Where the bloody hell are Hugh? Brisbane are fading and waning before our eyes

Brisbane would be the ultimate wildcard team

Sight is different to vision. You can see something, but the vision can confuse you. We are seeing Brisbane fade before our eyes yet not believe the picture.

Brisbane earned the right to doubt what we are seeing. They earned the expectation that it was just a temporary aberration and they would click. Just a bit slow out of the blocks. Timing their run to September. The explanations fall like an easy shorthand from a commentator’s lips.

We have been waiting for them to click. Waiting for them to once more routinely win at home. Waiting for them to rip a good team apart and look like Brisbane again.

Currently they are ninth and with half a season done face the prospect of clinging to a finals berth only by dent of an AFL marketing thought bubble. They would be the ultimate wildcard team no one would want to play in desperado round.

The Lions now look less like the rampant team that won the last two flags and more like a waning team that has played preliminary finals or better in five of the last six years. They look tired if not old. They look worn down. They look like they have lost hunger and an edge.

The margins when any team win a flag is small and those margins are hurting the Lions now. They are a good side that is suffering from playing more games than others for the last six years.

A side that has the hunger does not have a quarter like Brisbane had last week when they conceded the largest third quarter score in VFL/AFL history to GWS. In the last three losses the opposition has scored a combined 386 points. They were previously superb at denying scores from turning the ball over, ranked fourth last year, but this year they are 14th.

If you look at their six losses for the season, they have conceded 117.5 points per game, which is the worst of any team other than the West Coast Eagles. They have not conceded scores at this rate under Chris Fagan since 2017.

Fagan said if you don’t consistently play with effort you are vulnerable. And Brisbane are vulnerable. Defensively it hurts them.

This is not just an absence of effort, there is an absence of personnel. The fact Harris Andrews is out there masks the fact he manages bad knees weekly and is playing below par. Jack Payne ripped his patella in round 14 last year and has not been seen since and there is no time frame for when he is back. Ok, they won a flag without him, but other things were going right last year that are not now.

Brandon Starcevich was lost to concussion and then to West Coast, Ryan Lester has missed the last couple of weeks and will miss up to another month with a calf injury. Dayne Zorko did a quad ahead of the Geelong game and has been missing.

They saw Cal Ah Chee walk to Adelaide for nothing and after years of injury trouble Kiddy Coleman is once more injured while Eric Hipwood is still out and Oscar Allen arrived needing to manage his bad knees. He now has a foot injury that will see him miss 9–10 weeks.

In the background they have dealt with the public nature of Lachie Neale’s marriage issues prompting a handover of the captaincy and doubts over his future at the club. Likewise, Zac Bailey is out of contract and questions persist whether he will leave the club. These might be quasi-normal conversations for any club but, when you lose, everything is raised as a possible contributor.

Hugh McCluggage’s drop in form has been the most stark and the most perplexing. An All-Australian last year he is in a funk this year that is hard to understand. He had three handballs, 0 marks, 0 clearances, and 0 tackles after half-time on Saturday. Across the board year-on-year his numbers have dropped alarmingly. If there is an injury he is carrying or there is another issue the club is not saying.

Will Ashcroft’s numbers are not dramatically down on last year, but his impact is done and he’s lost an edge.

All of this is remediable, but it is a season that feels like the culmination not of one pre-season but of seven seasons of grind and the toll it takes to stay high.

What we are seeing is different to the vision we have in our mind of what this team still is.

Commonsense under review

Really, it’s surprising it took this long. Just five weeks ago the AFL made a decisive intervention for commonsense in goal reviews that was just lacking that one key ingredient – commonsense. Damn it, it was all going so well.

It was, at the time, a pleasingly swift response by the league to acknowledge a silly mistake by a goal reviewer to let play go on for more than half a minute before saying “hey fellas we think there was a score back there can we go back again now?” The AFL correctly said “what were you thinking? You can’t take that long”.

But then they over-corrected and took the ability to speak up and tell someone a mistake might have been made off the ARC altogether.

After that moment in the St Kilda-West Coast game the AFL scrapped the ARC’s ability to intervene and overrule a score. Like a kid at an adult dinner table they were told to only talk when spoken to by the adults. It was, as colleague Pete Ryan presciently described at the time, not a solution but a reaction.

Self-evidently Geelong’s goal that was called a point on Friday night should have prompted the goal or field umpires to call for a review. They didn’t, and it was quickly evident an error had been made. But now the ARC was denied the opportunity to tell anyone. This was not the sort of commonsense the AFL was searching for when they made their last decision on the run.

Farmer Fraser

Josh Fraser showed rare self-awareness in an industry of egomaniacs. I’m not ready, he said. No one says that. Well few do.

Now it is becoming like a Life of Brian skit with crowd correcting him: “only the true messiah would deny his own divinity”.

Fraser is not the messiah, he is not even a very naughty boy, he is a farmer-ruckman from Mansfield by way of Collingwood and Gold Coast. And he retains an earthy farmer’s realism that a drought will follow a flood, that a good crop only means a bad one is coming.

He is the anti-James Hird in that sense, he is the man who has been building his apprenticeship slowly and deliberately in VFL and development roles and talks down those encouraging him that he is the answer and to press ahead now.

What Fraser has delivered Carlton is a warm frankness and the reassurance that things were not as bad as they thought they were. The bones are there in an unfinished list, so the next coach is not starting with nothing. The transition game remains a problem for personnel but not nearly as big a problem as it was thought to be after a few positional changes and a revived no-compromises attitude to hunt and pressure and create turnovers.

Having gone through the Brett Ratten caretaker into coach experience – rewarded with the top job for not winning any games as caretaker – or the David Teague Train experience that sounds now more like a 1990s electronica album Carlton will not be so readily seduced by the next few months. But neither will Fraser.

The most encouraging thing a new coach will have seen is the last mark by Patrick Cripps at the weekend to safeguard the game. Cripps has never been a good overhead mark – as Sam Walsh said after the game amused by his captain’s towering mark – and his goal-kicking is iffy.

If Cripps, like Paddy Dangerfield, can reliably develop that part of his game he can be an effective third forward target and goal kicker. If he can prove he can shift his balance to 60-40 forward over midfield it will not only fundamentally change his game, but it will rapidly and profoundly help reshape a Carlton midfield (and forward threat) that Fraser has shown they need to accept they must change, Carlton know they need to change the mix of their midfield. Cripps’s match-winning mark and goal might have shown them one way to do it.

Michael Sellwood you beauty

Even Luke Beveridge acknowledged the stakes were not quite the same, but neither was the calibre of the player involved. When Michael Sellwood floated across the pack to take an outstanding grab he saved the game for the Dogs. It was a Leo Barry moment. Of sorts. Pack marks of any type have become rare enough but when they are taken by a young player who backs himself in front of a full stadium and wins the game for his team it is Barry-worthy.

It was a small moment in a catalogue of small moments for a player compiling a case as an emerging talent.

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