Opinion
On Friday morning, I had my own reactions to what I witnessed on Thursday night, when a young man took to the field and behaved in a way that raised hundreds of questions and one solitary possession.
Those reactions felt surreal at the time, but were perhaps in line with many of yours. A sense of sadness or even heartbreak as the footage was on that little screen in my hand, and nothing about it looked natural or healthy or safe. My shoulders slumped, and I rested my forehead on my palm while the other hand scrolled and scrolled and scrolled.
My heartbreak quickly turned to stinging criticism of those who were present on the night: teammates, support staff, coaches, all of them. Ooh, I was adamant as I vented up towards my ceiling, albeit in heavy silence.
The only thing that’s been typical about the performance and critique of the player, Elijah Hollands, was the reactions of the public. You can pick any forum you like and it was, in true 2026 fashion, yelled from the extremes. Acidic ridicule, vitriol, finger-pointing and blame for as far as the eye could see. Then, of course, came the second wave of kindness, compassion and calls for patience. A few rare but important voices holding some middle ground to give balance to something we think we’ve not witnessed before. All of us pinballing across the spectrum it seems, maybe still.
So, where are the Carlton footy club now? It’s impossible to answer, because as a sporting code, it’s hard to know where we all are after last Thursday night’s events.
In terms of the Blues as a footy team, I could be accused of being somewhat of an agitator this year. My big query on them even before the season started was not whether they could play well, but whether they could play well when they were challenged. No footy team has an uninterrupted hold on the momentum of a game or a season and the Blues just cannot deal with the distractions that come with an opposition getting on top of them.
They wilt. Consistently. It’s been hard to watch at times, comical at others; harsh as that sounds, it’s undeniable.
With the awful pattern of giving up leads as the Blues do so routinely, my question each week has been, when the opposition gets momentum – say, kick two quick goals against them – where do the players go? In their thoughts, I mean. Where do they go?
Elite athletes are trained extensively on resets, both individually and as a group. Two weeks ago, before the unfortunate events of Thursday night, I was discussing this practice of athletes and resets with the ABC’s Corbin Middlemas and it jogged a memory from a time in my playing days. In fact, it was at a time in my career when the team I was a part of was the best I’d played in, the 2015-16 Bulldogs team.
Sure, we had a bunch of good players, a great culture of hard trainers and a generational coach. But we also had a psychologist by the name of Lisa Stevens, who created a simple but effective on-field, in-game reset.
It was a three-step process for when the anxiety of shifting momentum or fear of failure came crashing through your emotional wall.
1: Make yourself BIG (physically, shoulders back, head up) and BREATHE (to get oxygen to the part of your brain that can problem solve).
2: TOUCH a teammate or CONNECT with a teammate in some way, shape or form (grabbing the jumper with a clenched fist was an efficient way to do this over distance and noise).
3: Keep coming FORWARD. (This was the nexus point of strategy and metaphor).
I hadn’t thought about this three-step reset for years. Now I can’t stop thinking about it.
For a footy team, it’s a great little tool. I saw it work wonders for the group I was a part of. Human nature (particularly in losing sporting teams) has a long pattern that when under pressure, we become narrow in our thinking and revert to survival mode.
Is that what happened to Carlton on Thursday night? Is that why they missed the signs of a teammate who needed help?
There is an ocean of concern and questions that continue to roll onto shore for the Carlton Football Club and one of their own, Elijah Hollands, and there are not many answers just yet.
But if I reflect on myself on that Friday morning, when I made myself small and hunched, I silently churned away and for a while, I was not interested in moving from my judgmental position, forward or otherwise.
So I’m going back to that simple three-step reset. Carlton could do worse than adopting something similar, to better look after each other in tough times.
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Bob Murphy is the former Western Bulldogs captain and an Age columnist.Connect via X.