Fev: In My Own Words Page 9

  However, I spent all the credit I had built up with the coaching staff when I had a big night out with Matty Lappin and Andrew Merrington just eight days before our round 1 game against Fremantle at Subiaco. We had been nightclubbing and were all very drunk when one of the boys suggested we go to Victoria University’s Student Village in Maribyrnong to visit a couple of girls he knew. It was about 4 am by the time one of the girls let us into a dormitory, and we began yahooing and wrestling each other to the floor. A stern-looking girl walked into the corridor where we were mucking around and told us to piss off. I grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed her, then sprayed her again as she was walking away. I thought it was just a bit of harmless fun, but next thing we knew the police were there. One of the girls we’d gone to see let me hide in her room, but the other boys weren’t so lucky. They spent the night in the cells at the Footscray police station, having been charged with being drunk in a public place (the charges were dismissed a couple of weeks later). Despite my lucky escape, I was still fined by Carlton and had to apologise along with Matty and Andrew to the rest of the team. The club said that we were going to get some counselling for alcohol abuse and do some community work, but we never did.

  Blues president John Elliott, who was himself renowned for drinking too much and carrying on in public, was one of many people who teed off at us in the newspapers after the incident. ‘Carlton is very unhappy by the whole matter and we have taken appropriate action,’ he said. ‘We are taking it very seriously and a week before the season starts … it’s pathetic.’ Elliott gave us another spray at the club’s jumper presentation, which was held two days after our night out. He told the playing squad that he didn’t want anyone else behaving like the ‘three idiots’. To the relief of Matty and me, the club’s administrators confirmed our selection for the game against the Dockers (Andrew was selected for the reserves). They copped a lot of flak over it, but to be honest, we hadn’t done anything seriously wrong. We hadn’t beaten anyone up or damaged any property.

  By the time the Fremantle game kicked off, I’d forgotten about the whole saga. I was ready to knuckle down and get a kick. I started at full-forward, which was a pleasant surprise, but the Dockers paid close attention to me and I struggled to have any impact on the contest. Four kicks and one goal was my contribution, although it was still an enjoyable evening as we came from behind to win by 1 point. Lappo and I avoided having a beer with the other boys on the flight home, although Lappo had probably earned a frothy as he’d kicked three goals.

  It was back to the bench a week later against Hawthorn. I eventually came on and kicked a couple, but we still suffered a disappointing loss in front of our home crowd. That effort meant we were given no chance of beating Essendon in our round 3 game at the MCG, particularly as the champion trio of Bradley, Silvagni and Koutoufides had to pull out of the team due to injuries. But Brett Ratten was inspirational in the midfield as we kicked six goals to one in the last quarter and snatched a 17-point win. Hoops and I were both in the thick of the action during the final stages of the game. I kicked a goal that put us within 7 points, then Hoops snapped a beauty, narrowing the margin to 1 point. Ratts put us in front after a great pass from Matty, then Simon Fletcher made a name for himself by slotting another. When the siren sounded, we all went mad. It was like we had won the Grand Final. Even now, I still regard that as one of the best wins I played in. We had so many young blokes in the team and we really stood up. It was bloody great fun. We had a few beers that night.

  Consistency became the big issue down at Carlton when we got rolled by Adelaide at Princes Park the following week. I spent most of the day on the bench after I was poleaxed by Mark Ricciuto. He was a tank of a man and he also flattened Hoops that afternoon, not that he should have been very proud of taking out our 71-kilo string bean. Thankfully, Britts kept me in the team for round 5 and I rewarded him by kicking three goals against the Saints, but my topsy-turvy season continued when I was next to useless in our loss to Collingwood a week later. Once again, Blues fans called the talkback sports shows to say I needed to get my hands off my hips and start having a go. When the Herald Sun published a list of players who were considered the most frustrating to watch by their own fans, I was not exactly surprised to find out I frustrated Carlton supporters the most.

  My season continued in that vein for the next five weeks. When Lance Whitnall was injured early in our game against the Lions in round 8, I came on and took eight marks and kicked three goals. I was full of energy and enthusiasm. But in other games I looked uninterested and hardly touched the ball. I’m still not sure why it was that on some days I felt like I could jump over tall buildings and on others I felt as flat as a pancake. That’s just how it was. Sure, it was frustrating for the fans and the coaches, but it was bloody frustrating for me as well.

