Carlton’s biggest problem should be their biggest asset. Their problem is they have two of the best goalkickers in the competition over the past two years. But yet they can’t kick a goal.
Carlton have a scoring problem and a goal kicker problem. They are separate but connected. They have the past two Coleman medallists in their forward line but one of them can’t kick straight, and the other can’t kick enough to compensate. Overall the team is bottom four for hitting the scoreboard.
Harry McKay is misfiring in front of goal. Credit: AFL Photos
Harry McKay the 2021 Coleman medallist, is missing goals – partly because to kick straight his first thought is to kick sideways. That is, he likes the side-on approach and to kick the ball right-angle across his body for a straight kick, and for curling shots in. Presently, it’s not working for him. His accuracy is awry.
Charlie Curnow’s problem is not about how many shots he misses as how many goals he needs to kick. Curnow is shouldering the burden to kick Carlton’s score. He has kicked 32 per cent of Carlton’s goals this year. McKay has kicked 14 per cent.
The Blues shot at goal accuracy of 42 per cent ranks them 16th in the competition, and much of that can be sheeted home to McKay. They only kick a goal from 20 per cent of their forward-50 entries, which also ranks them 16th.
Curnow is not the problem here. He kicks accurately, he marks well, and he draws free kicks. He has kicked more goals from free kicks (six, seven if you add a 50-metre penalty) than any other player this year. He has kicked 12.5 in shots taken from the corridor. McKay, on the other hand, has kicked 2.6 from this avenue directly in front of goal.
Charlie Curnow boots one of his five goals against Geelong in round two.
Curnow has kicked 17.6 from set shots for goal. McKay has kicked 6.7 from set shots. That figure doesn’t include the shots, such as Sunday’s, that sprayed the wrong direction and didn’t even register a score.
So, the problem as it relates to Curnow is not accuracy but, in the absence of alternatives, can they get him to kick more goals?
Charlie Curnow.Credit: AFL Photos
The problem as it relates to McKay is clear – he isn’t converting. He isn’t converting from directly in front. He isn’t converting from the boundary. On Sunday he passed a ball backwards outside 50 to George Hewett to take the shot. Kindly, it was suggested by Michael Voss, that he wanted to bring his teammate into the game. More cynically it looked like he didn’t want to take the kick, himself.
Carlton has a few problems in attacking. McKay’s accuracy is one, but more broadly it’s how they attack and who they attack through. It is where their attack is focused, how they bring the ball inside 50, how they keep it inside and, then, who scores.
“Our front-half game, and efficiency around our front-half game, needs to improve,” Voss said after the loss to the Saints.
“I think the method actually looks quite OK, but you’ve got to finish your plays, and they’re incomplete [at the moment].”
Carlton have two of the best marking tall targets in the competition yet they rank 15th for marks inside 50.
Carlton is often slow in how they move the ball into attack. On Sunday that was magnified by the fact Adam Saad did not play, and that they were playing St Kilda who play with a more defensive wall than any other team.
St Kilda don’t care if you have a mountain of the ball, as long as it’s up the field in areas that don’t hurt them. This is what happened on Sunday when Carlton had 446 disposals – the second most of any team this year – but still only kicked 60 points.
The Saints give up the most disposals of any side in the competition. Ross Lyon takes the view that you can fiddle around with the ball like a soccer side shuffling it around midfield, switching back and across and back again and searching for gaps to attack the goal, but if he makes sure no gaps are there then all that movement is for nothing.
That was what happened on Sunday. Carlton tried to go fast, but they also went slow and in the end they went nowhere.
Two weeks ago, before they were belted by Adelaide and then lost to the Saints, former Brisbane and Collingwood premiership coach Leigh Matthews said he was troubled by the Blues’ reliance on the two key forwards and the lack of a variety of goal kickers. History was against teams reliant on too few to kick so much.
The Blues have a spread problem. Small forward Matt Owies started the year brightly with six goals in three games, but he has been out since round three. Corey Durdin has six goals in five games, which is a solid output.
Jesse Motlop has kicked a goal a game in his six games this year, which is serviceable, while Zac Fisher has only kicked two goals for the year despite playing every game.
They plainly need more goals out of their midfield.
The biggest problem – on paper at least – is that the dynamic Jack Martin is out. On paper, he should be an answer to the problem, but getting him on the field has proven more of a problem than an answer. He has only played one game this year after just 12 games last year, and 11 the year before.
The concern is that Carlton has lost two successive games they expected to win and one of the causes of those losses was that one of their great assets was a liability. But Harry McKay has a Coleman Medal. He clearly knows how to kick goals. Now he needs to remind himself how he did it.
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