The Macedonian Marvel

THE GUARDIAN

The Joy of Six: Peter Daicos

From breathtaking skills to a miracle banana goal, via the agony of injuries, the best moments from the Macedonian Marvel.

Peter Daicos looks back at his career

1) The Macedonian Marvel

When it came to conjuring the seemingly impossible with a football in hand, no AFL player has a highlight reel as overstocked with jaw-dropping moments as the Macedonian Marvel, Peter Daicos. Daics, Magic or the Magician to team-mates and fans, Daicos was a player who drew fans through the gates with his freakish natural talent, which isn’t to say that there wasn’t a hard-working backbone there too, but it was the thrill of the limitless possibilities that kept footy lovers glued to the man in black and white.
While Collingwood fans idolised Daicos, opposition fans him and so an entire generation of footy-loving kids took to the backyard and nearby ovals to try and recreate Daicos’s latest wizardry. If ever there was a player who made fans stop and revel in the pure joy of his skill, it was the Magpies No35.
Somehow it’s still possible that Peter Daicos is historically underrated. He kicked 549 goals in 250 games, many of which were spent in the centre of the ground, but it’s fair to say that stats don’t do Daicos’s talent justice; maybe he was more like Garrincha to Gary Ablett’s Pele, but no one who saw him at his freakish best ever forgot the experience.
Daicos’ parents met at Macedonian dances in the shadows of Fitzroy’s Brunswick Street and that setting proved prophetic for the manner in which their son Peter would slide and shake his way past opponents. Where a young Bradman had his stump and golf ball, childhood Daicos would improvise footballs out of toilet rolls and paper; anything he could get his hands on and tie into a clump to kick around the house. An auspicious seven goals came in his first junior game for Clifton Hill Under-11s.
Contrary to popular belief, the Daicos household was not a soccer stronghold and father Stan even absconded from a day trip to see South Melbourne Hellas in order to check out what the crowd was roaring at next door at Lakeside Oval. He was immediately hooked; Stan Daicos was a South Melbourne man through and through and his children could play whichever sport they liked. Even when both sons ended up down at Victoria Park playing in the Collingwood Under-19s, Stan stuck with South.
Though attempts were often made to draw the soccer link, and those miraculous goals off the ground certainly fed the fire, Daicos himself only ever played two games with the round ball at junior level and one of those appearances was motivated solely by the desire to get out of school. The conclusion was easily formed through. Former Collingwood chairman of selectors Ron Richards said that even as an Under-19s player, Daicos could “bounce the ball as though it was round; I never saw anyone else who could do that. Great players, such as Baldock, could knock the ball on in front of them, but Daicos could dribble it with his hands.”

2) Daicos in front of goal

It’s almost impossible to decide your favourite type of Daicos goal, let alone settling on one in the literal sense. There were the ones where he’d lead his opponent towards a loose ball in the pocket, tap it along the ground as he baulked in different directions before plucking the ball off the ground and screwing it over his shoulder and through the sticks. Statistics can’t measure genius.
The famous banana against West Coast is a good example of the Daicos goal-kicking philosophy and his own description is illuminating. The vision shows Daicos receiving Darren Millane’s handball and making a split-second call to kick a banana as two defenders bear down. The way Daicos recalls it he had time to consider the fact that kicking on the left would narrow the angle and that although it went against the intuition of everyone else, kicking on the right was entirely logical to him in order to open up the goal face. That he presents the impossible banana as the logical solution tells you that he was operating on a different level to everyone else. No-one else would have even attempted that.
In his book, Daicos actually describes kicking all of those miraculous goals in perversely understated fashion. It was about a quick burst of speed to find some space and then adhering to his philosophy of holding onto the ball a little longer than most players would and not rushing the kick. He’d slow down his action in the final two steps before kicking, something that’s impossible to see in real time but clearly had an impact on his ability to assess the scenario, choose his weapon and thread goals from tight angles with opponents all around him. Where other players looked harried, Daicos seemed to have extra time.

3) Daicos the midfielder

It’s amazing to consider that even given his long stints in the Magpies midfield, Daicos still managed to top the Pies’ goalkicking list on five occasions. Collingwood played him in the centre knowing well his ability to score because 1981, his second full year of senior football, brought a stunning 76-goal haul from the forward flank and 58 was hardly a drop-off in productivity from three fewer games the year after. Ironically, Daicos’s first kick in league football had sailed out of bounds on the full. That game still resulted in 25 touches and the Pies knew they had a ball magnet.
For seven seasons thereafter Daicos’s goal tally was reduced by time spent either roving the packs in the middle or sitting on the sidelines. His highest possession tallies came in 1988 and ’89 but with the Magpies “class of ‘86” bringing youthful run to the side, coach Matthews shifted Daicos back into the forward 50 on a full-time basis to spark a run at the flag.
1986 had also brought with it Daicos’s first major reality check when Matthews told the then 24-year-old Daicos after a 20-goal loss to Hawthorn, “Daics, it may be that league football has passed you. Maybe I’m asking too much of you; I think league football’s passed you. You’re too slow.” Stung into working harder on his fitness and running, Daicos polled more Best and Fairest votes in the second half of the season than any other Pie.
An honest reviewer of Daicos’s performances, Matthews also proved a great ally when injuries brought the star’s place on the Collingwood list into question. A mooted trade that might have sent Daicos to North Melbourne in return for Graeme Atkins in 1987 is one of footy’s great sliding doors moments. A more handsome offer from Richmond had been turned back in 1983, too.

