“We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons.” Sam Lipsyte, The Ask
Not long after tidying the paperwork on the shambolic conclusion to Michael Malthouse’s coaching career, Steven Trigg pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, paused just a moment and asked, “Why does the Carlton Football Club exist?”
Since the book of Genesis, we have been cautioned that what brings us down is our own arrogance or ambition. And the Carlton Football Club had a formidable arsenal of both.
It’s little more than a year since Malthouse celebrated his games record as coach under lights at the MCG. But for Carlton it was about as black as a night ever gets. Blacker still when the Channel Seven cameras revealed a moribund Geoffrey Edelsten in the coach’s box – the personal embodiment of a club living at the hole of the bottom of itself. Even its hovercraft was found floating upside down in the Yarra.
Walking the halls of the club’s base on Royal Parade was like walking through an abattoir in thongs. Future historians will marvel at the club’s ability to survive what it wrought upon itself, all the while chanting the especially loud dialogue of the deaf, like Stephen Kernahan’s mantra, “We are Carlton, fuck the rest.”
Since the turn of the century Carlton had been eating shit with a silver spoon. But it wasn’t until the club was well on its way to a fourth wooden spoon, and three minutes to midnight from an Elliot-led “Make Carlton Great Again” campaign, that it embarked on a reset.
After a business-as-usual six-goal win over Brisbane, Carlton has reached the halfway mark of season 2016 at six-and-five. The pace car for football punditry has already been lapped. Twice. It is not unreasonable to say that this is more than a reset – which if the past is any guide at Carlton, usually takes the form of a tent revival, an exercise in brand maintenance, or (as in the initial months of Malthouse’s tenure) an extended book tour.
This is an honest-to-God reinvention. It’s a reinvention began with asking that most fundamental of questions: “Why does the Carlton Football Club exist?”
For Carlton CEO Steven Trigg it was a “sense of belonging”. It was something he’d been reflecting on since first walking into the club and figuratively (and quite possibly, literally) putting a boot through the wall that separated his predecessor’s office from the rest of the administrative staff.
Despite his enthusiasm, Trigg’s vision remained a formless wish rather than a plan – and as any Carlton fan who has had to stomach at least a few three-page, five-year-plans will tell you, faith without works is dead. But when Malthouse took to burning every bridge he could find, Trigg was handed an opportunity to drape a predictable boilerplate with something the club had not seen in 150 years.
Process.
According to a club source, Brendon Bolton was appointed after a process that was a dozen interviews deep. Small wonder he is smitten with words such as “endure” and “journey”. But “Brendon” and “Bolton” are the two words that may best describe exactly what Carlton is today and why many intelligent and reasonable people are finding the club likeable for the first time.
Bolton has the peppy optimism of a self-help book. But while his early press conferences may be dotted with platitudes, his positivity is more profound. He is not a “To the barricades! Group hug!” kind of coach.
“Brutal Blues” is one of the four values installed by Trigg and Bolton across the entire club. Importantly, it is a value that spreads beyond its less-than-immaculate PowerPoint conception. Carlton’s brutality has not only been displayed on weekends, but also demonstrated in a single summer, when Stephen Silvagni delivered a mass of newcomers to the club. Fifteen of them, equal to more than one-third of Carlton’s list.
As brutal as the business may be, a football club still operates on a human scale in which one person can make a difference. And Bolton has made a very real and noticeable one this year. According to another insider, Carlton has been fielding calls from player agents for the first time in years.
Much of Bolton’s success has been branded with the thin label of “teacher”. But there are bad teachers just as much as there are good ones. The best teachers are the ones that remain students at heart and who keep learning from those they teach.
A story that has become part of the casual small-talk currency at Carlton is how Bolton addresses team meetings in the club’s lecture theatre. Rather than standing professorial behind the lectern like his predecessor, Bolton will sit among his players and be part of the discussion. It is part of Carlton’s Socratic “learning environment”, where players and coaches are expected to question one another.
“If you don’t have an environment where they’re a participant in the learning, not being just a recipient, then they don’t think,” said Bolton at the club’s pre-season camp earlier in the year.
The change in philosophy also has a psychological edge through the one other person Carlton hired from Hawthorn, psychologist Anthony Klarica. Klarica – who was the elite performance manager at a club that had had more than a few of them – runs Carlton’s leadership program. While his initial focus is on the players, he has a broader mandate to develop leadership and culture across the entire club. This hits another sweet spot of the Trigg-Bolton Venn diagram – an alignment of purpose between the football and administrative departments.
When Bolton was at Hawthorn, he gave an interview with his alma mater, the University of Tasmania, where he said he’d “always enjoyed the sense of ‘connectedness or belonging’ you feel by virtue of being involved in team sport,” adding, “team sport challenges us, inspires us and requires an alignment of purpose.”
And this is precisely what he has achieved in less than a year at a once fractured football club. In doing so, he has become much more than a teacher and a coach. More than unifying a fractured club, he has begun to heal it. Bolton has helped create the “sense of belonging” by which a newer Carlton might be defined.
