Earlier this year, Charlie Curnow marked on the lead, feigned to his right, cut to his left, left his Bulldogs opponent tottering and lashed a goal from outside 50. The ball didn\u2019t spin normally but thudded through the air, a bit like a hammer throw. It was soundtracked by an ascending, guttural \u201cCHAAAAAAARLIEEEE\u201d. Michael Voss turned to the crowd, pumped his fist and screamed \u201cYou beauty!\u201d<\/p>\n
It was moments like that where it was easy to be seduced by Curnow. It was moments like that, under the Docklands roof, where the Carlton crowd would crackle with optimism. By the end of that night, as with so many others in 2025, the adrenaline wore off and the Blues were overhauled. In the warm-up, Curnow would be gambolling about and he\u2019d almost always start the game well. But as his team stalled, he\u2019d be a frustrated, peripheral figure.<\/p>\n
Now, with four years to run on his contract, he is said to be \u201cdesperate\u201d to play elsewhere. Apparently he\u2019s not responding to the coach\u2019s tough love, wants to get out of Melbourne and is willing to take a pay cut. We glean this through the language of trade period \u2013 denial, leak, counter-denial, counter-leak. Reports are peppered with \u201cmy understanding is\u201d and \u201cit\u2019s an interesting one\u201d. Charlie jets off to New York, the managers strut it out, and the rest of us are left scratching our heads.<\/p>\n
Carlton has been on a media blitz this week, uploading video of a conversation between Patrick Cripps and Jacob Weitering in which the underlying message was \u201canyone who\u2019s not onboard with us can nick off\u201d. On Monday, Voss was on radio discussing the various players who may not be playing under him next year. The message to Elijah Hollands was blunt \u2013 that he\u2019s not professional enough and that he\u2019s let them down. The message to Tom de Koning was more forgiving \u2013 a nod to the impossibility of knocking back the absurd money being thrown at him.<\/p>\n
The message to Curnow wasn\u2019t just directed at the player, but at the industry generally \u2013 back off, he\u2019s going nowhere, we won\u2019t even field your calls. In doing so, it\u2019s playing out almost exactly like the Christian Petracca wrangling this time last year. It\u2019s a chess game. It\u2019s brinkmanship. It\u2019s managers swaggering about like they own the game, which at this time of year they do. It renders words and player statements pretty much meaningless.<\/p>\n
Power generally swings to the players and their managers, but that might not be the case in this instance. Photograph: Dean Lewins\/AAP<\/p>\n
Each year, as we edge closer to trade period, we get an insight into how the sausages are made. It\u2019s not pretty. Maybe it\u2019s good to get a dose of reality. For most of preseason, we get the language of optimism, connection and brotherly love. But at this time of year, for those clubs not in the finals, most of the players are commodities, clients and bargaining chips. Most have little say in the matter. Some, like Curnow, orchestrate it themselves.<\/p>\n
For Carlton people, that can be hard to countenance. He\u2019s pushing the friendship right now, but Curnow has always been a popular, engaging and talented player. In the early weeks of the 2016 season, Carlton released a mini documentary featuring their new coach Brendon Bolton and his crop of young draftees. He took them to his home state of Tasmania where they hiked, pedalled, paddled and listened at length to Bolton\u2019s philosophies on life, family and team defence. If you were to build a core of a football team, piece by piece, high draft pick by high draft pick, it was all there in the Tasmanian wilderness. He had two key forwards \u2013 Curnow and Harry McKay. He had the top draft pick in Weitering. He had the son of a Blues champion. It\u2019s not as though any of those have been a bust. But it\u2019s been nearly a decade \u2013 it all should be coming to fruition now. They should be all in their prime, Carlton legends for life.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not how footy works of course. And it\u2019s certainly not how footy works in this era of mega bucks and long contracts. In this environment, power generally swings to the players and their managers. But in this specific scenario, the club still holds all the aces. Carlton are well within their rights to stonewall any attempts to lure Curnow. They\u2019re well within their rights to be pissed off at him \u2013 that he\u2019s jumping ship just when things get really hard, that he\u2019s let them down in big games, and that he owes them. They\u2019re well within their rights to demand a superstar in return for granting his wish. Given that Jack Silvagni is now headed to St Kilda, the need to play hardball with the likes of Curnow is even more urgent.<\/p>\n
skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to From the Pocket: AFL Weekly<\/p>\n Jonathan Horn brings expert analysis on the week’s biggest AFL stories<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n If he does end up staying, all involved will carefully massage the messaging. We\u2019ll hear about how much he loves the club and how much he loves Vossy. But if the Blues continue their mid-table drift, we\u2019ll get something similar to what we saw with Petracca this season \u2013 a player who clearly wants to be elsewhere, a player with all the joy sucked out of his game, and a prisoner of his own contract.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this year, Charlie Curnow marked on the lead, feigned to his right, cut to his left, left…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116385,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-116384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}