CARLTON'S entire game plan has undergone a major overhaul as coach Brett Ratten prepares to guide his team into the post-Brendan Fevola era.

"Who's going to kick the goals now that Fev's gone?" is the question that has followed Ratten wherever he went this summer, but it seems the answer isn't as straightforward as simply nominating a player to fill the Coleman medalist's prolific boots.

Instead, Blues' coach has signaled a change in the way his team goes about its footy with more patient ball movement and a harder defensive edge the key modifications. 

"Maybe we'll be a bit more stop-start in our flow," Ratten said in an exclusive interview with carltonfc.com.au on Tuesday.

"The speed that we've played with, which was a 'helter-skelter' type footy in periods, actually opened us up at times."

Ratten signaled that the Blues were more likely to adopt a tempo style of play in an attempt to harness or slow the momentum of the game, depending on which team was in control of the contest.

"Sometimes when you're attacking you've got no cover in place and you open yourself up," he said.

"We've worked on that a fair bit over the summer and I think we've seen it work in parts. Against Brisbane I think it worked fairly well for us [and] we saw parts of it in the Adelaide game".

Ratten has recast the structure of his attack around inexperienced key forward pairing Lachie Henderson and Setanta O'hAilpin who have 73 AFL games between them.

Henderson, one of the gun tall prospects to come out of the 2007 NAB AFL Draft, has had to deal with the burden of high expectations from Blues' fans since crossing from the Brisbane Lions as part of the Fevola deal. 

Ratten has been impressed with his new recruit, but said it was unfair to compare the two players.

"Some of our expectations of people in this competition do amaze me sometimes," he said.

"Does Lachie Henderson replace Brendan Fevola? Well Brendan is 29 and Lachie has just turned 20. I don't know where Brendan sat at 20 years of age at our footy club, but I don't think he had played a lot of games of football and the expectations of him were completely different.

"I think the expectation we put on players is out of kilter with their development as they learn the game."

Ratten is happy with what he's seen from his key forward tandem so far and has also been buoyed by the pre-season form of smaller forwards Mitch Robinson, Eddie Betts and Chris Yarran who he feels are equally important cogs inside 50.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding Carlton's fledgling forward line, Ratten said finals were still well and truly on the agenda at Visy Park, but he also urged fans to be patient while his young team continues to grow.

"This year we'll change a bit structurally, our personnel will change and our experience will grow again. I think we're tracking where we'd like to be," he said.

"We've seen some dramatic improvements in the body shapes of some of our players in the last six months which I think will hold us in good stead in 2011 and 2012.

"We need to make sure that as a club, and for our supporters as well, we're patient in what we do. [There are] expectations and the way we play sometimes might not be the prettiest football we've seen, but our results will hopefully back that up." 

Read the entire Q&A with Brett Ratten at carltonfc.com.au