'The whole car exploded': Game that doomed Michael Voss era long before he quit as Carlton coach

The Michael Voss era at Carlton has ended 10 weeks into its fifth year. If you were to sum it up in one word, it would be: rollercoaster. 

Whenever you felt comfortable and thought you understood what the Blues were in any given season, they would suddenly veer off in the opposite direction, for good or for bad.

The 50-year-old coach added one final example of that, resigning after the club's round nine loss to Brisbane, arguably their best performance of the season to date, against the team he captained to three successive premierships as a player. 

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Voss took over the Blues at a time of optimism at the start of 2022. The deep list rebuild they began in 2015 with the hope of building a true contender was starting to come together, but the rushed appointment of David Teague as senior coach quickly sputtered out. 

They had one of the best young spines in the game, with Jacob Weitering, Patrick Cripps, Harry McKay, Charlie Curnow and Tom De Koning. Sam Walsh was blossoming into a superstar and they'd just cashed in draft picks to bolster the midfield with Adam Cerra and George Hewett, after also spending big money on Adam Saad and Zac Williams. 

Carlton fans were desperate for success. Across the previous 20 years, the club had won two finals, undergone two incredibly deep rebuilds and won five wooden spoons.

They'd now sacked two coaches in three years, and Voss was the man brought in to harden the group into a top eight side, after a lengthy stint at Port Adelaide serving as Ken Hinkley's right-hand man.

With that came a whole new game style, based largely on what the Power were doing at the time, and reigning premiers' Melbourne, and it could be summed up in three words: contest and clearance.

The Blues wanted to beat you up in the middle of the ground and batter you over the head with a hammer contest after contest until McKay and Curnow got on the end of it and put it on the scoreboard. The game style was built largely around Cripps' greatest strengths as a clearance beast in the midfield, and helped turn him into a dual Brownlow Medallist. 

Voss would almost immediately serve up a glimpse of the rollercoaster ride that would define the next five years. In his first five games as coach, Carlton would get out to huge leads against both Hawthorn and Port Adelaide before blowing them late and hanging on to win by under a goal.

Those in-game performances were almost a microcosm of what the Blues would ultimately deliver across the 2022 season. 

The Blues spent all of 2022 hovering around the top four, the entire season inside the top eight, and looked like they were finally ready to deliver on the promise of September success. And then they lost five of their last six games and missed finals. Out of nowhere. 

That final game of the 2022 season ended in total humiliation. All they had to do was beat arch rivals Collingwood to make the top eight, and they led that game by four goals in the final quarter before ultimately losing by one point.

Many Carlton fans will point to it as the single worst loss they've experienced in their lives. 

From the absolute bottom of the rollercoaster, Carlton would then deliver the kind of ride that would leave you dizzy in 2023. After round five they sat fourth on the ladder. By round 13, they were 15th.

That round 13 loss to Essendon in 2023 had fans and pundits wondering if Voss' time as coach would come to an end after just 18 months, given the capitulation at the end of 2022.

What happened next? Well, they went on a fairytale run all the way to a five-goal lead over Brisbane in that year's preliminary final. Out of nowhere (again), things clicked offensively, the list got healthy and suddenly they were the team winning the close games and building momentum.

They won narrow finals over Sydney and Melbourne, the latter a total shock, before going down to the Lions and blowing that early 30-point lead (again). 

Talk about a rollercoaster ride. 

And then 2024 began with the tailwind of the incredible finish to the previous season. The Blues looked as though they'd finally matured into a true contender and had broken through all of the teething pains of the Voss era.

In round 15 of that season, they battered perennial contenders Geelong by 10 goals and sat firmly inside the top four. This writer is loathed to admit he left the MCG that night finally ready to let go of years of being let down and believe his team was finally, genuinely, actually, good.

Come round 19, Carlton was second on the ladder and the questions were now about how best to position the team for an assault on the premiership. It's first real crack at doing so since 2000.

They then lost five of their last six games and slumped all the way to eighth. The wheels didn't just fall off. The whole car exploded. My bad for finally having faith, I suppose. 

Carlton were destroyed in that elimination final in 2024; conceding the first 60 points of the game to the team that had ended their fairytale campaign the previous year, Brisbane. 

