Pre-Season Game 3
Collingwood v W. Bulldogs
Etihad Fox Footy 7.00pm Weather: Min 10 Max 22 Chance of rain 5%: < 1mm Wind: S 19kph Betting: Collingwood $1.60 Western Bulldogs $2.30 |
FACT: The year before Nathan Buckley became coach the Pies played in a Grand Final − their second in a row
FACT: Under Buckley the Pies have slipped further down the ladder each year
FACT: Last year the Pies didn’t make the eight
FACT: All eyes outside Collingwood’s inner sanctum are on Nathan Buckley
IN SOME countries, football starts wars. In Australia, it starts arguments and the greatest argument starter of all is Collingwood.
Love them or loathe them, the Magpies have a grip on the public imagination that other AFL clubs — and other sports and businesses — can only dream about. They are that rare thing in sport, competitors that transcend the game.
“The Club” pushes cricket off the back page in summer, the same with horseracing in spring. Almost anywhere that Australians gather around the globe, the Pies get a guernsey in the conversation.
For football purists, that conversation is about Collingwood the team: how it plays, the game and the politics of winning and losing. But Collingwood the club means more than just footy for some. Its president Eddie McGuire sees its financial dominance not just as proof of skilled housekeeping but as a force for social good, helping plug the gap between haves and have-nots.
The Collingwood camp has plenty of have-nots. McGuire wants them to feel they have a stake in Australia’s version of Manchester United, the King Kong of world sport.
Football is a broad church. For years in Victoria, it has jokingly been called a religion. But for many Collingwood followers, it’s no joke: belonging to the black-and-white tribe gives their lives meaning.
The club’s 1890s origins are Irish, Catholic and working class. Their faith is fierce and one-eyed.
The people who run the fast-food caravans outside the MCG know about this. When they arrive at midday on Fridays and Collingwood is drawn to play that night, early bird Magpies are already waiting.
This doesn’t happen with other clubs’ supporters.
“They’re the biggest diehard enthusiasts you’ve ever seen,” says one food vendor about the Magpie army. “It’s what they live for. On game day they are by far the best spenders outside the ground.”
In fact, when the Magpies are playing well, the caravans take more money outside the gates than caterers do inside the MCG. The caravans serve 3000 jam doughnuts at a big Collingwood game, compared with “maybe 1200 for other clubs”.
The difference between Collingwood supporters and others, he says, is that Magpie fans identify so strongly with each other.
“They’re different. They’re a tight-knit family and they all talk to each other about footy. Fans from other clubs are not really socialising with each other the same way.”
But the tribalism has an edge.
“If they’re winning, they’re great, but if they’re losing they will turn dirty in a heartbeat.”
That wouldn’t surprise Nathan Buckley as he readies for his fourth season in one of sport’s toughest jobs — that of Pies senior coach.
Some see this year as Buckley’s make-or-break season. Several former AFL coaches and club officials reckon Collingwood is as likely to finish 12th as fifth in September.
If that happens, closet Buckley knockers will start sniping openly.
After Buckley swapped his boots for a clipboard, he was Mick Malthouse’s loyal assistant, then his successor, a transition planned as carefully as a royal wedding.
Collingwood finished 11th last season, only a few kicks out of the eight but outclassed by the top four — and below half a dozen second-tier teams.
It’s no disgrace but if it happens again, all eyes will be on Buckley. Including some, maybe, in the boardroom and coterie groups.
If that happens the question the knockers will ask is whether ‘Eddie’ will stick with ‘Bucks’.
McGuire says he will. Only a complete cynic would suspect he wouldn’t. He has invested in Buckley and won’t be tearing up contracts just to please those who don’t share his faith.
Unless, that is, the coach — rather than injuries or recruiting — is clearly to blame.
EVEN years after a treacherous hamstring did what his opponents could not, the best Collingwood player in a century still looks as if scientists designed him to combine speed, endurance and strength.
From the jutting jaw to the squared shoulders to the locomotive legs, Nathan Buckley radiates natural athleticism: part bruiser, part ballet dancer. If footballers were sold like yearling racehorses, he’d have topped the sales.
Unlike most sale toppers and No.1 draft picks, Buckley performed as well as he looked. But, as a coach, maybe he still faces the dilemma of the gifted player he used to be.
Brent Crosswell, one of the most gifted of all, once explained that the gifted player is often disappointed “because of the compromise he has to make with the fact it’s a team game”. Meaning, at least 15 teammates struggle to do things “the natural” does as easily as breathing.