  Still, Britts selected me every week—that is, until I tore the posterior cruciate ligament in my right knee during our round 11 loss to Richmond. My teammate Anthony Franchina ran into me as we were both trying to grab the ball and I was carried from the field on a stretcher. I was ruled out for at least six weeks, while my old Dandenong Stingrays teammate Kris Massie also went down with a broken leg. The weirdest thing about that day was that Mum wore a Richmond scarf to the game. Maybe she was trying to blend into the crowd, or maybe she was secretly hoping that Chris Newman would get his team over the line. What I do know is that Mum never wore that scarf to a game again, and for the rest of my career at Carlton, I didn’t suffer another serious injury.

  For a bloke like me who just wanted to play footy every day of the week, the knee problem was seriously annoying. I was bored senseless during the week and so I started going out more, just to have something to do. Before I knew it, I was back in the headlines after things got a bit out of control at a pub in Brunswick. Under the screaming headline ‘WILD BLUES’, the Herald Sun’s Mark Robinson wrote, ‘Carlton players Matthew Lappin and Brendan Fevola have been involved in another drunken escapade.’ This time, however, I’d been declared guilty by association, which I felt was grossly unfair. I had simply been in the pub when one bloke had urinated in the bar and another had pinched a heap of bottles from behind the counter. Yet the true nature of my involvement was buried in Robinson’s article.

  [The licensee] said Fevola, who had acted the peacemaker, left his phone number so he could be contacted.

  ‘When Brendan Fevola came, I told him, “Mate, you’re not the problem. You were the guy trying to keep the peace. I want the guys who were involved to come and talk to me”.’

  I knew I had behaved responsibly—I even went back to the pub two days later and paid for the stolen alcohol myself. So I was pretty pissed off with the opening to that article. But I also knew that if the media wanted to blow the incident up, then there wasn’t much I could do about it.

  Because I was very keen to get back on the park, I did everything the medical staff asked of me and returned to the reserves just five weeks after injuring my knee. I was recalled to the seniors for our round 20 game against St Kilda at what was then known as Colonial Stadium. We needed to beat the Saints to wrap up a spot in the finals, so the pressure was on. Warming up in the rooms before that game, I felt rejuvenated and motivated. I couldn’t wait to get out there and put on a show. As it turned out, we won by 44 points and I produced one of my best AFL performances. I booted five goals, took nine marks and gathered seventeen possessions. And I did all the one-percenters, pushing myself to contest after contest, desperate to prove I was worthy of participating in the finals. The match report in the Herald Sun would read: ‘As well as his ability to kick goals from long distances, Fevola’s chasing and harassing to keep the ball inside the scoring zone would have earned brownie points from the coach.’ Indeed, at his post-match press conference, Britts delivered a passionate defence of me:

  He is different. That’s why he’s able to provide you with the good things … basically he’s a good kid. He just needs to work hard. He got a lot of publ
icity early. There was a lot said about him, a lot written about him. Every time he stepped across the line he was quoted about the goals he kicked in that [Millennium] game. He was only going to please you blokes [in the media] by kicking another twelve against someone.

  I remained upbeat and on song during the last two weeks of the home-and-away season. I put in a reasonable effort when we flogged Collingwood, and I kicked three goals in our 70-point win over Geelong. That was the afternoon when young Cats defender Darren Milburn knocked out Stephen Silvagni on the wing and nearly caused a riot. As far as the Carlton supporters were concerned, SOS was untouchable, and they went crazy when Milburn ironed him out with a brutal hip-and-shoulder. One bloke showed his anger by thumping his fists on the roof of the Geelong interchange shelter when Milburn was benched later in the game. The Cats were an absolute rabble that day. The one thing they did was fire us up for a big tilt at the finals.

