In round 3 we met the Magpies. Against expectations, since the New Year’s Eve slaughter, Mick Malthouse had guided Collingwood—the wooden-spooner in 1999—to two wins in its first two games. The Pies went into the match sitting in third place on the ladder, one spot behind us. A crowd of almost 83,000 packed into the MCG and the atmosphere was electric, but it turned out to be an extremely frustrating afternoon. Britts repeatedly benched me, the selected full-forward, despite the fact that we were struggling up in attack all afternoon. I finished with only one behind and a handful of possessions as we were flogged by 73 points. We fell to sixth on the ladder and our doubters queued up to say that we were too old and too slow. The result was another reality check for me.
Britts kept selecting me in the seniors in the following weeks, but I didn’t get a great deal of game time. In fact, I started the first eight games of the season on the bench. When I did get out there, my kicking was wonky to say the least. I had three shots from within 45 metres in our loss to the Bulldogs in round 4, and I booted two behinds and one out on the full. My kicking yips were hard for me to understand. I’d slotted them from all angles on New Year’s Eve, but now I was struggling to hit the side of a barn. Parko was rightly concerned that the situation was affecting my confidence, so he enlisted Stephen Kernahan to do some one-on-one work with me. You might think it was a strange choice, given Sticks’ reputation for kicking helicopter punts, but his 738 goals spoke for themselves. You don’t bag that many without being able to kick straight. And so Sticks and I spent half an hour every evening after training kicking towards the big sticks at the Robert Heatley Stand end of Princes Park. I’d have up to sixty shots and most of them went through. But on game days that confidence and surety in my kicking style would evaporate, with the ball continually sliding off the outside of my boot—against the Swans in round 8, I booted 1.4 and one out on the full.
‘I used to kick straight,’ I told Mark Robinson after that game. ‘It’s only been this year I’ve been missing. At training I hardly ever miss—it’s just when it comes to a game. I think too much that I’m going to miss rather than just kick it.’
Parko and Sticks decided to start filming my shots at training and analyse my technique. Our new reserves coach, Ross Lyon, who had enjoyed a distinguished playing career with Fitzroy, became involved as well. Ross reckoned that I was waving the ball around too much as I ran in. As he put it, it was like I was stirring a bowl of porridge. Having worked that out, we set about remodelling my kicking style, although I didn’t adopt my trademark grip—with one hand lower than the other—until a couple of years later.
I managed to kick two goals in our big win over Fremantle at Subiaco Oval in round 9, but after that I found myself practising my new kicking style in the reserves. Initially, I wasn’t overly happy to be back in the ressies. One week, I took out my frustration on my opponent and copped a one-game suspension, although Ross Lyon soon pulled me into line. He was a tough and demanding coach, but he was a great bloke; he was really one of the boys. After home games, he would take us to his mate’s pub up in Fitzroy and we’d have a few beers and a feed. It was great team-bonding stuff. We didn’t take advantage of the situation by getting rolling drunk in Ross’ company. We just had a few quiet ones and enjoyed ourselves. Anyway, my confidence had been shot by spending so much time on the bench during the first half of the season, but Ross got me believing in myself again. My return to form was confirmed when I kicked seven goals in a reserves game against Collingwood. It was the curtain-raiser to the last ever AFL clash between Carlton and Collingwood at Princes Park. I sat back in the social club and watched as the boys avenged our early-season loss to the Magpies by flogging them by 111 points before a sellout crowd.
That effort against the Maggies reserves team saw me made an emergency for Carlton’s round 19 game against the Western Bulldogs at Princes Park. And when Adrian Hickmott pulled out after copping a dose of the flu, I was in. It was a great opportunity. The Blues had won thirteen games in a row and were regarded as a certainty to play Essendon in the Grand Final. But Britts made me sit on the bench for most of the afternoon, and I managed only four kicks and one handball. It was a pretty ordinary effort from Carlton, with our winning streak coming to an end when the Dogs won by 3 points. I was sent back to the reserves and missed the long-awaited clash with the undefeated Bombers in round 20. The game drew a crowd of more than 91,000 to the MCG. Essendon won by 26 points and Kouta suffered a season-ending knee injury, severely denting any hope we had of winning the premiership. However, Kouta’s injury, coupled with a hamstring strain suffered by Craig Bradley, opened the door for me, and I put my hand up for a recall by kicking eight goals against the Northern Bullants in the final round of the VFL home-and-away season.
