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“Awful”: The most alarming part of Carlton’s viral training session
SEN • January 28th, 2026 10:49 am
There was some interesting vision from a recent Carlton training session.
The vision was originally filmed and posted by Blues fan Heath Buck, who runs the My Blue Heaven social accounts. It was reposted multiple times thereafter.
It shows Blues players in a fairly simple kicking drill missing targets under no pressure. In his voiceover Buck described the skills as “sloppy” and meeting a “pretty good standard of local football”.
It had Kane Cornes wondering if Blues fans should be worrying or if this was nothing too serious, just an anomaly. He’s leaning towards the former, describing the vision as “awful”.
“How much weight should we put on some pre-season training vision of a particular club?,” Cornes said on SEN Breakfast.
“The vision has now gone viral because it’s been picked up by the influencers.
“It’s awful. I say it’s awful because as a professional AFL footballer when you’ve got no pressure on you, you hit targets left, right and centre. You don’t miss kicks if they’re under no pressure.
“You only really make genuine skill errors when there’s game play and pressure coming at you and you know someone is going to tackle you.
“This vision from Carlton is very ‘going through the motions’. Not a whole lot of pressure on the ball.
“Are we overreacting to this?”
Co-host and Blues supporter Sam Edmund reckons we need a little bit more information about when this particular skills piece took place within the larger training session.
“We need some more info, we need some context,” he said.
“Was it at the end of a three-hour session in blazing heat? Was it an integration to involve the fans? (tongue in cheek).”
Cornes added: “What more info do you need? We know they’re AFL players…
“I don’t think that’s an excuse, it looked like a simple triangle kicking drill.
“Should we reassess our expectations of the Blues off the back of this? It sounds ridiculous.
“But with the access you get with Channel 7 you often get to see the players warm up pre-game. I’ll never forget I was watching the Western Bulldogs warm up at Marvel and the ball did not hit the ground. Ed Richards was punching the ball like a work of art under no pressure. Tim English was just nailing kicks. That’s the level.
“With Carlton it wasn’t just one miskick, it was about 10 in a row.”
Edmund added: “You cannot win a premiership in January and you can’t claim a wooden spoon in January either.
“But it gave me a laugh.”
Cornes says he was most concerned that the coaches didn’t intervene.
“As players we’ve all been in those situations where it’s almost like a comedy of errors which becomes contagious,” Cornes said.
“One error leads to another and all of a sudden you hear someone whistle and yell, ‘Boys, bring it in, this is s---’. I was waiting for someone to go, ‘Bring it in, this is rubbish, we’re not accepting this’.
“That was almost the most alarming part, that they just let it roll on for minutes without anyone pulling anyone up for the disastrous errors that were in front of us.”
