GEORGIE PARKER: Michael Voss can only do so much with a Carlton list that’s not up to reaching finals

The are few jobs in football quite like coaching Carlton.

The navy blue jumper carries expectation and listening to Carlton fans on talkback radio at the moment, the message is pretty clear. Nothing short of finals will do. And not just making them, having success once they get there.

Carlton supporters don’t see themselves as a rebuilding club. They see themselves as a club that should be competing in September. Every single year.

But right now, that expectation is pretty unlikely and realistically something the current list simply isn’t capable of delivering.

Whether Michael Voss is a good coach or not is a debate that will probably run all season (or earlier, depending on how the first half goes, I guess?)

But the reality of coaching in elite sport is that even the best coaches can only do so much with the list in front of them.

And Carlton’s list, at the moment, looks far closer to one that is still building than one ready to make a deep run in September.

And that’s where the real tension sits.

Carlton supporters are judging the present through the lens of the past. A couple of years ago this was a list that — on paper — looked ready to finally do something. Multiple Coleman medallists, a dual Brownlow-winner, a plethora of All-Australians and a gun Rising Star. Enough talent that when put together should create a team capable of success.

But the performance never quite matched the potential.

Now Voss enters another season needing to prove himself, but he’s now not doing it with a team of individual stars, but doing it with a list that feels more like one in transition.

The Opening Round loss was ugly. The round one win delivered the four points, but for many supporters it didn’t feel like much of a step forward.

And that’s the problem for Voss. The expectations of the fan base are still built around the idea of a team ready to win now. But what he appears to have in front of him is something closer to a rebuild.

And rebuilds take time.

As an athlete, I’ve experienced that first-hand.

I remember the turning point for my coach who rebuilt my Hockeyroos team. Between 2011 and 2014 he took us from world number seven to world number two. But the journey there wasn’t smooth.

We dipped. We lost games while trying new things. We had to get used to a new voice from the sideline and he had to get used to us, figuring out what worked for our group and our skill sets. That process goes both ways after all.

Our moment came at the 2014 World Cup. He knew, (so did we) going into that tournament that if we didn’t medal, there was a good chance his job would be gone and the process would start again. You only get so much time to prove it will work.

After we won our semifinal to reach the gold medal match and a guaranteed medal — a match we eventually won on penalties — in the midst of our celebrations, I looked over at him. He was standing by himself, taking a breath. The look on his face wasn’t celebration.

It was relief.

Relief that the result had probably secured another few years of his job and the chance to keep building what he had started.

But that moment also showed how fragile coaching can be in elite sport. Sometimes everything comes down to one period of time, one tournament, one injury, one season.

Which brings us back to Michael Voss.

The question Carlton now has to answer is whether that moment has already passed for him.

Was that moment a few years ago when the list looked ready to win? When the expectation of success seemed realistic?

Because it’s incredibly difficult to expect a coach to deliver deep September success without a list capable of doing it. And it’s hard to start a rebuild (again) five years into your tenure.

The entire season risks becoming a running commentary on his future. Every loss will spark speculation. Every press conference will carry the same underlying question about how long he has left.

Even the definition of success will probably keep shifting as the year goes on.

Carlton supporters aren’t wrong to want success. That passion is part of what makes the club what it is. But right now the gap between expectation and reality might be wider than many want to admit.

Which means Voss might be coaching in a space where meeting those expectations simply isn’t possible.

So watch him closely after every Carlton win this season.

I suspect you’ll see a man who looks relieved that they found a way to get the four points, not excited about the game they just won.

And in elite sport, there’s a very big difference between those two things.