The coaches decided I had earned another chance, so I was selected on the bench for the round 22 clash with Richmond at the MCG. It was a big game for the Tigers. They needed to win to make the finals for only the second time since 1982. It was a huge game for me as well. A good performance and I’d be playing in a final a week later. Thankfully, in contrast to my effort against the Bulldogs three weeks earlier, I made the most of my opportunity this time. From the second quarter, I led Richmond defender Ben Holland a merry dance and ended the game with four goals as we cantered to a 73-point win. After the game, Parko declared that I’d done enough to gain a berth in our team for the Qualifying Final against Melbourne. But later, Parkin said to Herald Sun reporter Bruce Matthews, ‘I’m just one of a number [of selectors]. He’ll get my vote. I’m not sure about the others.’ And that was my problem. We had two coaches, one of whom was in my corner and the other of whom was not.
Britts was a fitness fanatic who used to ride his bike to work from the suburb of Bulleen, a distance of around 20 kilometres, and to his way of thinking, I was lazy and undisciplined and lacked intensity. Unlike most of the other coaches I’d had, I was unable to win him over simply by kicking a bag of goals. He judged me solely on how many acts of defensive pressure—tackles, chases, smothers—I tallied. In most games, I failed to get a pass mark from him. He had started me on the bench in ten of my eleven senior games. And to be honest, I was sick of him.
Much to my surprise, I was named in the forward pocket for the Qualifying Final. This was partly because gun forward Lance Whitnall had suffered a shoulder injury against the Tigers and was no certainty to play out the whole game. A couple of hundred supporters turned up to watch our last training session before we took on the Demons. Lance and I got them going by taking shots at goal from up against the fence at the social club end of the ground. I would run around high-fiving blokes when one went through; it was great fun. The fun ended on game day, however, when a youthful Melbourne side kicked seven goals to two in the last quarter to secure a remarkable come-from-behind victory. Tasmanian teenager Brad Green and mature-age recruit Cameron Bruce were their heroes, while I barely got a kick. ‘Too old and too slow’ was again the refrain from the experts. We were now on the same side of the draw as Essendon, which had lost only one game for the year.
The Carlton supporters were certainly not impressed by my lacklustre effort against the Dees. ‘Have you ever seen a lazier footballer?!’ raged a caller to the Sport 927 radio station. ‘Doesn’t run, doesn’t chase.’ The caller then threatened to drop his pants and run down his local street if I was selected for the Semi-Final against the Brisbane Lions at the MCG. Well, that bloke must’ve had his daks around his ankles after I somehow held my place in the side, despite the return of Craig Bradley.
Like in the Richmond game, I was desperate to prove a few people wrong, and I got my chance when the Lions decided to pay me little respect, choosing instead to concentrate on Whitnall and Aaron Hamill. In the second quarter I snapped a goal, and in the following four minutes the boys kicked another three and we raced away to a match-winning lead. In the second half, I was able to get on the end of some quality work from Braddles and Beauie and bag three more, though if it hadn’t bee
n for a return of the kicking yips, it could have been eight. Not that it mattered. The winning margin was 82 points, albeit we lost Silvagni for the rest of the finals to a hamstring injury.
At the end of the game, I made a point of walking over to Des Headland and shaking his hand. Two years earlier we had been involved in Klaus Toft’s The Draft documentary, which had caught me trying to rough up Des behind the play. Back then, we’d been a couple of young blokes hoping to make the grade. Now we had both played in an AFL final, even if for Des it had been a pretty ordinary day.
