Departing Geelong Cats president Colin Carter on triumphs, missed chances and the future
Carlton beat Geelong for the 1995 flag before details of secret player payments emerged years later – as the departing Cats president has reminded us.
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In 1985, Colin Carter literally wrote the AFL paper on equalisation then spent his decade as Geelong president attempting to circumvent that very principle.
If not for a tattooed Richmond midfielder, that audacious attempt might have resulted in three premierships in his 10 years in charge.
Carter will this year retire as Geelong president after a life spent not as a publicity-seeking official, but one providing abiding service to his club and the game over more than three decades.
A Geelong board member from 1988-1993, he resigned only to join the AFL Commission for 15 years until 2008, then returned as a Cats director until replacing Frank Costa as president in 2011.
He is as proud of the club’s exit from poker machines and its cultural leadership as all those games won since Chris Scott took charge in 2011.
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But Carter still shakes his head at the big ones that got away.
“I wrote the report which led to the national competition and it was a scheme designed to stop dynasties. I was part of installing it at AFL level and therefore it has been ironic and pleasurable to attempt to beat it,” he said.
“We haven’t had one draft pick inside the top 10 in the last decade.
“We have been in the finals nine of 10 years, we have had six top-four finishes and Dustin Martin aside, we could have been pretty close to three premierships.”
In this year’s Grand Final Martin’s four-goal masterclass simply ripped the game away from a Geelong side dominant until half-time.
“Last year (in the 2019 preliminary final) was one where we were a couple of players down and if we had got over Richmond, GWS were cooked by the Grand Final,” Carter recalled.
“Another time an errant kick meant we missed the prelim by a few points,” Carter said.
“But I have always said we won a few prelims by a few points too.
“I felt we were grossly unlucky to lose 2008 to Hawthorn, but then again we were lucky in 2009 and I have friends who barrack for St Kilda and I feel badly for them too.
“So you grab them when you can.”
ON GEELONG STAYING AT THE TOP
Carter believes the first rule of business – and thriving as a football club – is minimising those self-inflicted controversies that so often befall rivals.
“Footy clubs make decisions on football and list management and staff and if you can get eight or nine of those decisions right out of 10 you are in with a big show,” he said.
“If you make bad decisions the headwinds hit you. If you get four or five decisions right out of 10, the margins are so tight you probably finish in the bottom half of the ladder.
“I have watched a lot of footy clubs and at any one point in time a third of clubs are making life difficult with inner turmoil.
“If you can avoid that, you are competing for a position in the top 12. Nothing that has happened has persuaded us that’s incorrect.
“In the old days the cheque book would cover a multitude of organisational sins.
“You could trash your organisation and buy a champion from Adelaide or Perth, but you can’t do it any more so it can take years to recover from bad decisions.”
ON CHRIS SCOTT’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE FANS
“I think he’s done a terrific job. Some of our members have developed an expectation that if you are not in the top four, (you have failed) but I don’t think he gets enough credit for the phenomenal task of building up this list without bottoming out,” Carter said.
“No one else has been able to do it.
“He has the best record of any coach in the history of the AFL.
“To my friends I point out my tenure exactly matches Chris’, but I rarely complete the sentence because it’s so ludicrous.
“It goes to show you as the winningest coach, and the next best is a fair way behind at 65 per cent, it goes to show you the expectations when you win all the time.
ON GIVING UP THREE FIRST-ROUND PICKS FOR JEREMY CAMERON
“The way it finished up, it really cost us two first-round picks and we got a couple of second-rounders back. It wasn’t really three first-round picks,” Carter said.
“I also respect that in the Giants’ case, if they had got 11, which would have drifted back to 13, it wasn’t adequate compensation for Jeremy Cameron.
“Geelong has a good reputation for wanting to walk away from negotiations with a sense both parties feel they have done all right from it. That is explicit.
“We sent (list manager) Stephen Wells to a negotiating course at Harvard and the major thing he came back with was in a successful negotiation, you and the other party need to walk away feeling you have done all right.
“I am not unhappy if that’s the way we are viewed.”
ON LOSING THE 2020 GRAND FINAL
“(Dustin Martin) was just terrific. I was disappointed for the guys, really. I can honestly say I am reasonably philosophical about these things,” Carter said.
“Guys like Cam Guthrie, who was in the squad in 2011 but didn’t win one, I would have loved to have seen him with a medal around his neck.
“And for guys like Paddy Dangerfield and Zach Tuohy, I would have loved it for them but it wasn’t to be.
“But I think we will go into next year, and we will need some luck, but I reckon our chances are as good as anyone else next year. I don’t think the opportunity has passed.”
ON THE MALCOLM BLIGHT ERA
The Cats lost the epic 1989 Grand Final to Geelong, two Grand Finals to West Coast and the 1995 decider to a Carlton side later hit with salary cap fines for their extra payments to players in that era.
