Patrick Cripps kicked the match-winner against Geelong as the Blues recorded their third straight win since Michael Voss resigned as Carlton coach. Photograph: James Wiltshire/AFL Photos/Getty Images
From the Pocket: Patrick Cripps creates pandemonium with fusion of rage, relief and release. Want to get this in your inbox every Wednesday afternoon? Sign up for the AFL newsletter here.
Cripps' Career Resurgence After Coach Sackings
Some of the best football of Patrick Cripps' career has come in the wake of coach sackings. In 2019, after Brendon Bolton had finally been shown the door at Carlton, Cripps played one of the best games of the century. His statistics, astonishing as they were, don't quite do justice to how well he played that day. "It's probably one of the best individual performances I've ever seen on a football field," his Brisbane opponent Dayne Zorko said.
Cripps was a wreck heading into that game. The final few months under Bolton had been a slog. The team was hopeless. Cripps was the youngest captain in the AFL, had two opponents hanging off him every week, and then had to go and say what a great job the coach was doing. On a miserable Sunday afternoon, he'd been held to 11 possessions by Essendon second-gamer Dylan Clarke. To watch him six days later was to watch a completely different athlete. It was the fusion of rage, relief and release. It brought to mind one of those corporate smash rooms, where burnt-out white-collar workers don overalls and face masks and take a crowbar to a room full of crockery.
By the time David Teague's tenure had fizzled out, however, he was struggling again. He had a broken back. He walked like someone who'd been riding bareback. "I can't believe how badly he's aged," Leigh Matthews said. "He's become like a journeyman." Cripps had only just turned 26. As a free agent, and with another coach out the door, he could have gone home to Western Australia. But he slimmed down, fixed his back and played some of the best football of his career. It was football as a form of hand-to-hand combat, consisting of hundreds of little scrimmages and skirmishes. But it was unencumbered football too. New coach Michael Voss built an entire gameplan around him and it helped secure his first Brownlow, with a little bit of help from the club lawyer. No one on the Carlton payroll, with the possible exception of Cripps himself, worked harder and hit more targets than Christopher Townshend KC.
Recent Struggles and Criticism
But as they say in The Sopranos, "you're only as good as your last envelope" and there has been times in the past 12 months where Cripps hasn't been himself. He only finished fifth in Carlton's best and fairest in 2025 in what was hardly a crack field. His form earlier this year invited rare criticism. You knew Carlton was at an especially low ebb when Cripps was being spoken about as someone who should be traded out. Jordan Lewis, who broke Cripps' jaw in 2017, said Carlton should trade him and bank the draft picks.
The reality is that the Blues' skipper had been worn down. He'd been worn down by the way he plays, by his teammates' inability to share the load and, most of all, by the energy he had to spend on auxiliary matters. When the former president Luke Sayers was embroiled in a dick pic scandal, when the team couldn't go the extra yard, when several high-profile teammates wanted to jump ship, and when another had a severe mental health episode on the field, it was Cripps who had to preach calm, stability and loyalty. When the coach's gameplan was being pilloried, it was Cripps who had to publicly defend it. All that would have been exhausting. All that was a repeat of the burden he shouldered leading into the Bolton and Teague sackings.
Extraordinary Final Quarter Against Geelong
And all that was unleashed, like an enormous yes, in his extraordinary final quarter against Geelong. It had been building since half-time of Voss' final game in charge. He took down the Irishman Oisin Mullin, who has manhandled some of the best footballers in Australia this year. There was a lightness to Cripps that was absent in 2025 and earlier this year. His fast feet and sleight of hand were back. And when you freeze frame his match-winning mark, his opponents include a 196cm two-time Coleman medallist, a five-time All Australian defender, a 300-game utility and a 201cm ruck.
Cripps' last-gasp mark, goal and the final siren generated the kind of pandemonium we usually only see, feel and hear in the final fortnight of September. It normally would have been completely out of context for a 15th-placed team. But it was indicative of someone who means more to his club than perhaps any other player. A player who could have spent his final years in Perth on some sort of superannuated arrangement and maybe even snared a flag. It wouldn't have been right however. It still couldn't have matched that familiar fusion of rage, relief and release we saw on the weekend, not just of an individual player, but of an entire football club.
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