AFL News: Carlton’s Ed Curnow on his return to the side, recycling timber and staying young at heart
Ed Curnow’s journey to get to Carlton was anything but conventional. Adelaide, then cruelled by injuries, he’s now settled with his dream beach house mixed in with some serious couch surfing.
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They say you shouldn’t take your work home with you … but Ed Curnow is literally covering his house in it.
When the midfielder found out Carlton’s iconic home ground was being renovated he decided the timber in the grandstand seating — and its historical significance — was too valuable to go to waste.
“A few years ago the footy club said they were demo-ing the stadium and I was planning to build a house down the coast for (wife) Em and us to live in,” Curnow told the Herald Sun.
“So I approached all the tradies and paid them to work an extra couple of weeks. They dismantled every seat one by one with drills and carried them down during training — so the boys gave me that much stick — then loaded them up on trucks and sent them down to the surf coast.
“It’s beautiful timber and to be able to save it is pretty awesome. I still haven’t used it all, the plan is to clad the house with it.
“I didn’t want to do it this off-season because I was being a bit precious about my body and didn’t want to do too much labour.
“I might have a crack at the end of this year.”
It was a fair decision to stay off the tools over summer. Curnow tore his calf on a trail run the previous pre-season and then broke down more than a Married at First Sight participant.
“I probably did a calf about four or five times last year, I did two hamstrings and I did my medial twice,” he said.
He didn’t play a game in 2022. It was a rude shock after 11 durable years, save for having a metal plate inserted into his throat in 2017.
Curnow usually runs about 50km a week … in his off-season. Without that base last year his resilience diminished.
“I like to run and I’m very active. If I don’t get outdoors in the morning then I can be a pretty ordinary human being. I like to get in the surf or go for a run and if I’ve got a day off in my program that doesn’t really suit the way I live,” he said.
Curnow kept pushing to play last year. It was a contract year, and by round 22 he’d done a pre-season of work.
But the Blues missed finals and so Curnow headed to Brisbane for the club’s VFL semi-final … as the runner.
“When you’re injured you’re not able to be physical, which is our job, and trying to stay relevant and have a purpose is what I struggled with for sure,” he said.
“I really enjoyed being the runner, I just stayed out on the ground. There wasn’t much running back to the coaches’ box.
“We had Danny O’Keefe and Luke Power running the show and they were trying to call me off.”
Curnow went through grumpy periods on the sidelines as every six or eight weeks he suffered an injury recurrence.
But the Blues told him in August he was sweet for 2023 and he continued training through the break.
They needed his experience. At the start of pre-season the 33-year-old was the only Blue who had blown out 30 birthday candles and he is their only 200-gamer.
It’s also easy to forget how damn good Curnow has been for the Blues. In 2020 he became the first Blue since Chris Judd finish on the podium in the best-and-fairest in three consecutive years.
By the time the draftees arrived he was running rings around most teammates.
“I wanted to put in a big pre-season and make an impact. The reality was I’d never played under Vossy’s (Michael Voss) coaching group before,” Curnow said.
“I wasn’t able to do that last year and I thought that’s my formula and always has been to play good footy, to run well.”
In round 1, when Curnow kept Tiger Dion Prestia to one disposal in the last quarter, Voss became Curnow’s sixth Carlton coach.
He’s had Brett Ratten, Mick Malthouse, Brendon Bolton, John Barker (interim), David Teague and now Voss. They’ve all been hits in his eyes.
“I think I had a bit of a down slump just before Mick Malthouse took over and he really squared me up along with (assistant coach) Dani Laidley around, ‘This is your career and someone else can easily come in and take it’,” Curnow said.
“So they really put me on the edge and he got me into that tagging mindset. So I played some good footy under Mick, and then Mick into Bolts he really honed in with a specific role to tag and put me on the edge, which helped my football.
“I don’t deal too well with positive feedback, I’ve always enjoyed the room for improvement or growth and responded better when someone puts a challenge to me.
“Mick and Bolts did that, and then having Teaguey he pushed me to look for more opportunities to be a better players and improve other areas of my game that I thought I just wasn’t very good at.
“Like skill execution and decision making and playing a bit more up forward.”
A lot of his career has been as a stopper. Who has been the hardest superstar to tag?
“I’ve always found it difficult playing on the guys with that sharp change of direction, speed and then still have the toughness and strength in the contest,” Curnow said.
“A guy like Jack Steven I always found difficult, Brent Harvey, Gary Ablett Jr and I always found Joel Selwood extremely brutal and he could turn a game with his leadership in five minutes.”
Boy, wouldn’t Geelong fans agree with that at the moment. Curnow has actually had a seventh AFL coach, too.
You’d be forgiven for forgetting that 16 years ago he was rookie-listed by Adelaide in the Neil Craig era.
“I was part of that new generation of Adelaide players, that year they drafted maybe 10 young players my age, to replenish their list,” he said.
“They still had Simon Goodwin, Tyson Edwards, Andrew Macleod, Rhett Bigglands, Scotty Stevens, there were some great older players that we all looked up to.
“I made a lot of mistakes that year. I had a bit of fun and enjoyed going out with the younger players and enjoyed what Adelaide had to offer.
“In the end that experience of getting delisted — I was the only player of that draft crop to get delisted – so that hurt.
“From there I just loosened up a lot around my football and came back to Victoria and played at Box Hill and was able to enjoy life, go to uni, live in a sharehouse with friends.
“That really helped my football. I was working at Grill’d in Camberwell, delivering X-rays for dental clinics and doing any odd job I could as you do as a 19 or 20-year-old.
“As much as I wanted to stay in Adelaide, I wasn’t ready to play AFL until I was 20-21 anyway.”
Curnow played alongside Hawks including Liam Shiels, Matthew Suckling, Luke Breust and even Stewart Dew. He played well, which fuelled his confidence for the big time.
“I know Brett Ratten valued the VFL program and performances there. I remember playing quite well against the Northern Bullants at Preston a few times and thought I might be a chance,” he said.
“You’re always looking around as a VFL player to see whose in the crowd and watching.”
Curnow broke his leg in round 13 of 2010 — but held on to win Box Hill’s best-and-fairest and then a lifeline at the Blues.
He spent about a decade in Melbourne before moving his young family down to the surf coast near Geelong.
It’s a long commute. But sometimes he crashes on the mattress in front of the TV at Sam Walsh’s sharehouse in Fitzroy.
“If it gets late one night and we have an early start, Walshy’s got a sharehouse with Paddy Dow, Matt Kennedy and (brother) Charlie’s there as well.
“I get to enjoy that feeling of pretending I’m 23-year-old.”
Uncle Charlie is “unreal” for Ed and sister Eliza’s kids. But don’t expect their chest-bumping goal celebrations to stop anytime soon.
“We don’t know how to be nice to each other so I don’t know how to give a friendly high five to Charlie,” Curnow said.
He started on Giant Stephen Coniglio last week. As for the dissent free kick that’s dominated talk this week?
“Was that against Coniglio? I was wondering what that was. I was laughing because he seems like such a nice guy, he was a bit frustrated and he couldn’t believe it still,” Curnow said.
“I had no idea what happened to be honest.”
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