It’s fair to say that from the ashes of the disastrous 2002 national draft Kade Simpson has emerged phoenix-like. What a player he’s been for the dark Navy Blues, and to think that Carlton’s No.6 somehow snuck through to selection 45.
How well Shane O’Sullivan, the then National Recruiting Manager, remembers the events of that tumultuous Sunday in November, which led to the club’s use of its belated fourth round choice to snare the little bloke from Emerald known as “Simmo”.
Rewind to the Saturday morning of November 23, some 24 hours before the aforementioned draft, when the Carlton hierarchy - including the President Ian Collins, committeemen Ken Hunter and David McKay, and Senior Coach Denis Pagan - gathered upstairs at the noted Rathdowne Street eatery, the Paragon Café.
Emotions in the room ran understandably high, as news broke that the club had been stripped of its priority, first and third round selections (together with the first and second round selections of the subsequent national draft and disqualification from the 2003 pre-season draft altogether) and slapped with a fine near enough to seven figures for salary cap breaches.
Collins has since gone on the record to say that the penalties set Carlton back ten years . . . and yet it was afforded less than a day’s notice of being hit with everything, including the proverbial kitchen sink.
As O’Sullivan recalled: “We were up all hours waiting for the verdict, and it wasn’t until the night before that we got the news [regarding the draft penalties]”.
“It was shattering, and nothing against ‘Simmo’ here, but we’d told [Brendon] Goddard and [Daniel] Wells that we were going to take them with our first and second picks . . . and Brendon in particular was living the dream because him and his family were all mad Carlton,” O’Sullivan said.
“With every draft we had to submit an order in advance which could then be compared to the actual draft order to see how we went. That morning we had ‘Simmo’ down with our first selection at pick 45 and sure enough when it came to our pick I had no hesitation in picking Simmo”.
For O’Sullivan, the reasoning was simple. “We knew he had a little body and all that, but he was a bit different,” O’Sullivan said.
“He was a left footer, a good mark for his size and knew the game pretty well, and we thought he could get a bit stronger which he has.”
At 27 years and 78 days old, Simpson becomes the 69th Carlton player in 115 years to achieve the 150-game milestone, and as the club’s keeper of the records Stephen Williamson reminds, Simmo was but 19 and 33 when he first turned out for the Blues in the round 11 match with Geelong at The Dome.
Notwithstanding his five top-ten finishes in the club’s B & F, Simpson was part of his team’s last two pre-season premierships, took out the Jim Stynes Medal for best Australian player afield in the 2008 International Rules series against Ireland, and has led the way as acting captain in seven Carlton matches including Brett Ratten’s first as Senior Coach.
Little wonder O’Sullivan is quick to laud Simmo’s eight seasons and 149 games - the last 136 of them consecutive - as “nothing short of magnificent”.
As he said: “To me he’s been as good as any player in that draft”.
