Elijah Hollands: What We Saw… and What We Didn’t Do

On Thursday night at the MCG, during a game between Carlton and Collingwood, some things that happened on the field that did not look like football.

This episode is about those moments.

It is not about analysing the reasons or causes of a player’s behaviour.

 It is about what was done, and more importantly, what was not done, to assist somebody in obvious distress in their workplace.

I refer to Elijah Hollands a couple of times in this episode as Elijah Holland. His name is Elijah Hollands.

What was off was not Elijah’s behaviour.

What was off was the response to it.

A player who appeared to be in distress was left on the field. For three quarters. 

Afterwards, he was spoken about by his senior coach in a way that suggested his performance mattered more than what he was going through.

This episode is not a diagnosis.
It is not speculation.

It is an observation about how we respond to visible distress, particularly in environments where performance is prioritised.

And it asks a simple question.

When someone is clearly not okay, why don’t we act? Particularly given Victoria has very strong laws in place surrounding psychological distress in the workplace. 

If this episode brings anything up for you, there are support resources in the show notes. 

Take care of you first, everything else can wait. 

Content Note
This podcast gets into bodies, panic attacks, trauma, sexism, mental health, and the occasional emotional sinkhole. Please look after yourself only listen when you feel safe to engage with potentially triggering material. 
Also, I swear.

Support
These aren’t here as a formality. I’ve used some of these myself.

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Credits
Recorded on the lands of the Ramindjeri and Ngarrindjeri peoples.
Sovereignty never ceded.

Recorded & edited at Ridley Farm Studio by Luke Ridley
https://ridleyfarmstudio.com.au...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

