Sacked podcast: Denis Pagan on the mess he inherited at Carlton, the cap rort and Wayne Jackson
Seven days after being appointed as Carlton coach the club was investigated for salary cap cheating. The AFL’s draconian penalties savaged the club for almost two decades. Denis Pagan has lifted the lid on what happened.
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Denis Pagan was bristling with rage. This wasn’t during the course of a fiery match; it happened in a normally relaxed setting of national draft day in November 2002.
Pagan crossed paths with then AFL chief executive Wayne Jackson, who had been a part of the league’s decision in the early hours of the previous morning to impose crippling financial and draft penalties on Carlton for salary cap cheating.
As Pagan told the Herald Sun's Sacked podcast, he couldn’t hide his anger when he and Jackson came face-to-face at the draft.
“I can’t remember the exact words,” Pagan recalled of the short, tense conversation.
“I said, ‘Geez, you were tough’ and he said ‘No, we weren’t, it was a just penalty’.
“I felt like pushing him down the stairs.”
Asked almost two decades on what had stopped him, Pagan smiled and said: “There were no stairs …”
He can laugh about it now, but at the time he was furious.
Pagan had only signed on to coach Carlton 72 days earlier after leaving North Melbourne, a club he led to two premierships and seven consecutive preliminary finals during the 1990s.
The agreement was reached with then Blues president John Elliott in his city office.
The new coach believed he would have access via the draft to the two best young players in the country – Brendon Goddard and Daniel Wells.
But within seven days of his appointment, he discovered the Blues were being investigated for rorting the cap.
Then, in the early hours of the day before the draft, a marathon meeting of the AFL Commission fined Carlton $930,000 and stripped them of picks No. 1, 2, 31 and 34 from the national draft, all draft picks in the 2003 pre-season draft and the first and second round draft picks in the 2003 national draft.
It was a body blow to the new coach’s plans.
Goddard and Wells were gone – to St Kilda and North Melbourne respectively. Pagan was left with the scraps and he says a footy club was damned for almost a generation.
None of the cheating was Pagan‘s fault – he had only just arrived at Princes Park – but he knew he would have to carry the can in trying to fix it.
“At the time you think you can work through this,” he said.
“But (the penalties) ruined so many people‘s careers with the decisions that (Andrew) Demetriou, (Graeme) Samuel and Wayne Jackson made. They just crippled the club.
“John Elliott walked away. He had no penalty, but how many playing careers were lost, how many administrators or people who worked at the club never had a chance. They made it impossible.
“I don’t think the AFL realised how draconian the penalties were.”
The wily, resourceful coach dared to believe for a time he could coach the Blues out of the mire … until he realised just how much of a basket case he had inherited.
“I coached for a long while, close to 30 years,” he said.
”For the first 25 years everything I touched turned to gold.
“At the end, everything I touched turned to cow manure.”
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‘THEY SHOULD HAVE HANDED BACK THE KEYS’
There were high-level discussions held at Carlton where powerbrokers considered “handing back the keys” to the AFL, according to Pagan. Elliott was gone and replaced as president by Ian Collins.
The club was broke, the playing list appeared broken, and the prospect of handing back the licence to the AFL was being seriously entertained. “He (Collins) talked about it all the time,” Pagan recounted.
“I don’t know how serious he was, but he said it. I don’t think anyone could have got out of that mess.
“Let the AFL fix it. They caused this mess. I don’t think anyone would have been fined to the extent that they (Carlton) were.
“They were on their knees … it was the start of a nightmare that lasted five years.”
As expected, the Blues struggled in Pagan’s first season of 2003, winning only four of 22 matches, and losing the last 10 games. But it wasn’t just the draft penalties that hurt the Blues.
The coach knew issues closer to home were festering and hindering the club’s fortunes.
‘TAKING THE CLUB HOSTAGE’
Pagan ruled Arden Street with extraordinary success for 10 seasons.
He managed to combine an iron discipline for the most part, yet allowing enough time off the leash for the players to have some fun away from the club so long as they worked themselves to the bone when it came to footy.
It worked spectacularly.
He tried to do the same at Princes Park but found a resistance he couldn’t budge.
Too many players – some of them high-profile, underperforming, overpaid and set in their ways – pushed back the other way.
“At that stage, I think they (the Carlton players) had taken the club hostage,” Pagan said.
“Some of them were on huge money – $450,000 and $500,000 and they were playing 85 per cent of the games in reserves. There were so many blokes doing their own thing. They didn’t do weights … they turned up when they wanted to. Some of them were really good players and it was really messy.”
Pagan unsuccessfully tried to lure new players to the club without success.
Richmond star Matthew Richardson was courted with a batch of scrumptious scones baked by Pagan‘s wife Cheryl.
“Cheryl made a lovely afternoon tea and we thought we were some sort of chance,” Pagan said.
“But when he got up (from the chair), we could see it wasn’t going to happen. Why would you want to come to Carlton. No one wanted to come. We couldn’t land a fish.
“The club was in disarray. You couldn’t believe how messy and how disjointed it was at every level of the club.”
Pagan said there were “fractured” groups everywhere at the club – “from top right through to the bottom – admin, staff, players, supporters”.
