10 THE GIRL WITH THE CURL
There was a lot of optimism around the club going into the 2005 season, as things had changed dramatically over the course of the previous two years. We now had the youngest list in the competition (I was one of only five players who had been with the Blues since the 1999 season), the club’s financial situation was stable, and we felt like our worst days were behind us. I was again included in the player leadership group, and as always, Denis was forced to explain to the press why he thought this was a good idea: ‘Brendan has a very charismatic personality that people are attracted to. He’s very likeable. His persona makes people feel good.’ It seemed that, despite our ups and downs, Denis liked me and I liked him—although he never stopped telling me to cut my hair, which had earned me another nickname: ‘Shag’.
Denis trained us really hard in the lead-up to the Wizard Cup and we started in fine style, defeating Essendon by six goals. Lance Whitnall, who had given up junk food and devoted himself to a tough fitness program over the summer, was clearly best-on-ground that night. Lance had struggled with injuries, weight problems and poor form for a few years, and he had almost been traded to St Kilda following the 2004 season, so it was great to see him up and about. A week later, Lance and I showed our potential as a dynamic attacking duo when we kicked four goals each in a 10-point win over Melbourne. Age reporter Jake Niall brilliantly summed up the positivity that surrounded us:
The pre-season is about hope and hypotheticals. If Hird stands up, if Richo grows up, if Akermanis shuts up. Every club has a large ‘if’ hanging over it.
For Carlton, it’s whether Lance Whitnall steers clear of fried food and Brendan Fevola stays out of trouble. These ifs are bigger than the old Whitnall waistline but, with each pre-season game, Carlton’s key forward duo gives supporters greater cause for optimism.
The way Whitnall is travelling, we may soon hear about actresses experimenting with the ‘Whitnall diet’, for whatever has caused Lance to lose weight, gain mobility and resurrect his ailing career could surely benefit the various Jennifers of Hollywood.
I found myself in a spot of bother during the Demons game, getting reported for rough play after I flattened Brad Green. Thankfully, the newly formed match review panel, created so that incidents could be assessed without the need for a tribunal hearing, later let me off the hook. I made the most of it by kicking six goals in our 51-point flogging of the Western Bulldogs in a Wizard Cup semi-final at Telstra Dome. My performance that night was aided by some wonderful tips from perhaps the greatest player ever to pull on a boot: Wayne Carey. Denis was Wayne’s number-one fan, so he had invited the big fella to do some voluntary coaching with our forwards during the summer. Working with him was an awesome experience. I learned a lot about the game from him.
More than 26,000 people turned up to see us beat the Bulldogs, which showed just how excited the Carlton supporters were about our prospects in 2005. It was a very exciting time for the players as well. I told the Herald Sun’s Mark Stevens after the Bulldogs game:
We’ve been through a lot of shit at the club and we’ve started to get through into a bit of clear water. Hopefully we can start winning some big games and bring some joy to the fans. I think if you had said we’d make a Grand Final at the start of the Wizard Cup, we’d have been tickled pink.
Many people like to think of the pre-season grand final as nothing more than a glorified practice match, but it was huge for us that year. We desperately wanted to win. Nick Stevens even missed his brother’s wedding so he could play. Our opponent in the big game was West Coast. The Eagles were regarded as having the best young list in the competition and went in as hot favourites—although the game was being played at Telstra Dome in Melbourne, the pundits expected their brilliant midfield, led by Chris Judd and Ben Cousins, to be far too quick and slick for us. But with more than 40,000 raucous Carlton supporters cheering us on, we made a mockery of the predictions by grabbing a 22-point lead at half-time. It was one of the most exciting halves of football of my career. Lance Whitnall and I played every minute like our lives depended on it. I harassed and chased and laid tackles and smothers, all the things I was usually bagged for not doing, and on top of all that I booted five goals from all sorts of crazy angles and distances, most of them while being manned up by star defender Darren Glass. It was just bloody brilliant fun. My favourite moment of the first half came in the second quarter when, with scores level, I sprinted out to the 50-metre line and laid a crunching tackle on Eagles youngster Brent Staker. The ball came free and bobbled along the ground, I picked it up then snapped it across my body and straight through the big sticks. The crowd went absolutely bananas. I was in heaven. Feeling the energy from the supporters, I jogged around the boundary line, wagging my index finger at the beaming fans.
