Carlton coach Michael Voss has promised his club’s increasingly impatient fan base that his players will work hard to get better in the areas of the game that are letting them down badly.
The Blues played Brisbane on Friday night in front of a record home-and-away crowd between the two teams (45,548), but by three-quarter time, a large portion had seen enough as their team trailed the Lions by seven goals.
The Carlton fans who were still at the ground at the end of the third term voiced their displeasure by booing their team, but Voss had no issue with that or the early mass exodus from Marvel Stadium.
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“That’s up to them, I can’t determine what they do. All I know is I’d rather have our fan base,” Voss said post-match.
“We’ve got a very large supporter base and we will more embrace that than anything else, so we won’t step away from that and we certainly won’t step away from our responsibilities in what we’ve got to do next.
“You want them to bring the noise and with that, there’s good and with that there’s some things that you’re going to have to go through.
“We understand the frustration and we’ll get after it, that’s our promise.
“We have internal measures that we want to make sure that we’re really great at, and at the moment we’re not great at them, and we need to get better.”
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Carlton’s skill errors, their inability to form lengthy chains of possessions, their struggle to handle pressure, and basic turnovers, are just some of the things that Voss needs to work on eradicating from his team on game day.
“Good teams give you feedback and we got some feedback tonight that we’re short in a few areas,” Voss said.
“We can either ignore it or we can accept it and get to work on it so our choice is that we have to get to work on it, accept it and get better.”
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But Voss insisted that he had the right mix in the middle of the ground despite the recent form of his underperforming on-ball brigade.
Hopes were high among Carlton fans this year after their team missed the finals by 0.6 per cent last year, after being in the top eight for the first 22 rounds, and 30 games into his career as Blues coach, Voss admitted he expected his team to be playing better by this stage of his tenure.
“Right now we’re not playing at the level that we want,” he said.
Carlton’s last three losses have been against fellow finals hopefuls Adelaide, St Kilda and Brisbane and Voss accepted that his team was off the pace a third of the way into the season.
“I don’t think we should shy away from that at all,” Voss said.
“Three weeks ago against Adelaide we got a bit of a lesson in a few areas, so we went to work on a few things that has helped us find a little bit better form, and hopefully stand up to some of these teams that find themselves in the top three or four in the competition.”
Voss didn’t expect Tom De Koning (concussion) to face the Western Bulldogs next week, but was optimistic that Harry McKay (cut eye) and Jacob Weitering (arm) would be available.