Next up was the Preliminary Final. The media coverage in the lead-up to the game focused on Essendon’s desire to exact revenge for its 1-point loss to Carlton in the 1999 prelim. But for me, the game was about getting the chance to take on my great mate Adam Ramanauskas, who was enjoying a brilliant season with the Bombers. Sensing a programming opportunity, the ABC decided to screen The Draft on the Thursday before the game, which led to a few of the boys giving me some grief about it the next day. They kept laughing about my comment, ‘If you could play football and not run it would be good.’ That’s all anyone ever says to me about the doco.
On the eve of the game, David Parkin told some reporters that Carlton needed a miracle to win. He was right, as always. We fought hard early on and trailed by only 21 points at half-time. But when the Essendon boys went for broke in the third quarter we had nothing left, and they cruised to a 45-point win—and a place in the Grand Final. I started the game at full-forward, which was a pleasant change from my usual spot warming the pine, and ended up kicking two goals against the Bombers’ ever-consistent full-back, Dustin Fletcher. Having also gathered seven possessions and taken four marks, I certainly wasn’t our worst player. But I was far from our best.
In a way, that game summed up my season. I had shown plenty of talent, but I needed to develop the sort of consistency that Rama had shown. Thanks to the Bombers’ ten-goal win over Melbourne in the Grand Final, Rama became a premiership player. Watching him collect his medal on the biggest day of the season made me very jealous. He was now the golden boy, while I was under the pump. The media experts were quick to point out that I had kicked twelve goals in the Millennium Match but only twenty-six (and twenty-nine behinds) in fourteen games during the regular season. On top of that, Parko, one of my biggest fans, was handing Carlton’s coaching reins to Britts, who seemed convinced that I was an unmotivated slacker.
7 A BIT OF HARMLESS FUN
In the lead-up to the 2001 season, my best mate, Chris Newman, was drafted by Richmond. ‘Newy’ going to Richmond created a funny situation among our families. I had gone to Carlton, the team that Newy’s mum followed, while he had gone to the Tigers, which was the team my Mum barracked for.
There was more good news when, despite my concerns about how I would be treated now that Wayne Brittain was coach of the team in his own right, Carlton signed me to a new three-year contract worth around $150,000 per year. I’d only recently turned twenty, yet I was earning more than Mum and Dad combined. The football department had known they had to keep me after my good mate Aaron Hamill had quit to accept a lucrative five-year deal from St Kilda. I was shattered that Sammy was leaving us, but I knew it opened the door for me to get a game every week.
Another reason that summer was so enjoyable was that I had developed a great friendship with Ryan Houlihan. ‘Hoops’ (we first called him Houla Hoop, then just shortened it to Hoops) had come to Carlton after being selected with pick 73 in the 1999 national draft. His older brothers Damian (he played eleven games with Collingwood) and Adam (sixty-one games with Geelong and thirty-three with Richmond) were already on AFL lists, while his younger brother Josh would spend time at St Kilda without cracking a game in the seniors. Hoops and I had become great mates the year before. We’d spent nearly every day together, living out of each other’s pockets.
Hoops was good at all sports, with golf, tennis and cricket among his favourites. But I’m glad he followed his brothers into elite footy because he was the sort of player that a key forward loves. He always seemed to have plenty of time to decide what he was going to do, and his kicking was first-class. In fact, he was the most skilful bloke I played with, which is a big call because I ran out alongside stars like Craig Bradley, Chris Judd and Marc Murphy. I used to lick my lips when I was standing in the goal square and looked up the field to see Hoops take possession of the footy. He would wait for me to lead, then he’d put the ball right into my hands. Hoops used those skills to boot some brilliant goals of his own, and he was just as good with his left foot as his right. He had a laid-back personality, much like me, and that meant people often thought he wasn’t really trying during games, which was bullshit. He gave his all every time he ran out for the Blues.