On Thursday, the sixteenth of April 2026, the Carlton Football Club played the Collingwood Football Club at the MCG. The crowd was approximately 78,000 people. It was a big game. Prime time. Thursday night footy. The oldest rivalry in Australian World's football. And something happened on that field that did not look did not look like football at all. Now I've been watching footy since before I could walk. And if you watch enough footy, you learn the rhythms. You can tell when someone's having a quiet game. You can tell when you're injured, you can tell when they're injured, and you can tell when they're a bit off. But it was different. Elijah Hollands was standing in the forward 50. On his own, nowhere near the ball. Hands both hands in the air. Gesturing. Gesturing. If we wouldn't know how to talk. Gesturing, gesturing. I don't know how to say that word. Making a sign towards the crowd. That's not positioning. That's not structure. That is not a player waiting for a play to unfold. That was something else. By the end of the game, he'd had one disposal. One. Most players get about twenty. In a quiet game, you might get ten. One is not a quiet game. One is a signal. And look, that was just one example of Elijah's odd behaviour. I think what we witnessed was not a bad game. I think we witnessed a distress event. But it was treated immediately after the match like a performance issue. After the game, the Carlton coach Michael Voss said this. And these are direct quotes. Quote, I spoke to him after the game. He was really disappointed with how he started the game, really upset. He feels like he's let me down. Quote. He was pretty emotional after the game. He didn't play a great game. He was clearly really disappointed with his performance. And quote quote. Obviously with the importance of the night, he feels like he's let people down. We've just got to keep supporting these people through these situations. And quote I'm not going to do a forensic analysis on Michael Voss's words, but I am going to point a couple of things out. One, in the first quote that I read, Michael Voss says of Elijah Hollands He feels like he's let me down. Why is Michael Voss saying that? Why is Michael who gives a fuck if he's let you down? And then in the second quote I read, Michael Voss says he didn't play a great game. He was clearly really disappointed with his performance. Who the fuck are you, Michael Voss? What are you doing during four quarters of football? Who around you is not saying, hey Vossi, Lija doesn't look that great. Why did it take until the third quarter to get this man on the bench? Why wasn't he given any medical assistance during the game? And this in the last quote that I read you infuriates me to when the saying it makes my blood boil is not enough. I wish it made your blood boil, Michael Voss. We've just got to keep supporting people through these situations, through those situations. Those past tense, like they're not going to happen again. Elijah Hollins didn't let anyone down. He was let down by his club, by society, and by every fucking one of us who walks past a person who's not okay, and we don't say, hey, are you okay? I want to say something here as someone who's had what people call mental health episodes in public. I don't love that phrase, but when I say you know what I'm talking about. I had what I now recognize as a panic attack. I had my first recognizable one in my 40s. I was waiting to see my doctor. It was September, and I was talking to myself, and I was sitting outside the doctor's surgery, and I was freezing cold, and I was singing to myself, and there were lots of people coming in and out of the surgery, you know, and I was kind of hugging myself and rocking. You know, what's really ironic about that is it was the very first Are You Okay day? Nobody except my doctor asked me if I was okay, and he's paid to ask me if I'm okay. I say please and thank you. I stand in coffee lines, I if someone drops something, I help them pick it up, I hold the door open for people. You know, like I'm acting like what I think a pretty functioning member of society. So you're not to know that I have CPTSD, very frequent panic attacks, and chronic depression with suicidal and self-harm thoughts more often than not. Like more of most days of the week. So I guess I want to say mental health episodes not only look different in every person, but they look different within that person, like from episode to episode. Sometimes I faint on the floor at Woolies. Sometimes I talk to myself. I never hyperventilate, ever. And that's a common misconception about panic attacks. Now, a panic attack is a mental health episode. I'm not saying that Elijah Hollands had a panic attack. I'm not sure what he had, but something was going on and it was an awful ball. In sporting codes, if a player breaks their leg, they come off the field immediately. If there's a suspected concussion, they come off the field immediately. We say we take mental health seriously. The AFL and other big institutions and organizations say they've got processes and protocols in place. Dear Carlton Football Club, there are work health and safety protocols in place. There are systems. We don't debate it. And yet, what happens when it's a mental health episode? When it's behavior, when it's something we don't fully understand. We hesitate. And in that hesitation is where harm happens. Elijah Hollands spent some time out of the game last year on personal leave. The club knows there's something not quite right with their player. So why was there so much hesitation on Thursday night? Look, I don't know what the Carlton officials observed before the game in regards to Elijah Hollands. I I really don't. Medical professionals, I understand, spend most of their times like in the doctor's rooms, and so unless Elijah had gone in, it's very unlikely that the medical people would have known that he was in distress, and and he may not have exhibited any unusual behaviour before the game. I want to clearly say I am not here to diagnose Elijah Hollands, and I refuse to actually. When someone is in distress, it is not their job to assess their performance. When someone is in distress at work, it is not their job performance that needs to be assessed. Their job is to remove them from harm. You know, when the bigger picture is if with 78,000 people watching at the game and a club watching every player's every move, club officials, there are people who watch every player's every move on that football field, and with a television viewing audience, and with an AFL who says it's got protocols in place, and with work, health and safety, and with the media banging on about supporting people with mental health. If Elijah Hollands, a esteemed football player of one of the biggest football clubs in Australia, can be left out to dry, can be left in distress for three quarters of football, what chance do the rest of us have? I do not have a solution for this. And I think that's part of the point. Because if we're waiting for perfect understanding before we treat someone like a human bloody being, we are going to keep failing people in real time. Time after time after time. We already know how to act. Get the player off the fucking field. Get a doctor to sit next to him and say, Are you okay, mate? Is there something we can do? Talk to me. Tell me what you've done in the last couple of hours before you started playing. It's a whole lot trickier, and I'm particularly. You know what? If the situation looks like escalating to be aggressive, I walk away. I am not saying you should do that. I am not saying that at all. I am saying that's what I do. In your family. If it's someone in your family, I would love someone in my family to ask me if I was okay and if there was something they could do to help me. I would love that. What we saw on Thursday night was an absolute disgrace. But not, and I don't mean the way Elijah Hollands was acting, I mean the way the Carlton Football Club and the AFL did not care for him. And that's just one example. It's just one we all happen to see, and when I say all, I mean everybody watching, everybody there and everybody watching. Would have been hundreds of thousands of people would have seen it. And what we saw was not just a player having a bad game. What we saw was a player having a moment of distress and an entire system not knowing how to respond to it. And until that changes, all the we care about mental health messaging in the world is just fucking words.