“Whoever wins it, if they can back it up and win the 2021 John Nicholls Medal, I’m not sure anyone has won two best and fairests in one year!”
On Patrick Cripps:
“A lot of our staff have been away and only recently come back: it has been a little complex to dive into any long-term negotiations with players the ilk of Patrick Cripps given the uncertainty around TPP last year and the uncertainty moving forward now.
“There have been conversations going on all along and never at any stage have we been told by Patty or his management that they don’t want to talk to us.
“David Teague, Brad Lloyd and myself often comment that given all of our experiences at a number of different clubs, we can’t ever recall a player being so invested in improving his football club than Patrick Cripps.
“Given the fact that he’s our captain and he does have that strong investment, we are really comfortable with where things sit with him."
On the gate share agreement for Round 1:
“I think it’ll be the status quo. When we built our long-term gate share arrangement, what previously hadn’t been involved was how do you deal with years where there isn’t a return game.
“Richmond and Carlton addressed that in our gate share arrangement and we’ve got all bases covered there. From our perspective and the arrangement we have with Richmond, it’s the status quo.”
On the Club’s position off the field:
“We had some great announcements yesterday where we cleared that historical debt which has been with the Club for 25 years.
"I was hearing a few comments from a few people saying ‘Debt is cheap, why would you bother’ but when debt involves things that have occurred over 25 years and isn’t being used to increase your revenues, no debt is good and it doesn’t matter how cheap it is.
“We’re very happy to get rid of that and it’s largely been driven, almost entirely actually, by our members. To announce a membership record yesterday on the first day of February is quite unprecedented.
“All I can say to our members who stuck with us last year is a huge thank you and they’ve gone to the well again this year to put us in the strongest position off the field that we’ve been in for a hell of a long time.”
