AFL 2024: The inside story of how Clayton Oliver saved his career at Melbourne

As one observer explains, if you saw Clayton Oliver on the street last year, he would cross the street and ignore you. But after his life hit ground zero in December, the Melbourne star had to change his ways. Here’s how he did it.

Zane Carter thought he’d go down to Gosch’s Paddock for a run around with the Sherrin. It was mid-January and the suburban footballer needed to shake off the cobwebs of the summer break.

As he was jogging around, Carter ran into Clayton Oliver. He was also by himself and the pair started chatting. They knew each other through mutual friends and had previously bonded over their love of horse racing.

The next day Carter’s phone beeped: “Do you want to go for another kick?”

It was Oliver, and so started a relationship which would play a significant role in helping save the Melbourne superstar’s career.

A month earlier, Oliver’s life had hit ground zero. He’d been sent home from Melbourne’s training camp in Lorne after one night, his erratic behaviour being the last straw for many at the club.

There’d been dozens of incidents, some had made the papers (ie. a hospital stay in October) and many hadn’t. Oliver’s life was spiralling out-of-control and he was quickly losing the people who had stood by him the most, his teammates.

Zane Carter and Clayton Oliver at Gosch’s Paddock over summer. Picture: Jason Edwards

Something had to give. The message from the club, led by football boss Alan Richardson, was clear: “Go get yourself right, don’t worry about footy, work on yourself.”

He’d been told he could no longer train with his teammates. He needed to treat people better and the days of having one rule when it came to behaviour for Oliver and different rules for the 44 others on Melbourne’s list were over.

The club provided him with a fitness program to follow over the summer and there was also a minder, a friendly face from the club, who would be around to help out and monitor his progress.

And if Oliver had any doubts about the seriousness of his situation, that was rammed home when he was summoned to AFL headquarters for a meeting by his manager Paul Connors.

It was an intervention of sorts with Connors, who wasn’t Oliver’s regular manager but had stepped up to try to help save one of his company’s major clients. Connors and Oliver were joined by Melbourne CEO Gary Pert, AFL Players’ Association boss Paul Marsh and several AFL senior staffers including the competition’s head of mental health and wellbeing, Kate Hall.

There was no escaping the enormity of his situation in that room. They were all there to tell him some home truths and also offer him a way out, explaining the resources that were available and the steps he needed to take.

And all of them said the same thing: “It was up to him.”

FITNESS FANATIC

Even when his world was falling apart around him, training was never an issue for Clayton Oliver.

“Clarry will get a fitness program and double it, that’s how Clarry operates,” was how one Melbourne official described his legendary work ethic.

This was the attitude which had got the 26-year-old to the top of the tree – a premiership, four best-and-fairest awards, three All-Australian jumpers, third in the 2021 Brownlow Medal count and a massive contract extension until 2030.

And, as the burning January sun beat down, Zane Carter got an insight into this mindset.

The training sessions weren’t just a light jog and a bit of kick-to-kick. Oliver would often be busting his gut at Gosch’s Paddock for over four hours and always at a different time, sometimes 3pm to 7pm.

“I would call it at two,” Carter laughs.

Carter played two years in the VFL with Port Melbourne before he returned to his original club Chelsea in the second division of the Mornington Peninsula Football Netball League.

“He is so self-driven, some of those sessions were big, we’re talking 15km,” he says about Oliver. “To do that on your own is hard, to get yourself motivated to do sessions like that by yourself is tough so that’s why he would see who was around.”

Oliver worked hard during his time away from the club Picture: Jason Edwards

Carter, who works as an electrician, would try to fit in three sessions a week with Oliver which included a gut-wrenching early Saturday morning running session at the Shrine of Remembrance.

A few times he brought along a couple of Chelsea teammates who were “a bit starstruck” given the paparazzi would turn up every now and again to take shots of the exiled Oliver.

For six weeks, the likes of Carter, and any of Oliver’s other mates who were up for it, would be at Gosch’s to help him get his body AFL-ready.

By late February, their services were no longer required. The Demons had welcomed back their star midfielder and they were just as shocked as the rest of the football world when Oliver was ready to play in the opening game of the season against Sydney on March 7.

The turnaround had been extraordinary in many ways. Thanks to Carter and friends, Oliver was physically ready, while mentally it was chalk and cheese to where he’d been just three months earlier.

But it was still very much a work in progress, and that’s exactly how the Demons describe Oliver’s situation now, 10 rounds into the 2024 season.

One observer says Oliver is ‘a different person’ this year. Picture: Dylan Burns/AFL Photos

Max Gawn has spoken a number of times about how proud he’s been of his teammate’s resurrection from his “mental health challenges”.

For two weeks in the off-season, the skipper had Oliver live with him in an attempt to get him on track. He joked that the period “felt like a couple of years”.

“He has stuffed up and he has owned up to a lot of those stuffing ups,” Gawn said. “He has lied to me, he has told the truth, he has done everything you can in a little period.

“But you can see how hard he is working to become his best self.”

Oliver’s good friend Christian Petracca has also spoken about how it has taken time to trust his teammate again.

Many at the club are blown away with the 2024 version of Oliver they are now dealing with, compared to last year’s troubled model.

“It’s just incredible, he’s a different person,” one observer said. “If you saw him in the street he would stop, shake your hand and ask about how you’re going. Last year he would have crossed the street and ignored you.”

He still lives with his best mate, who is a painter by trade, but there has been the addition of a couple of dogs into the household which has been a good distraction.

Senior Demons officials are reluctant to speak on the record about the turnaround. They’ve been burnt too many times and still have their fingers crossed that this new “Clarry” is here to stay.

“He’s healthy and in a really good space,” is Connors’ take.

Oliver after Melbourne’s round 8 win over Geelong. Picture: Dylan Burns/AFL Photos

Oliver has given a couple of post-match interviews with teammates where he has been impressively honest, emphasising that he knows he’s still a work in progress.

The good vibes about Oliver are certainly being felt at Chelsea where the “Clarry effect” has kicked in with the team undefeated at 6-0 this season leading into this weekend.

“It’s been a long time since Chelsea has been six-zip,” Carter says. “Those Saturday sessions at The Shrine, they were the ones. That extra Saturday session, that’s not what local footy clubs are doing.

“They are the ones that stick to my mind that might have given me a little edge and, with the other boys, just touching the footy (with Oliver) was at a whole different level.

“It’s quite funny when you think about how he was kicking around with a couple of local footballers then he’s back on the ’G just a few weeks later.”

Carter is grateful for the Oliver experience and can’t speak highly enough of the Demons superstar who, he says, is completely different to how he’s been portrayed, albeit most of that was by his own doing.

One Saturday morning after they’d done a Shrine session, he invited Oliver back to his nearby apartment for breakfast with his partner Matti, the daughter of rich-lister bookmaker Matt Tripp.

The topic of the Bella Tripp Foundation came up – Matti’ sister Bella sadly lost her life in April 2022 at aged 14 due to respiratory complications from a bone-marrow transplant following a lengthy battle with leukaemia.

A fundraising Gala Event was being planned to raise money to help researchers understand the respiratory complications of bone marrow transplants in children.

“A couple of days later he (Oliver) had two signed guernseys from the whole Dees squad ready for us to be auctioned at the gala night,” Carter explains. “We didn’t ask or anything, he just thought it would be nice. That’s the type of bloke he is.”