The Eagles fought back in the last quarter, hitting the front at the 11-minute mark, but we held our nerve and won by 27 points. Having seen off two opponents, I finished with eight goals. My new kicking style, which I’d developed over the summer, had worked a treat. The most obvious thing about it was the way I gripped the ball, placing my right hand near the base of the footy and my left hand near the top. It helped me keep the Sherrin steady during my run-up. It was a unique approach that would prove very effective in the coming seasons.
When the final siren sounded, it was as if we had won the real premiership. We jumped all over each other as our delirious supporters sang, ‘We are the Navy Blues’. Telstra Dome was absolutely rocking. The smiles of the fans turned into laughs when former Hawthorn champion Michael Tuck came forward to present the medal named in his honour to the best player on the ground, which was me. Tucky said into the microphone, ‘The Norm Smith Medal goes to Brendan Fevola.’ Everyone was roaring with laughter as I climbed onto the podium; it was very funny. We then jogged a lap of honour, waving the big bowl-like trophy—we often referred to it as the Wizard Wok!—to all the people proudly waving their scarves and flags. When we arrived in the rooms, Ian Collins was wearing a big grin, probably because he was already thinking about what he could do with the $220,000 in prize money.
12 March 2005: With Nick Stevens during the Carlton v West Coast Wizard Cup grand final at Telstra Dome. (Newspix/Cameron L'Estrange)
Denis tried to keep a lid on things. After all, we had to front up for round 1 of the regular season in a couple of weeks. Nevertheless, that night we celebrated as if it was late September and we had won the premiership. Wearing our medals, we first headed to a pub owned by former Carlton player David Rhys-Jones. After a heap of beers there, we went to the Spy Lounge. We were patted on the back by Blues fans everywhere we went. I think I pulled up stumps at around 6 am. It was a massive night.
The next morning, the papers were full of positive stories about Carlton. ‘No ceiling on season for Pagan’s buoyant Blues,’ was the headline in the Australian. ‘A win for the Blue believers,’ yelled the Herald Sun. According to the footy scribes, we were back in business. Some blokes were even saying that if Lance and I stayed fit, we were a rough chance to win the flag. The front cover of the Sunday Age sports section carried a picture of me punching the air with delight, accompanied by the headline, ‘The Fevolution is upon us.’ Inside, reporter Mark Fuller sang my praises:
The stains of Fevola’s wild youth are fading weekly. They were mostly minor blemishes rendered darker for the fact that Fevola was feared to be in the act of wasting an immense talent. Many more nights like last night and Fevola’s reputation, like his twinkling boots, might soon be whiter than white.
It is not so much that Fevola has become a model citizen. His hair, for one thing, suggests he would be insulted by such a notion. But in his 25th year, and his seventh as an AFL footballer, Fevola is in danger of becoming the model footballer.
It was generally agreed, outside the club as well as inside it, that we were going to make the finals. The performances of recent pre-season competition winners were offered up as proof. In 2000, Essendon had won the Wizard Cup
and had then gone on to win the flag. Port Adelaide had won the pre-season comp in 2001 and 2002 and then made the finals. Adelaide had done the same in 2003, while St Kilda had almost made the September Grand Final after winning the Wizard Cup in 2004.
The celebrations continued on the Sunday at Carlton’s family day, which drew a big crowd to Princes Park. Then the club gave us the Monday off, so the players went to a couple more pubs in Carlton—we basically had a two-day bender. Back at the club, Ian Collins was so sure things were on the right track that he handed Denis Pagan a three-year contract extension, tying him to the club until the end of the 2008 season.
