Carlton coach Mick Malthouse took no time to get back into the groove of AFL coaching. Picture: Brett Costello Source: News Limited
MICK Malthouse was lying low on the Great Ocean Rd when his friend and long-time manager, Peter Sidwell, interrupted his morning coffee.
It was mid-season, and Sidwell had been contacted by an "associate" of a Melbourne-based club inquiring about Malthouse's intentions for 2013.
Sidwell, who says the club was not Carlton, called Malthouse to sound him out.
He told him to start thinking about whether he wanted to return to the coaching caper.
"I'm at Lorne and the last thing on my mind is coaching," Sidwell recalled this week of Malthouse's reply.
But the seed was planted.
A month later, in July, Sidwell ran into Blues chief executive Greg Swann -- by chance -- at the football and told him he believed Malthouse had not lost the desire to coach again.
Publicly, Malthouse was saying he would not consider a job offer until October, but a deeply divided Carlton board knew he was keen.
THE end for Brett Ratten came quickly.
Needing to win in Round 22 to keep its finals hopes alive, Carlton suffered a harrowing 12-point loss to the lowly Gold Coast Suns.
The performance was a shambles, and Ratten bristled when asked post-match if he was worried about its ramifications.
"What do you reckon, mate?" he barked at the journalist.
As he spoke, club heavies were holding crisis talks in the toilets at Metricon Stadium.
Watching on from the stands that night was billionaire Blues powerbroker Bruce Mathieson, who attended the Gold Coast match in the company of president Stephen Kernahan.
Twice during the season Kernahan had to fight off factions on the Blues board to save Ratten from the sack -- after heavy losses to Port Adelaide in Round 10 and Hawthorn in Round 14.
There would be no third chance.
"Without anyone saying anything, everyone knew what it meant," a Carlton insider said this week of the Gold Coast loss.
Board members and the football sub-committee held telephone hook-ups, and by Monday afternoon Ratten knew he was a goner.
He told his wife and kids, unaware that the Blues were already seeking his replacement.
Club chiefs insisted publicly that the club would not make a call on Ratten until after the last match against St Kilda that weekend.
"There will be no decisions and indeed no further meetings to review the operations of the club until after Sunday's game," Kernahan said on the Monday.
But things were already moving.
Sidwell was officially contacted that week.
"Prior to that it was really only newspaper conjecture. There hadn't been any really serious contemplation of anything happening at all," Sidwell says.
"It was only the capitulation at the Gold Coast that caused the absolute acceleration. Otherwise, my understanding was that there wasn't a compunction on the board for change at that point in time."
Kernahan would make a couple of calls to Paul Roos -- the preferred choice of some directors -- but it was never seriously explored.
Roos told Kernahan "the planets aren't aligned".
Ratten was officially informed of his fate on the Wednesday by Swann and Kernahan and it was announced at a press conference the following day.
He asked and was permitted to stay on and coach the final game against the Saints.
With a season to run on a two-year contract, Ratten received a payout of about $600,000.
FAMILY approval was always central to Malthouse's return to coaching.
The following Monday -- after the St Kilda game -- Malthouse met Carlton for the first time.
He and wife Nanette hosted Swann, Kernahan and Carlton football boss Andrew McKay at their East Melbourne home.
Nanette gave her tick of approval and the men discussed their football philosophies and the Carlton list.
Malthouse told them he would be bringing in his old mate and former Richmond teammate Robert Wiley as a senior assistant.
Wiley would be his right-hand man, while Malthouse also had links to Blues football administration manager Shane O'Sullivan, with whom he worked when Footscray coach in the 1980s.
But Ratten's assistants -- Mark Riley, Alan Richardson and Paul Williams -- were given the boot.
On the Wednesday morning Sidwell met Swann and Blues vice-president Richard Newton at Newton's 13th-floor St Kilda Rd office.
The three thrashed out the deal, discussed money and Malthouse's requirements -- a three-year deal worth $3 million-plus.
Sidwell went back to Malthouse, and by Friday afternoon a contract had been drawn up by commercial lawyer Charles Anzarut.
It was a done deal, but both parties wanted to give the announcement some space out of respect for Ratten.
They waited until 15 minutes before the press conference on September 11 to sign the contract.
Not long after putting pen to paper, Mathieson called Swann's mobile from Queensland and it was passed across the desk to Malthouse.
The pokies king wished the new coach of Carlton the best of luck.
The deed was done.
AT 3.20pm tomorrow Malthouse comes up against his old team and his old boss Eddie McGuire.
Some Collingwood officials suspect the Malthouse camp had been courted by Carlton figures as early as August 2011.
"There's plenty of people who thought that he'd maybe had discussions before he went on The Footy Show in 2011," one Magpies figure said this week.
"He's close to Greg Swann and he had two years to think about it. Certainly there were behavioural changes around that period."
Sidwell says that's fantasy. "That's just not true. I know the truth -- and the truth is Michael had no contemplation to coach last year at any stage. And that is absolutely what he held faithful to. Indeed it was a family promise that they had.
"So any conjecture to the contrary is just the ravings of unbalanced minds."
Regardless, Malthouse's supporters say he is a changed man at the Blues.
The three-time premiership coach has confided in friends that he has been given free rein to coach at Visy Park by Swann, Kernahan, McKay and the board.
In his final years at the Pies, despite the success of 2010, Malthouse sensed the ever-presence of McGuire and chief executive Gary Pert. He felt undermined by the Nathan Buckley forces.
It is a resentment that came to the surface this week when Malthouse revealed his family was "bitter" and "disappointed with humanity" following his departure.
He said he thought his days as an AFL coach were shot, and maybe they were -- until the Blues came knocking.
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