Such talent can attract criticism as well as admiration. From Buckley’s first season in black and white after coming from Brisbane in 1994, he was sneered at behind his back. It was the price he paid for not making light of his ability, instead always trying to improve on it.
Two decades on, Buckley the calm perfectionist has brought his thoughtful attitude to coaching. It’s who he is. Watch him at a big function, even out-of-season, and he isn’t busting to crack jokes and have beers with the boys.
At one event where most guests party hard all afternoon, you see Buckley off to the side in deep conversation with another of the game’s more serious graduates, AFL chairman Mike Fitzpatrick. Both are friendly and have a sense of humour but neither tends to waste time on small talk or feels the need to suffer fools.
Back when football (and coaching) was a simpler game, the likes of Barassi, Sheedy — and Malthouse — could tear strips off players in a rage or as part of a calculated “tough love” stratagem. But they’d have a drink and a laugh with them after the game, burying the hatchet until next time.
Buckley strikes some watchers as cooler and drier than that, a grown-up among excitable boys. This is no criticism. He has also had to face the extra hurdle of coaching players he’s played with or knows well, something that didn’t help other favourite sons such as Francis Bourke, Wayne Schimmelbusch and Michael Voss.
If football coaches are not weird or wired when they start in the big league, they can soon get that way. The reason, a coach once confided, is that everyone from the junior cheersquad to the old folks’ home is a footy expert.
“If you coach the Australian hockey team,” he said, “there’s maybe half a dozen people in the country who know as much about the game as you do — and they don’t interfere. But if there are 90,000 people at a football game, they all think they know better.”
Among the critics, of course, are rivals with a vested interest in making mischief.
The pressure cooker effect gets to some coaches.
When Ross Lyon turned on a Dockers supporter brash enough to touch him as he strode past at three-quarter time in a losing finals match last year, it showed how intensely even cool heads can react.
The punter might be lucky he didn’t cop a whack. Football lore has it that a teenager playing kick-to-kick at the Western Oval in the Mick Malthouse era wasn’t so lucky after he offered the then-Bulldogs coach some free advice as he stalked across the field after a loss.
Malthouse, the tough-as-nails defender from Ballarat, has never been a soft touch. His exit from Collingwood after coaching the team to the 2010 premiership and the 2011 Grand Final is one of the great plot twists of modern Australian sport.
The estranged Malthouse gave a long interview on The Footy Show claiming he’d been pressured into handing over when he wasn’t really ready. If there was a moment when some club insiders fell out of love with their premiership coach, it was then — more so because they realised rank-and-file followers would take Malthouse’s part and disrupt the club.
McGuire had virtually staked his presidency on hiring Malthouse from West Coast in 2000. But the mateship cooled as Buckley took up the coach-in-waiting spot. It didn’t improve when Malthouse seemed to step up hostilities from the sidelines. The pair reputedly haven’t spoken since Malthouse went to Carlton after the 2012 season.
Malthouse is set to break Jock McHale’s coaching record of 714 games on May 1 — against Collingwood. Both his friends and enemies use this extraordinary longevity to back opposing views.
His supporters point to his long list of finals appearances; his critics say in coaching the 1990s West Coast Eagles he had an elite “state team” and should have won six flags, not two.
Sour Carlton supporters now tell each other Malthouse’s average over 30 years is exactly that: average. Carlton and Collingwood fans don’t agree on much, but find common ground in the man they now jokingly call “Not-my-Faulthouse”.
Malthouse’s default position is to attack, which has earned him enemies in the media. A former newspaper editor (and Collingwood fan) speaks for many when he says that interviewing Malthouse “is like being punished for a crime you didn’t commit”.
But all of his supposed flaws would go unnoticed if his team started winning. In footy, victory ensures forgiveness for nearly anything.
Even taking home loaves of bread from the club canteen, as one premiership coach reputedly did every day.
Even drinking two bottles of wine before training, as another legendary coach reputedly did for a few seasons before the axe fell. Then there were the gamblers and the lechers and the thieves.
Compared with some of the giants of his craft, Buckley is a cleanskin. But as the months tick past, he is getting closer to the point where either he vindicates the patience shown in him — or it runs out.
IF Nathan Buckley feels the pressure, he doesn’t show it. He looks as composed — and nearly as fit — as he was on the field.