He even knew of player plots to topple him as coach, but still he fought on.
“There are some times in life (when) you can’t win or be successful, but you couldn’t have success with the people who were there.
“You have to ride the wild surf. You would come in every morning and it was like the little bloke with the sledgehammer who would whack you on the chin.
“It was just a terrible time. It was toxic, absolutely toxic.”
AGAINST THE ODDS
Pagan conjured 10 wins in his second season in 2004, which he rates as one of his best coaching performances, given the chaos and the odds stacked against him.
“I still had a strong belief we could do it, I didn’t think it was as dire (as was being suggested),” he said.
“I thought to myself, if you look back and assess yourself, there were plenty of times at North Melbourne on automatic pilot. But that year (2004) at Carlton, we worked really hard.
“I somehow think that might have been my best contribution … Everyone else was yelling out ‘You are an idiot, Pagan, you don’t know what you are doing, sack him’.”
That competitive 2004 season ultimately proved a one-off.
He would only coach 11 more wins across the next two-and-a-half seasons as the draft penalties sank in and the chasms between the factions grew larger.
“It’s funny how I look back now and we had Buckleys and no hope,” he said on reflection.
One game sticks in his mind – a 2006 loss to Collingwood – with his patched-up team of young Blues against Mick Malthouse’s Magpies.
“I remember one game sitting in the box and we were in front of Collingwood (early in the game). I looked down and they had (Nathan) Buckley and (Dane) Swan in the centre and we had Jesse Smith and Luke Blackwell. I thought to myself, ‘We are doing OK’.”
The Blues would lose the game, but at least showed some resistance early.
“We didn’t have a lot of luck (through those years),” he said.
He remains particularly proud of the performances of some of those players, despite the losses.
The Blues recruited Eddie Betts in 2004, and he debuted in Round 1, 2005.
“Shane O‘Sullivan was singing his praises,” Pagan said of a young Betts.
“He turned out to be an absolute superstar. It’s amazing Carlton ever let him go, but it’s good to see him back.”
Pagan is proud too to see David Teague get his chance as Blues coach now.
“He was one of the most courageous players I have ever coached,” he said.
“He is right up there with Glenn Archer, not in talent, but in courage.
“He won a best and fairest (in 2004). That caused a ripple … (with some) senior players’ petty jealousy.”
‘BACK ME OR SACK ME’
Pagan sensed he was “a dead man walking probably three years out before I got the Tijuana brass.”
It wasn’t just the losses mounting up, but the lack of cohesion and support he and his footy staff received from the club powerbrokers.
“I remember saying to one senior official there, ‘Either back me or sack me, don’t sit on the fence, make a decision’,” he said.
“They tried to force me out.
“There was a marketing component to my contract and (they said) ‘that’s not right, we aren’t going to pay you that’. They wanted to try and force me out.” That payment was finally sorted out over a meal at the Flower Drum restaurant, but the spice between the coach and the board lingered.
“They sacked my assistants to try and get me to resign,” he said of the underhanded tactics used against him.
“How can you blame the physical education guy? How can you blame (assistant coach) Tony Elshaug?
“Just thinking back, (I had) five presidents and five CEOs and three football managers (in his four and half seasons). It was just changing all the time. Nothing was constant.”
SACKED
Pagan’s last win – his 25th for the Navy Blues – came against Port Adelaide in Round 10, 2007. What followed was, in the words of the coach, “a couple of smashings”.
His final five losses as Carlton coach came at an average of 75 points, with the tipping point being a 117-point loss to Brisbane at the Gabba in Round 16. Jonathan Brown kicked 10 goals; the Blues kicked only six.
“I knew coming back (to Melbourne) I was cooked,” Pagan said.
Pagan flew back with the team on a commercial flight; he knew there was trouble when he heard some board members shared a flight on Dick Pratt‘s private jet.
“I found out afterwards what had happened,” he said. ”You didn’t have to be Einstein to work it out.
“When Dick Pratt stuck his bib in, whether it was right or wrong, they were not going to say ‘Dick, pull your head in’. He might have been a very good businessman, but as a football judge, I don’t think he was anything special.”
“He was one of the Carlton people who would have thought, ‘We can’t tolerate this’.” Pagan was informed of his sacking by Stephen Kernahan, but was determined to attend the farewell press conference.
“They had made up their minds … there are only two sorts of coaches, those sacked and those about to be sacked,” he said.
“I sort of tried to keep it (the press conference) lighthearted and my parting words were ‘All the best to my friends and my enemies, and I have a lot (of them)’.
“It wasn‘t a relief. I had failed by my own high standards.”
Pagan’s first 10 seasons as an AFL coach helped to change the course of the North Melbourne Football Club’s history, turning a team with good potential into a premiership winning force.
He had a 62.39 per cent winning record with the Kangaroos.
His last five years at Carlton came at only 25 per cent.
“You tried to patch things up and hope,” he said.
“We won a couple of (Wizard Cups in 2005 and 2007) … we didn’t have a lot of luck, and things just didn’t go right.”
“It was just a really sad situation and the AFL has got to take a lot of responsibility for it.
“They (Carlton) haven’t really recovered 20 years down the track.”