O’Connell, a lifelong friend of the great Bruce Doull, was typically Doullesque in his response. In tilting his head forward and back, “Jack O’Crack” succinctly (if silently) told the tale of the 50-goal bombardment of the big sticks and that surreal final scoreline of 28.9 (177) - 22.18 (150).
That the team from struggletown matched the previous record Grand Final scoreline of 22.18 and still fell 27 points adrift of its much despised opposition best reflected the Blues’ murderous assault on the uprights, with Alex Jesaulenko, Robert Walls and John Nicholls helping themselves to seven, six and six goals respectively, with Peter Jones (in what was surely his greatest game for Carlton) imperious in his ruck play and Doull doing a number on the great Royce Hart.
It was also, as the then match committee member and spritely nonogenarian Keith McKenzie so succinctly put it, “a brilliant, strategic triumph”, remembering that Carlton was truly humbled by Richmond in the follow-up to the drawn ’72 second-semi.
It is here that Nicholls, as the forward-thinking captain-coach, is deserving of the greatest kudos . . . and it’s best told in his own words, as they recently appeared in the tome Out of the Blue.
“I still felt that we could beat Richmond but I realised after four or five years, back in Barassi’s time, that whenever we were four or five goals up on Richmond, Richmond would always get up and beat us by kicking well over 100 points. We’d been trying to screw them down to 80 or 90 points, but we’d gone too defensive and I knew we couldn’t beat them that way,” Nicholls said.
“After the debacle against Richmond in the second-semi we all turned up to training in disgrace. So I got out there and reminded them that yesterday’s gone and this is what we’re going to do for the Grand Final, but what we can’t do is show our hand. For a fortnight I told the players that we were going to change it around completely for the Grand Final, but we couldn’t let people know by changing it around for St Kilda. So I said ‘We can beat St Kilda playing our orthodox game’ and we did. We struggled through, beating them by two and a bit goals.
“These sorts of things can leak out but our group of senior players, with whom I had a great affinity - Walls, Jesaulenko, Kevin Hall and these guys - they knew what the thinking was and they helped implement the plan, which went like clockwork.”