Looking back, Collo’s decision to re-sign Denis was probably the moment that things started to unravel for us. Although I loved Denis, many of the senior players were still very much against him, even after we’d won the Wizard Cup. Guys like Scott Camporeale and Kouta were careful to praise Denis in the media, but in reality they hated him. Kouta felt deeply disheartened that, as the team’s captain, he had not been consulted before Denis was handed his new deal. He thought it was disgraceful that Collo didn’t care how the players felt. When hugely respected blokes like Kouta are not on board with what a club is doing, it spells trouble. And there was plenty of trouble at Carlton in the six months that followed.
We were hot favourites to beat North Melbourne in our opening game of the premiership season. But although Kouta put on a vintage display in the midfield and I kicked three goals, we lost a scrappy, frustrating game by 20 points. In round 2 we beat Essendon by 4 points in a cracking game, piling on seven goals to two in the final quarter to snatch an amazing win. But we then lost to Collingwood, drew with Port Adelaide and fell 19 points short against Fremantle. When we fronted up to training on the Monday after our loss to the Dockers, we faced a stark reality: we were twelfth on the ladder and our chances of playing in the finals were already looking slim. There is no doubt that the team, myself included, suffered from a pre-season premiership hangover in those early rounds. Our intensity had dropped off after our big night against West Coast and we were finding it really hard to get it back.
To make matters worse, I found myself in trouble with the match review panel after the Fremantle game. In the second quarter I’d wrestled with Dockers backman Antoni Grover. He’d put me in a headlock and I’d struggled to breathe, so I’d grabbed at his face to make him let go of me. Although Antoni had had to leave the field under the blood rule, I hadn’t thought much of it until I was charged with ‘making unnecessary contact to the face’, which is code for eye-gouging. I thought I’d get off because clearly I’d needed to do something to get free or I was going to pass out. But the vision of me grabbing Grover’s face looked really bad and that’s all the tribunal cared about. They rubbed me out for two weeks. Denis was livid at the decision, but he was far more livid with me for putting myself in such a position. Asked about the incident at his weekly press conference, he said:
He does so many good things. He came to hospital with me the other day to see a very sick boy. I remember a guernsey day that finished at 2 pm and he was here at 4.30 pm signing autographs. You think, ‘Gee, why do so many good things and then lose it for a couple of moments and get involved in something that is really insignificant?’
Having been the darlings of the pre-season competition, Lance Whitnall and I were both under the pump by then. Under the headline ‘Once were wizards: The big Blues’ fall from Wizard Cup grace’, the Herald Sun ran a table which showed that I’d averaged sixteen possessions per game in the pre-season, but only eleven touches over the first five premiership rounds. Lance, meanwhile, was averaging eight less disposals per game in the regular season than he had in the Wizard Cup. Around that time, it also leaked out that my manager was in a stand-off with the club over a new contract, with Paul Connors believing Carlton was offering far less than what I was worth. The media had a field day with that. They even ran polls in the paper asking people to vote on how much I should be paid. It was ridiculous.
Things started looking up when Jarrad Waite did a brilliant job for us at full-forward in round 6, bagging five goals to ensure a 6-point win over Hawthorn—I threw my arms around him in thanks when he walked off Telstra Dome. In the ensuing couple of months, however, we became a rabble on the field. I was still suspended when we were embarrassed by Richmond in round 7. On that grim afternoon, the Tigers led by thirteen goals to one at half-time. With my great mate Chris Newman running amok in the back line, they won by 85 points, which was their biggest-ever win over Carlton. I returned for our clash with Geelong a week later, but we lost that one by 70 points. In all, we lost eleven consecutive games.
In the middle of that horror run was the last official AFL game to be played at Princes Park (Collo and his board had decided to move all our home matches to Telstra Dome and the MCG), a match against Melbourne that took place on Saturday 21 May. The Demons were entrenched in the top eight, and although the final margin was only 18 points, we were still flogged. We were 46 points down halfway through the second quarter, and by three-quarter time we trailed by 57. We only avoided a complete catastrophe by kicking six unanswered goals in the final term. I was among the many Carlton players who had little impact on the outcome. My only two goals came towards the end, when the sting had completely gone from the contest. Kouta was our only decent player that day. If not for him, we might have lost by 100 points.