Hoops and I loved hanging around the footy club together. We used to pinch ourselves when we’d walk past the pictures of the 200-game players hanging on the walls under the Heatley Stand—I’d tell Hoops that I was going to be the first of us to get a picture on the wall. On game days, we had a pre-match tradition of embracing each other and saying, ‘Good luck, brother.’ Hoops would then wait for me at the door that led out of the rooms because he knew I liked to be the last player to run onto the ground. We also played a lot of jokes on each other. I used to put Deep Heat in his jocks all the time. I did it on match day once. We ran out for the warm-up and Hoops started jumping around, then he ran up to me with a big grin on his face and said, ‘You fucking prick!’ He had to run straight off again and change his jocks.
Lots of things like that went on at the footy club. Stephen Silvagni was the king of stealing the other boys’ towels. We called him the towel bandit. SOS never took his own towel to training. Instead, he would pinch one out of another bloke’s bag, use it to dry himself after his shower then fold it up and put it back. When SOS retired, I picked up the mantle as the new towel bandit. I always made sure I pinched a towel from a bloke whom the coaches had kept out on the track for a bit longer. It was great fun.
Away from sport, Hoops and I were young blokes who loved a beer. We had both recently moved out of home and were keen to explore everything Melbourne had to offer. One of our haunts was the Star Bar in Richmond. You’d walk in there on a Sunday night and there’d be 100 footballers standing around getting poleaxed. We also went to the Depot, nearby on Swan Street, and when we were ready to mix it up, we’d go to Billboard and the Spy Lounge in the city, or Jimmy Rowe’s and another joint called One out in Essendon. We always received drink cards so we never had to spend any money. And going out was a bit easier back then. After all, no-one had cameras on their phones. Plus, I could fade into the crowd because not many people recognised me. Despite all those goals in the Millennium Match, I was nothing special—just a bloke who was in and out of the senior team.
If we played on a Sunday afternoon, our night would usually go something like this. We’d stay at the Depot until our drink cards ran out, then it was off to the Star Bar, where we’d stay until it shut around 3 am. We’d move on to Heat at Crown Casino and then, after that club closed at 6 am, it was a matter of ducking home to change into shorts and a T-shirt and heading to our recovery session, usually at Princes Park. I’d rock up, jog a couple of laps and then go home. There wasn’t much to it. I’d sleep off my hangover on Monday night and then head to training on Tuesday morning feeling a million bucks. Sometimes our recovery sessions weren’t until one o’clock in the afternoon, so you could stay out all night and then have a good sleep-in before attending. If blokes had really overcooked it the night before, they just wouldn’t go to the recovery session; they’d ring the football manager and say they had gastro when really they were still pissed. But I never missed those sessions. It didn’t matter if I was pissed or not, I always went. On the days when we had proper training sessions, Hoops and I didn’t run the gauntlet like we did before recovery sessions. A lot of people think that blokes in the AFL often rock up to full-on training pissed, but they don’t.
Despite a
big summer of fun and frivolity, Hoops and I were both fit enough to be selected for our opening Ansett Cup game against the Western Bulldogs. We both featured among Carlton’s best players as we won by 14 points—I kicked 4.3 while Hoops ran riot in the midfield. I kicked another four goals—this time without a miss—in our third Ansett Cup game against the Lions at the Gabba, but we were beaten by 13 points. We rounded out our pre-season with practice matches against St Kilda and Sydney, and although we lost those games, I was named among our best players on both occasions. After that string of good performances, I felt like I’d really proved my consistency to Britts. He kept harping on about the need for me to improve my tackling and chasing, but I think he was quite happy with where I was at. Not that he wanted me talking to the media about my good form, or whether I was ready to fill the big shoes vacated by Aaron Hamill. Every reporter who rang the club was politely told that I was off limits because the club wanted me to let my footy do the talking. Stephen Kernahan, who was one of our assistant coaches, was given the job of speaking about my improvement to Inside Football. ‘It’s his third season of AFL football and he’s finding the mark at the moment,’ Sticks said. ‘Every forward has bad days and we’re hopeful Fev is through all his bad ones. When he works hard like he did against Brisbane, he gets rewards.’
Fev: In My Own Words Page 8