4) 1990 – The Perfect Storm

Viewed in the context of both the Magpies’ struggle to shake off the ‘Colliwobbles’ tag and Daicos’s own battles with debilitating injuries, 1990 was the annus mirabilis for both player and club. With Pies coach Matthews able to rely on a younger fleet of midfielders, his theory that Daicos would thrive in a forward pocket was vindicated when his man kicked a remarkable 97 goals, usurping his coach to take the record for most goals kicked in a season by a player other than a full forward.
In seven different games that year Daicos kicked six goals or more and contrary to popular belief, many of them came when it really mattered. Four apiece came in the tied and replayed first final against West Coast, the first of which produced his miracle banana goal from ‘the wrong way around’. All of this despite the fact that only 34% of his possessions for the season were shots on goal.
In the grand final and with Paul Salmon’s opening pair of goals setting what appeared an uncomfortable tone for the match, it was Daicos who broke the circuit, latching onto a ball slapped forward by Craig Starcevich, rounding his opponent Peter Cransberg and threading a miraculous goal hemmed in on the boundary. The Pies never looked back.
Daicos was subdued on the big day by the standards of his season and remarkably even admitted to thinking about his impending 100-goal milestone during the game, but with no other player on the ground kicking more than two goals on the day his second, a typical Daicos banana, ensured a well-stocked highlight reel. A premiership medal was fitting reward for the magical ride on which he’d taken Pies supporters throughout the year.
Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, we can now enjoy 40 (some probably unseen to many and definitely not with the musical accompaniment of Twisted Sister) Daicos goals from the magical year. Skip to 1min 25sec for the definitive Daicos play: a one-handed mark holding off a Dees opponent followed by a 55 metre torpedoed goal. Magic.

5) The Daicos physique

The theory was that Daicos’s low centre of gravity and strength through his hips were a key weapon in his arsenal, but it’s actually remarkable to think what he achieved as a player (that he even made it to 250 games, for instance) given the issues with his body. Injuries cut significant holes in the prime of his career, especially a series of disastrous knee and foot problems.
Daicos was pigeon-toed and bottom-heavy, not exactly a catastrophe for his aspirations in the bigger-boned era of 1970s football but also not the perfect platform for becoming an elite on-baller. On an unscientific level, Daicos actually felt that the pigeon toes helped his goal-kicking from acute angles. With his short, stocky legs, opponents found it hard to knock Daicos off balance. Tony Shaw promptly nicknamed him ‘Sawn off’ on account of those famous legs and it’s no coincidence that so many of Daicos’s goals were scored after baulking, side-stepping or shrugging off a turf-bound opponent.
Flying in the face of convention and the medicos, Daicos refused to have his ankles taped for games. Maybe the injury list proves it was hardly world’s best practice that a player putting so much torque on his lower body with the rapid twists, twirls and changes in direction didn’t tape his ankles, but then he mightn’t have so regularly pulled off the impossible with the extra constraint.
Following a groin operation in 1983, Daicos was in and out of hospitals for the rest of his career, each patch of blistering form countered by a newer, crueler injury. A knee reconstruction wiped out most of 1985 and stress fractures in the feet kept (a product of being on his feet all day in his day job as a publican) kept him to just nine games in 1987. Back troubles were persistent. By the age of 28 he’d endured nine operations below the hips and later a shoulder injury would take him out of action too. By 1987 Daicos was on a performance-based contract so didn’t receive a cent of pay when he was out of action. It would take him five years to progress from 150 to 200 games.
It really is amazing to consider what further heights he’d have reached without all those visits to the surgeon. A shoulder injury during a 1992 Waverley clash with Geelong was the perfect microcosm of his career; having single-handedly retrieved the game for his side with five typically spectacular goals, Daicos badly injured his shoulder tackling Cat Gary Hocking and missed the next month.

6) The underrated Daicos

Is it even possible that there are parts of Daicos’s game that we underrate? Certainly his ball-winning ability as a midfielder is generally lost among his goal-kicking feats. So too was his propensity to leap high onto the backs of opponents to take spectacular marks, a not inconsiderable feat for a man only just pushing six-foot and without the physical attributes generally considered advantageous to high-flying.
Like Ablett in the same era, Daicos’s ability to hold off (or be held by) an opponent with one arm as he marked the ball in the other was a significant weapon. Countless times he’d pluck or juggle the ball with his free hand and then go back to dob a goal.
Daicos was also probably the last great exponent of the torpedo as a legitimate attacking weapon, as opposed to a last resort for bombing long out of defence or hitting in hope of a miracle goal. He kicked them on purpose, because he didn’t have the same confidence in his drop punt but also because it was a skill he practised and executed with precision. Fortunately for football lovers, Matthews knew that Daicos was a peerless exponent of the torpedo and allowed him to use it whenever necessary. Daicos described it like a golf swing; the more relaxed the action the sweeter the stroke. You just don’t see that on football fields anymore.
Matthews recently said that Daicos was a pioneer in the way he studied and practised the art of dribbling the ball along the ground for goals. It’s a skill we’re starting to take for granted now, but in the 80s and early 90s these goals were often regarded as pure luck. There was nothing uncalculated about the way Daicos kicked them, whichever foot they came from or whether they dropped from his hands or got booted off the ground. Like so many things Daicos did, it happened too often to be considered a mere fluke.