The Carlton Football Club is in dire straits, and things are only managing to get worse.
What should have been a pre-season period brimming with hope and possibility has instead become an absolute nightmare; firstly due to yet another knee injury to gun midfielder Sam Docherty, and secondly with speedy forward Jarrod Pickett going down at training just this morning with, you guessed it, a suspected knee injury.
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Pickett reportedly went down in a collision during morning training – the last training session for the Blues before a three-week Christmas break, would you believe – and had to be carted off the field at Ikon Park. He’s now undergoing scans for a possible ACL injury.
If the news is the worst case scenario, it would be another season derailed for the 22-year-old, who spent much of the 2018 season on the sidelines with a broken wrist.
Docherty, similarly, is a sad case. The gun midfielder touted as Carlton’s next great hope spent all of 2018 on the sidelines recovering from a full knee reconstruction. Despite this, he was elevated to co-captaincy of the side in anticipation of his return to the field in 2019. Then, just under two weeks ago, he suffered another ACL injury – to the same, surgically repaired knee – and has since undergone another full knee reconstruction. Again, he’ll miss the entire season while he recovers, meaning that when he potentially does return to the field in 2020, he will have been absent from AFL fields for over 2 and a half years.
Combine that with the draft day shenanigans which could see them gift a 2019 top 5 pick to Adelaide if they suck ass again next season, and the question’s gotta be asked: What the hell is going on?
Poor management? Bad development? A series of totally unrelated unfortunate events?
The only logical conclusion to draw is thus: The Blues are cursed. Hopelessly, hopelessly cursed.
Somewhere along the line someone in charge at Carlton has clearly knocked the wheel off a gypsy’s wagon, and the club has been put under a dark, mystical spell that can only be broken with some sort of ritual sacrifice.
Was it the salary cap rorting that invited the curse? Hiring Mick Malthouse? Snatching the 1999 Preliminary Final away from Essendon causing the natural order of things to become perilously unbalanced? Hard to say.
All we know is the true hero Carlton needs, and perhaps the last chance they have, is Anthony Koutoufides and his magical souvlaki dancing.
If it can appease a murderous CGI gorilla, it can surely break a gypsy curse.