  We finished fifth on the ladder and had to play eighth-placed Adelaide in an Elimination Final at the MCG. Matty Lappin and Kouta were awesome as we demolished the Crows, while I gathered fifteen touches while roaming around the forward line, although I spoiled much of my good work by kicking 1.3. Nevertheless, I had done enough to hold my spot for our Semi-Final against Richmond at the ’G. The Tigers were playing in only their second finals series in twenty years and they’d been flogged in week one by Essendon, so we thought it was going to be a walk in the park. But our confidence crumbled when Kouta went down with a serious knee injury and SOS did his ankle. By the final siren, we had managed only seven goals and had lost by 11 points. It was a terrible effort, probably our worst performance of the year. Having managed only two behinds for the afternoon, I was shattered with how the day had panned out. A day earlier I had been thinking our form was so good that we might even pinch a spot in the Grand Final, like we had in 1999. Instead, our season was now over. Our rooms had a funereal atmosphere—no-one lost finals matches to Richmond, certainly not Carlton—and seeing so many sad faces quickly became unbearable for us young blokes. We smashed down half a dozen beers and headed out on the town. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said to Hoops. ‘We’ll be back in the finals next year.’

  We drank all Saturday night and then slept all Sunday in preparation for Mad Monday, that most enjoyable yet infamous of football institutions. Mad Monday always happens on the Monday after your season ends, and it always involves binge drinking. The club would put on a few beers and a feed for us on the day, after which we’d head out and tear good old Melbourne town apart. Hoops and I drank flat out. We went to a few pubs with the boys before heading off on our usual nightclub circuit. We were as drunk as you can be, but we powered on into the early hours of the morning. On nights like those, I always had to be the last to leave. I never wanted to go home because I thought something fun might happen while I was in bed.

  We ended up at Crown Casino and won about $400. Gambling was a big part of my life by then. I had started punting at high school but had stepped it up at Carlton. It was little wonder. Everyone at the Blues gambled because there was a TAB outlet at Princes Park. Gambling really brought out my competitive streak. I thought I could win anything.

  At around 6 am, Hoops and I stumbled out of the casino. We looked pretty ordinary, as you can well imagine. We had spilled drinks all down our shirts and stank of grog, we had a couple of days’ worth of stubble on our faces, and our hair was all over the place. We walked through the tunnel under the Yarra River and ended up in Elizabeth Street in the CBD. Grinning and laughing, we walked up to a busker and started singing along with him. We chucked all our money down—there were coins and notes everywhere. We were carrying on like pork chops when I saw my then girlfriend walking towards us. She had just stepped off a tram and was on her way to work. ‘Go home, you idiots,’ she yelled, shaking her head. We decided that was probably the best course of action, so we picked up our cash and jumped on a tram, hoping it would take us to Hoops’ house in Brunswick.

  While on the tram, we realised we were close to a pub that was owned by someone we knew, so we got off and ran the couple of blocks to the pub. He let us in and we had a couple of pots with him. It was about 9 am when we finally hit the wall and decided enough was enough, catching a cab back to Hoops’ house.

  The truth was that most people at the club didn’t care if you had a few too many on Mad Monday. The coaches and the administrators would usually get on the sauce with us during the early part of the day. I couldn’t help thinking that if I had booted plenty of goals in 2001, no-one at the Blues would have cared at all about what I had gotten up to—that the real problem was that I wasn’t kicking enough snaggers.

  But the club was annoyed about my indiscretions, and now they were also concerned about my staying out all night. They asked me to explain my actions over the last year. The club initially refused to guarantee that I would remain at the club in 2002. The situation made me think about how Adam Ramanauskas and Des Headland were now premiership players, Des having played in the Lions’ victory over Rama’s Bombers in the 2001 Grand Final. While they were riding high, my career was heading south. My name was constantly brought up when the player trading period began a few days after the season had ended. I was linked with just about every club in the competition, one of the rumours being that Adelaide was thinking about recruiting me in exchange for premiership wingman Kane Johnson. In fact, that deal nearly came off. I even met with Crows coach Gary Ayres at a hotel on Queens Road, near the Albert Park Grand Prix circuit. It was quite a funny thing to be part of because when I arrived at the hotel, I bumped into my Carlton teammate Kris Massie, who had just had a chat with Ayres himself. ‘Mass’ was struggling to get a regular game at the Blues and was keen for a change. He gave me a bit of advice, then I headed upstairs to the room that the Crows were using for their interviews. I was confronted by a bizarre scene. It was so dark in the room that I could hardly see Gary Ayres, although I could hear his voice clearly. It was like chatting with Darth Vader. I started laughing, and Ayresy saw the funny side as well and the interview went really well.