Decisions made in that game and across those final few weeks fractured the playing list. Matthew Kennedy left, Curnow was frustrated and would leave a year later, and the club was forced to pick up the pieces. 

At this point, it was almost impossible to know what to make of Voss. They had just spent a full season looking like a genuine contender before everything wilted. Just like it had in 2022. 

But that was, really, the end of the rollercoaster. Three wild seasons filled with 'what ifs'. The next year, 2025, Carlton turned over key players in order to refresh the list, cutting depth and limping through an injury plagued year that never once crossed into the top eight. 

They had a new president in Rob Priestley and a new CEO in Graham Wright. Voss had one year left on his contract and the majority of fans and pundits expected the new Carlton bosses to shake hands with the coach, part ways and begin a new era once again.

Instead, they shocked the vast majority of supporters by strongly backing Voss and guaranteeing his job.

They didn't hand him a new contract or any reassurances that he would actually coach the entirety of 2026, but backed him to continue on.

It doesn't even feel like hindsight to say that the wrong decision was made because everyone was largely shouting it from the rooftops at the time. Wright baulked at the tough call and now Voss has resigned 10 weeks into the season, having seen the writing on the wall. 

Carlton's 2026 season has been defined by the same rollercoaster games that they battled through all the way back in 2022 with those losses to Hawthorn, Port Adelaide and then Collingwood at the end. They continued to plague them, particularly in 2025.

They've led at half time more weeks than they haven't, but have just one win to show for it nine weeks in. This same pattern of defeat has been so ingrained in the players and coaches, that you could see it coming from a mile away. 

The 2022 loss to Collingwood that nuked their season, the 2023 preliminary final, multiple big games in 2024, and now it was just common practice to fall apart in second halves across 2025 and 2026.

Voss had no answers for it. Frankly, he had proven he couldn't solve the problem in 2025 and it's Wright's biggest failing that the club allowed it to continue on into 2026, becoming the most analysed and discussed game plan in footy.

And that was the issue. The crash and bash style Voss brought to the club in 2022, which sporadically brought with it success, didn't cut the mustard anymore.

The Demons, Power and Dockers, teams playing a similar style, had all either moved on to newer more ball movement and speed focused methods tailored to recent rule changes, or they had just sacked their coaches in the hopes of creating that change in 2026.

In Melbourne's case, it has worked beautifully. Steven King has taken over and turned the dour Dees into the fourth best offensive team in the game. They had the courage to sack a premiership coach in Simon Goodwin and move out legends of the club in Clayton Oliver, Christian Petracca and Steven May, and were rewarded for it.

Carlton meanwhile meandered into 2026, making changes everywhere except the one spot that actually needed it.

And before they could make the call to sack Voss and correct that mistake, six months too late, he pulled the pin and packed up his things, finishing up after a decent fightback effort against the team that defined both his playing and coaching career, Brisbane. 

He leaves the Blues with a higher win percentage than any coach they've had since the legendary David Parkin and Robert Walls. 

Unfortunately for Carlton fans, that winning percentage is a tick over 50. Which about sums up their 21st century.

Voss was brought into the club to be the final piece of the puzzle. To lead this group to perennial contention across the first half of the 2020s, following a deep rebuild. 

For the second half of 2023 and the first half of 2024, it looked like he was on the path to achieving that goal. Ultimately however, he fell short.

It's not all Voss' fault, of course. The club had a four-year run of injury luck that always left them shorthanded. The rebuild itself didn't go to plan either. Led by list manager Stephen Silvagni, Carlton missed out on a number of trade targets and ultimately burnt five first round picks, three inside the top 10, on players who were gone within five years.

If you want to go deep into the weeds, Carlton blew almost every draft pick they had between 2010 and 2014, leaving them effectively needing to import every senior body from other clubs to fill out the list. 

But at the end of the day, the buck always stops with the senior coach in professional sports. Voss had his run, and it has come to its natural end. His game plan went out of style 18 months ago, and he hasn't been able to reinvent it.

For many Carlton fans 30 or younger, he will have delivered many of the best and worst memories of their sporting lives. The high of the finals run in 2023 and the lows that were the final weeks of the 2022 and 2024 seasons. 

A rollercoaster you'd pay good money for.