Saturday Date: May 7, 1977

Umpires: K.Smith & M.Dye

Goalkickers: P.McKenna 3, T.Southcombe 1, B.Doull 1, R.Ashman 1, R.Walls 1

Best: R.Austin, G.Whitnall, B.Doull, T.Southcombe

Reports: Nil

Injuries: Nil

Replacements: A.Jesaulenko (strained knee) by T.Pickett at half time & R.Ashman (ankle) by R.Ohlsen at three quarter time

Game Review

A sad, sorry day for the Blues - especially so after our promising early season form.

But spare a special thought for Magpie great Peter McKenna, now with the Blues after a long esteemed and successful career with Collingwood. Near the end of his career in 1976, McKenna was given a lifeline with Carlton, and faced his old Club for the first time in this match. A 100 point drubbing wouldn't have been on McKenna's mind at the time of crossing over.

It was also a disappointing game for Robert Walls who became the youngest Blue to hit 200 games.

A week later, one of the most famous Football Record covers appeared reading:

Moore kicks...
Moore marks...
Moore, Moore... chant the Magpie fans...

In reference to Peter Moore's 7 goals.

Black (and white) day for Blues
What a blue, blue, blue awful black and white day it was for Carlton at VFL Park on Saturday! Unbelievable! What can you say when you earnestly believe you have the top club football team in Australia and you get annihilated? I presume that's the apt word to use, even though it was probably even worse than that. Never before have I seen a Carlton side..... any side beaten to the football so often. It was just one of those days, unexplainable, better left in the past. What can we say to our supporters who travelled so far and jam-packed into the ground, to see us humiliated? How can such an effort be explained? We ran out onto VFL Park on Saturday with what we thought was the right attitude - looking back it mustn't have been. How could it have been?

There's no doubt about Collingwood. As I wrote early in the season, there's no way they won't miss the finals this season - and it's because of only one man's influence..... Ton Hafey, of course. They beat us by five goals in the pre-season practice match, and they left us for dead on Saturday. They're playing confidently and more importantly, as a team - and it was team work to perfection on Saturday. We were outclassed in probably every position. Waverley is becoming a bit of a jinx for us now. We were beaten there in the rain by St Kilda early last season, and that put us on a run of five losses straight. Then of course there was the Preliminary Final last year.

And I suppose you've got to put a question mark over our heads now on our performances in pressure matches. Against the big teams in our last four matches Collingwood; Hawthorn a couple of weeks ago; and last years's two finals matches - we've cracked. There's no use thinking otherwise and we've just got to come back as a power side against the power teams. It's been an annual trend the past couple of seasons for Carlton to go through a bad patch - I think it's about time we learned our lesson. We won't be taking Melbourne lightly this week. - Alex Jesaulenko Inside Football.

Collingwood thrashed Carlton in front of 64,256 people at VFL Park. The Magpies, scored 16.10 to 1.4 in the second and third quarters with Peter Moore kicking five goals in the third term. - Football Record.

Team

Milestones

200 Games: Robert Walls, who became the youngest Blue to ever play 200 games.