  At the time, it was all sort of exciting. I began to think that moving interstate might be good for me. I wanted to get away from the Victorian media, and like Mass I wanted to go to a club that would give me a game every week. But in the end, while Adelaide did a deal for Massie, they couldn’t get Carlton to part with me. I believe the Blues later had a crack at swapping me for St Kilda’s Barry Hall, but he eventually joined the Sydney Swans.

  And so I was given one last chance at Carlton. The fact that a number of great Blues players had retired—Silvagni and Fraser Brown among them—was probably a key reason why they held onto me. In addition, Kouta was going to miss much of the 2002 season due to his recovery from a knee reconstruction. It meant that the Blues had few matchwinners on their list, and I knew, and so did they, that at my best I could certainly be a match-winner. It was the one thing that stopped them from throwing me on the scrap heap.

  All of these dramas meant that I was really under the pump as the 2002 season loomed. My relationship with Britts wasn’t great and I just didn’t feel motivated to give my all on the training track. Footy wasn’t fun anymore. Making matters worse, halfway through the pre-season I was struck down by the debilitating groin problem osteitis pubis, which meant that some days I found running almost impossible. Basically, everything was going to shit.

  I did manage to get myself fit enough to be selected for Carlton’s pre-season games against Geelong and Richmond in what was now called the Wizard Cup. I kicked four goals and was named among our best players on each occasion, which gave Britts enough reasons to select me for our premiership season opener against St Kilda at Docklands. The Saints were heading into their first full campaign under new coach Grant Thomas, but they had finished second-last in 2001 and were regarded as a bit of a rabble. Despite some concerns about our prospects for the season ahead, we were adamant that we would at least start the 2002 season with a win. However, we p
ut in a terrible performance and lost by four goals. I managed only four kicks without troubling the scorers and also gave away a couple of frees, which qualified me as one of Carlton’s worst players. My mood wasn’t helped by Wayne Brittain’s game plan, which involved kicking the ball round and round in circles in the middle of the ground. It was a nightmare for us forwards and I spent more time with my hands on my hips than on the Sherrin.

  Sitting up in the stands that afternoon, Mum could tell how unhappy I was, but later, when she asked me if everything was okay, I told her not to worry. This made her stress even more about my mental state. By this stage, Mum, who’d attended every game I had played for Carlton in Victoria, was unsure as to whether the club had my best interests at heart. She thought that the people at Carlton were not devoting enough time to properly managing my mental issues—the issues that many years later would be diagnosed as ADHD. She wanted to help me, but she felt powerless. In her opinion, I had become the property of the club, and she hated that. In contrast, Dad never seemed to worry about any of those things. He just loved having a son play in the AFL, and he went to all of my games all over Australia. Mum wished that she was my manager, while he was just happy to be my number-one fan.

  A week after we dogged it against the Saints, we suffered an embarrassing 78-point loss to the Sydney Swans at Princes Park. On a beautiful day for football, our final score was 4.9 (33). Barry Hall tormented the Carlton people by kicking seven goals in a best-on-ground display. I picked up twelve possessions and kicked a goal, but had no impact on the contest. Sick of my poor body language and my overall attitude, Britts duly sent me back to the seconds.

  Ross Lyon was still the seconds coach and he decided that the best thing for me was to have a run in the back line. It worked wonders. Given licence to be an attacking defender in our game against Frankston, I gathered twenty-six possessions, took eleven marks and even bagged a goal after Rossy moved me to full-forward late in the piece. I will be forever thankful to Ross for his ability to make footy fun again. He just told me to go out and get a few kicks—nothing more. After sitting through so many of Britts’ boring and overly technical meetings, it was a relief to head onto the field with a clear head and a positive outlook. I was subsequently recalled to the seniors for a Saturday night match against the Western Bulldogs, but I had to pull out of the team when the osteitis pubis flared up again. I was forced to rest for a couple of weeks and then fought my way back into the side for our round 10 game against Fremantle in Perth.