In his office at the Westpac Centre, he’s calmly listing reasons to be cheerful about Collingwood’s prospects.
On the list is the fact that Neil Balme agreed to return from Geelong to take over as head of the football department from Rodney Eade, who left to coach the Gold Coast Suns.
Re-calling Balme wasn’t spur-of-the-moment: Collingwood keeps a short list of “wanted” people to slot into gaps that appear.
Why Balme? Buckley says: “He brings experience and intelligence. He played and coached. He was relatively successful as a coach. He knows how football clubs work. He’s the perfect foil.”
He doesn’t need to add that Balme has the clout to work with one of the most decorated players of all time and perhaps the most mercurial and powerful president since the John Wren era.
Buckley is unruffled discussing Collingwood’s prospects, stressing the depth and potential of the list rather than stars.
“It doesn’t matter how good Pendles (Scott Pendlebury) is if the bottom 12 of the 22 don’t play well,” he cautions. “That’s why we give ourselves a chance this season. We’re not really thinking about 2017 or 2016 — or even round 10 this year. Just concentrating on what’s next.”
He isn’t spooked by the F-word.
“That sort of blue sky is exciting for us.”
He brushes off rumours of unrest, saying he wishes supporters could spend 24 hours with him, Balme, chief executive Gary Pert and the football talent at the Westpac Centre, which must be among the best sports facilities in the land.
But he’s a realist. “A 20kg weight is the same here as it was at Victoria Park — and it doesn’t lift itself.” In the end, the buck stops with coaches and players.
Buckley, Balme, McGuire, recruiting manager Derek Hine — and no doubt Pert — are in furious agreement about what Balme bluntly calls “quite a lot of necessary change” to the list Buckley inherited.
Unstated, but obvious, is that the loss of Dayne Beams to his native Queensland hurt the team. Balme says they are relaxed about the rest who have gone — Heritier Lumumba, Heath Shaw, Alan Didak, Darren Jolly, Chris Tarrant, Leon Davis and others.
“Players get older and retire. No one has the patience to do what Geelong did and get a heap of kids and wait ... but we still essentially have to draft good kids, put them in a good program and build a team. It takes time. But you’re not allowed to use the term ‘re-build’,” he adds.
Meanwhile, to stay competitive while recruits learn their jobs, the club has to juggle its list and haggle for “made” players on the free agency market.
Balme hadn’t thought about returning to Collingwood but jumped at it when the call came.
“One more decent tilt at another windmill” is how he puts it. Collingwood, he says, is a “pretty good windmill” — one of few capable of luring him from Geelong. A vote of confidence.
“Collingwood is always at the crossroads except in the summer after a flag,” Derek Hine says.
Every drama, every success, is magnified by the intense public interest.
“You can never use injuries as an excuse — but,” he says, then points to a run of injuries so unprecedented in the past two seasons that “we never had a clear run at our best 22”.
As fans go, few know more than club historian Michael Roberts (not the former VFL player). He might be expected to be a bit sentimental about departing players but, barring Beams’s exit, he’s content.
“Didak, Jolly, Tarrant and Davis were finished,” he says. “And Heritier Lumumba and Heath Shaw were necessary moves to reinvigorate the culture.” This is code for weeding out players perceived to have had a free hand under Malthouse.
“It feels like a systematic approach, but there just haven’t been the results on the field yet.
Another Shaw, Heath’s uncle, premiership captain and former coach Tony, concedes that supporters don’t “run” clubs the way they once did but he forecasts a storm of criticism for Buckley if the team fades this season.
“The club is going brilliantly off the field ... but the greatest pressure on a coach is scoreboard pressure,” Shaw says. “You’ve gotta win, gotta make finals ... It’s harder than being Prime Minister, I can tell you.”
Collingwood’s “Prime Minister”, Eddie McGuire, is happy with his Budget. The club is financially stronger than it has ever been.
By Christmas, memberships had topped 60,000, well on the way to beating last season’s record of 80,793 — double the 2007 figure.
McGuire bristles at what he sees as premature criticism. He says battlers like Richmond, Melbourne and St Kilda “have got three years into five-year plans for the last 30 years” whereas Collingwood, Hawthorn and the Swans see things through.
Buckley has coached three years. This season and next will get the Magpies ready for 2017, the club’s 125th anniversary — “and the centenary of winning the premiership in 1917”, McGuire points out.
It sounds like a plan. The message to supporters seems clear: Stick with the program.
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