“I still think that era was a bit undersold,” Carter said.
“We lost to Hawthorn by six points, then the expansion teams came in a bit stronger than you would have levelled them out to be and we lost another premiership to a side that was later shown to be so far over the salary cap they probably got vertigo.
“We are in an industry where there is only one successful team and a whole bunch of failures and it means the players in that era are undervalued by our industry.”
ON WANTING TO PLAY HOME FINALS AT GMHBA STADIUM
“It is unfair. You take a long view of these things and understand how you finish up in one place,” Carter said.
“We had a VFL competition where all finals were on the MCG and then we brought in interstate clubs who qualified for home finals but didn’t get them, and now that’s resolved but we are left with a dog’s breakfast.
“Melbourne clubs are asked to conform to 100 years of history with all finals at the MCG, but the time has come for us to recognise Geelong as part of a national competition entitled to home finals as Fremantle and everyone else is.
“We will get there at some stage when the inequity is finally realised, but we are still caught in a time warp.”
ON TASMANIA GETTING ITS OWN AFL TEAM
As a member of the AFL commission that decided upon expansion into non-football states Carter knows he is part of the problem instead of the solution for a stand-alone Tasmanian team.
He will not expressly say there are too many teams in Victoria but believes Tasmania now deserves its own team.
“I have always been sympathetic to the Tasmanian cause, but I guess you can be sympathetic while not doing enough about it,” he said.
The question of subsidies is a red herring.
“If you define a subsidy as getting more of the AFL’s distribution than someone else, then are clubs in the AFL who have been there for 130 years, who are getting extra distributions, why should the 10th team get it and not the first Tasmanian team?
“The competition is getting too big and the mistake we made (as the AFL) was not to be more aggressive in offering inducements to Melbourne clubs to relocate in the past when the opportunity was there.
“But that takes me into difficult territory.
“Going to 19 or 20 AFL teams when you only have one shot at winning a premiership every 18 years already, just takes us a step further.
“But Tasmania deserves to be in it.”
CARTER’S SUCCESSOR READY TO TAKE REINS
Geelong president Colin Carter will continue the club’s tradition of seamless transition by handing over the role to successful businessman Craig Drummond.
The Herald Sun can reveal Medibank Private chief executive Drummond will be elevated into the role after nine years on the Geelong board.
Carter joked on Monday that his tenure at the club coincided with Chris Scott’s decade in charge, which makes him the president with the greatest winning record in history — by percentage alone.
But like Frank Costa before him, former AFL commissioner Carter worked on a balance of supporting the football department without interfering to the detriment of on-field success.
Carter had always said the 2020 season would be his final year after setting tenures of 12 seasons for board members, having helped the club to a financial result of close to break-even.
He told the Herald Sun on Monday it was the right time to step away.
Drummond has 30 years of experience in the financial sector with companies including Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sacks JB Were.
“I did introduce tenure limits and they aren’t written in stone but they are 12 years and my 12 years is up and I am 77 so it’s time to move on,” Carter said.
“It will be seamless, very different to the American presidential election.
“The problem with football clubs is they are great fun and particularly when you are winning games so it’s easy to stay around forever but I am not in that school. I think the time is right.
“I will miss it but I do this knowing the club is in good nick and it’s going to be in good hands.”
Carter said Drummond had been on the board for nine years, was highly regarded and had been a major donor to the club for a long time.
“In 2010 when I came in the club had enjoyed so much success but Gary Ablett and “Bomber’ Thompson had just left and someone said to me, ‘You are getting the poisoned chalice’,” Carter said.
“But the club is very resilient. Chris Scott came in and the commitment we made was not to bottom out but still rebuild.
“I think the footy guys have done a brilliant job with the 2011 premiership and we have been in the hunt since then so the footy guys have done an incredible job of always staying in the hunt while not rebuilding.”
Carter said the Cats would continue to push to play all of their home finals at GMHBA Stadium, regretful they had not been able to secure that guarantee from the AFL in his time at the club.
He is proud of the club’s growth in the past decade and capacity to compete while also attempting to lead by example in the AFL.
“The last 10 years have been dominated by trying to remain very competitive on the field while continuing to rebuild off it,” he said.
“The stadium rebuild has taken huge steps forward in the last decade.
“The planned stage five redevelopment would be halfway to completion by now but there have been some delays which means it starts next year.
“We have got out of the poker machine business and removed all gambling advertising in games which have been big steps and the stability at the club has been really important.
“The coach is unchanged, the CEO is unchanged, so I think it’s been one of the club’s strengths in a very emotional industry.
“I have always said one of the roles of any board at a football club has been to provide air cover to executives so they don’t get knocked about by the prevailing winds.”
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