It’s not often that winning games of football adds to an AFL club’s problems, but that’s something a few people at Carlton might be feeling right now.
The Blues have just won their fourth game from the past six since dispensing with Brendon Bolton as coach and installing assistant David Teague as a caretaker. The two they’ve lost have both been by less than a kick.
It’s Carlton’s most sustained run of success since the first half of the 2016 season, more than three years ago.
And while Sunday’s win over Gold Coast was a game in which the Blues started favourite for the first time in eons, the other victories have come over Brisbane, now second on the AFL ladder, and in two difficult road trips, against Fremantle in Perth, and Sydney at the SCG.
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A goal more in each of two more games, and Carlton might well have just won its sixth game on the trot. It’s been a credit to Teague, and to the young Blues who have responded under his watch. But it’s also clearly created a problem the top brass at the club would have preferred not to have.
By any rational assessment of the current AFL coaching landscape, Teague has already done just about enough to secure the job on a permanent basis for the next couple of years at least. But when it comes to coaches, football often seems less than rational.
The almost-daily updates on the AFL coaching merry-go-round, with now three clubs – the Blues, North Melbourne and St Kilda – on the hunt for senior coaches for 2020, continue to bowl up a variety of scenarios, in Carlton’s case, usually featuring names better known than Teague’s.
There’s Paul Roos, out of the caper several seasons now, and who asked weekly about the prospect of a return, seems uninterested, but whose name keeps bobbing up on those lists anyway.
There’s Michael Voss, an assistant at Port Adelaide since his sacking from Brisbane’s senior gig, who has seemed to have an unofficial cheer squad within AFL headquarters pushing his case at every opportunity.
And there’s Brad Scott, clearly waiting in the wings for another go after resigning mid-season from the North Melbourne job. Teague’s name appears in many of these updates almost as an afterthought.
His case was also seen to be harmed a couple of weeks back when Carlton football director Chris Judd, in his role as a panellist on “Footy Classified”, talked about the Blues not wanting a coach “with training wheels on”, widely interpreted to read as a rebuff to the caretaker’s chances of taking on the job full-time.
That was a slip corrected subsequently by Carlton chief executive Cain Liddle. And Judd has since claimed his comments were taken out of context, and not a reference to Teague at all.
You’d hope not, given Teague, since hanging up his boots as a player at Carlton at the end of 2007, has for the last 12 years been a playing and non-playing coach with the Blues’ reserves side, and an assistant coach at West Coast, St Kilda, Adelaide and now back at Carlton. They’re some pretty sizeable training wheels.
But Judd’s comments, even sub-consciously, were a pointer to where the Blues’ headspace appears to be.
Carlton is a club which historically pursued “messiahs” or favourite sons as a coaching fix, even going back to Ron Barassi’s luring from Melbourne in the mid-1960s. There’s been Alex Jesaulenko, Robert Walls, and more recently from the messiah camp, Denis Pagan and Mick Malthouse.
Bolton’s appointment, in that context, was even braver than it might have been for another club. Not only did Bolton not fit either of those categories, he hadn’t even played AFL football, until recently enough to discount virtually any AFL coaching candidate.
In fact, that was the second time Carlton had stuck its neck out on that score, Wayne Brittain having coached the Blues in 2001-02.
Brittain, having virtually co-coached the team with David Parkin in 2000, took over officially the next season, in which Carlton got to the second week of finals. But the following year, a whole club imploded in a salary cap scandal and a team with it, the Blues taking out their first-ever wooden spoon.
Brittain was an easy sacrificial lamb for then president John Elliott, and Carlton went the messiah route once more with Pagan, a four-and-a-half season stint which yielded another couple of wooden spoons before Pagan, too, was sacked midway through 2007.
Carlton certainly showed more patience with Bolton, but finally flinched after round 11 this season, by which time the Blues had won just four of their last 43 games.
The instinctive course is thus, to go in a different direction. And the Blues will feel they’ve now been burned twice in the last couple of decades by flirting with lower-profile, non-AFL background “development” coaches.
But, really, any reluctance to embrace Teague as the next coach only fits the reservation about profile.
He has the playing background, having played 83 games with North Melbourne and Carlton, winning the Blues’ best and fairest in 2004 as well as the AFLPA “most courageous” award. And more than a decade pursuing a coaching career, including coaching his own teams.
It’s clear that the Carlton players who will be tackling the next few seasons are responding to his message, a series of senior Blues queueing up to publicly sing his praises.
And what, actually, is the importance of public profile in the senior coaching role? It didn’t help Mick Malthouse, the coaching games record holder, when Carlton continued to lose four years ago.
And it certainly hasn’t held back Chris Fagan at Brisbane, another not to have played AFL football, but an absolute shoo-in for this season’s “Coach Of The Year” award after a long and varied career in the football industry.
The one advantage the likes of Roos, Voss and Scott have over a candidate like Teague is their familiarity with the media landscape. But the caretaker hasn’t put a foot wrong on that score since taking over from Bolton. And indeed, the one muddying of the waters since he took charge came from Judd, not only very familiar with but actually part of the media.
You still have the sense that the powers-that-be at Carlton would prefer a so-called big name to David Teague as their next senior coach. But as the Blues continue to perform to a level they haven’t for a long time, any rationalisations against his appointment seem weaker.
Would giving him the job be another brave step? Or simply the logical one. I tend to think the latter.
*You can read more of RoCo’s work at Footyology