The Top-Ups who turned up Elsewhere

By Rod Mitchell
Article published: May 2011

With the recent successful drafting of former Adelaide Crow's rookie and Box Hill Hawk player Ed Curnow, you just wonder how these players slip through and make the grade at another club. Sometimes it can be that the player was too immature at the time, could have been homesick, or the club he was at had a plethora of players of the same ilk. At Adelaide Curnow was a Glenelg reserves player, and as a result didn’t get a look in with the Crows. At the Box Hill Hawks, despite missing the second half of the season with a broken leg, he came runner-up in the JJ Liston Trophy. It just makes you wonder what goes through the heads of clubs when they simply overlook such talent that is right beneath their nose?

Whilst the Blues famously - or more infamously - let Greg Williams go we did get him back into the fold where he played over 100 games, won a B&F, Brownlow, Norm smith medal and most of all a premiership medallion. For the average punter, this is the only player that we have let go, or has he???? Some supporters will be aghast when they realise that we have let some fairly handy footballers slip through our grasp. Carlton has had some players on its list that didn’t play senior footy but went onto and play senior footy at another club.

Every club has a tale or two of woe, and the Blues are no exception to this. When you look at some of these players you think, what if we had Scott Russell and Jason Baldwin in the 1993 GF could this have made a difference against the fleet footed baby bombers?? In the early to mid 2000's when we were bereft of players, could Lovett, Vandenberg, McDonald, Dimattina given us more grunt and skill?? These are the what-ifs, some of these players had very fleeting careers elsewhere such as Stuart Glascott, Damien Hampson and Paul Starbuck. But some others were very good servants for their adopted club such as Leoncelli, Russell amd Dimattina.

Some of the players we have left have captained other clubs Richie Vandenberg at Hawthorn, play state footy Leoncelli, premiership player Peter Bradbury etc. All clubs have players that have been released and made the grade elsewhere, I have complied a team from the last 30 (Pagan & West a bit longer) or so years. Probably the most famous we let go was Greg Williams but he came back 'home', little is it known that we also turned away triple Brownlow Medalist Dick Reynolds!!!

This group of players who didn’t play senior footy with the Blues, had to travel to other clubs to fulfil their dreams of playing senior AFL footy - they left and never returned to the Blues unlike Diesel.

The team is as follows;

We have also had quite a few TAC Cup U/18 players used as top ups for our reserves, but these players though were never drafted by the Blues.

Ben Johnson
Stephen Powell
Mark Stevens
Cameron Hunter
Aaron Henneman
Brad Scott
Michael Braun
Toby Thurstans
Brad Nicholson
James Rahilly
James Walker
David Spriggs

All in all, Football histories are littered with players who make it to the top level, but some follow different paths for a range of reasons. For Carlton, we can now enjoy Curnow's path from Adelaide's oblivion.

Links

Blueseum: Curnow's Blueseum Biography