As our captain, Kouta performed the official duties after the final siren had sounded. The umpires handed him the match ball and he held it aloft for the crowd to see. With Andrea Bocelli’s song ‘Time to say goodbye’ blaring around the ground, Kouta handed the ball to one of our club’s greatest players, John Nicholls. ‘Big Nick’ then walked off the field, with the players and coaches forming a guard of honour. It was a nice moment.
I was sad to see the end of AFL games at Princes Park, as the place held many happy memories for me. Apart from those great game days, that last match also brought an end to the tradition of post-game drinks at the nearby bowling club. Those drinks had been one of my favourite things about playing for the Blues at their famous home ground. Princes Park was the last of the old suburban grounds, and I think AFL footy has become a bit sterile now that all the games are played in concrete stadiums. Sometimes I wish I had played footy 20 years earlier, when the Bulldogs’ home matches were at the Western Oval and the Saints played at Moorabbin. In those days you could have a few drinks after a game and no-one would care, and you could have a bit of a laugh with your mates and not end up on the front page of the paper.
By the second half of the season, our confidence was so low that we were rocking up to games certain that we would lose. We were now mired in a truly disastrous season, and it was bloody tough. I’d always try and go into games with a positive mindset, but we were getting beaten by ten goals just about every week. Denis was copping a hammering in the media, but I’m certain that he did his best at the time. We just didn’t have the talent on our list to pull ourselves out of that hole. One week when we played Adelaide at Football Park, Denis told us to flood the back line for the whole match just to try and keep the margin from blowing out too badly. We actually held Adelaide to nine goals (although they also kicked seventeen behinds), but we managed to score only eight goals of our own. It was a depressing way to play footy.
As the team went from bad to worse, the pressure on me became huge. I knew that I had to kick bags of goals for us to have any chance of winning. But because everyone knew Denis’ game plan, opposition clubs would double-or triple-team me, which made it impossible for me to do anything. When we got flogged, which was often, I’d walk off the ground feeling really flat, even if I’d kicked two or three goals. Alex would try and cheer me up, telling me I’d played well, but I’d be thinking that I hadn’t done the right thing; that if I’d kicked more goals we would’ve won.
Even when I was really depressed about how things were going, I never showed it around the club. I was always up and about there. It f
elt like my true home. All the boys were there, all my mates, and I enjoyed training. As soon as I hopped in the car, however, I’d be flat—the adrenaline would just drain out of me. I know that Alex became worried about my mental health at those times. She could see what an effect the pressure had on me.
Sometimes I found it impossible to sleep at night after games. That was certainly the case after we suffered an 80-point belting from St Kilda in round 15. That was the most embarrassing game I have ever been involved in. I don’t really know why I was selected in the team that week. I’d suffered a groin strain in our loss to the Lions three weeks earlier and the injury had been getting worse by the day. I had been hobbling through training sessions without kicking the ball, and the problem was sapping my confidence. I’m sure that just about everyone in the crowd and the press box could tell that I was barely 50 per cent fit when we ran out to face the Saints. I could only manage a couple of shots at goal using my left foot during the warm-up because my groin was so sore. I had taken some painkillers, but they had done nothing. I found myself wishing I was back home.
I began the game by dropping two chest marks at full-forward. Shortly after, an umpire paid a free kick against me for pushing my opponent, Max Hudghton. I teed off at the umpy, who promptly awarded a 50-metre penalty. A minute or so later, I gave away another free kick, again disputed the decision, and conceded another 50-metre penalty. Up in the coaches’ box, Denis was flipping out. The runner came out and told me to get off the ground. I just sat on the bench looking sulky, I was so angry and frustrated. Denis decided to send me back out there midway through the second quarter, but I was all over the shop. I was dragged again in the second half, and as I took my place on the bench for the second time, having not yet recorded an effective possession, I turned to my mate Ryan Houlihan and said, ‘I’m going to get a donut today.’ He just laughed—you’ve got to laugh when everything is going to shit. I finished the game with no goals, no kicks, no marks and just two handpasses. I think the stats man was trying to help me out when he gave me those two handballs.
Fev: In My Own Words Page 13
