“No one knows the work that we’ve done and the preparation, how we’ve planned to play the game, so the only expectations I’m interested in are Nathan’s, the players’, the leadership group’s – what they think they are capable of doing.

“Let’s face it you can have all the expectations you want [but] Collingwood always has very high expectations.”

These were the words of Magpies CEO Gary Pert at a pre-season media event in March this year.

At the turn, Pert and the Collingwood faithful would have been feeling pretty good about their season, and about their prospects.

But alas, for the second year running, the AFL finals will have a distinct lack of black and white. The Collingwood Magpies will be on holiday during September, fluffing yet another bright start to the year.

The familiarity of this season for Collingwood fans must be as frustrating as it is perplexing: twice in a row the Pies have been 8-3 at the turn, only to fall away in the last 11 games.

Win-Loss	Percentage
First Half, 2014	8-3	122.1
Second Half, 2014	3-8	66.1
First Half, 2015	8-3	130.7
Second Half, 2015*	1-8	77.6

*Two games to play

For a team that had grown accustomed to success – making the finals for eight straight years from 2006 to 2013, including two minor premierships, a grand final loss, a grand final draw, and a grand final win – the Pies’ current mediocrity is starting to set tongues wagging.

Buckley’s team
Is Nathan Buckley the right man to coach? The last of the favourite sons standing, Buckley has so far managed to avoid the scrutiny so heavily applied to his counterparts in James Hird and Michael Voss in recent years.

The attention applied to Hird wasn’t for strictly on-field reasons, although we’re told in the end that’s what got him. Voss was doomed from the start, with an incompetent administration and a poor player development system stymieing his head coaching career.

Buckley has a significantly better winning percentage (56.7%) than both Hird (48.8%) and Voss (39.9%), and has coached in more games (91) than Hird (85) but fewer than Voss (109).

While it’s still only early on (at least for Voss and Buckley), I’d feel comfortable asserting that Buckley will be the most successful of the trio over the full course of his coaching career.

The Buckley era began in controversial yet uncontroversial circumstances, with a coaching handover reminiscent of the kind of deal you see cut in the WWE. Buckley was signed on as an assistant coach under then head honcho Michael Malthouse in 2010, following a couple of years as an underrated special comments caller for Channel Seven.

I say controversial yet uncontroversial because it was the first time in league history an assistant coach had been signed on to formally take the reins from a mentor after a set period of time – in this case, Buckley was set to take over from Malthouse at the conclusion of the 2011 season.

The Pies won the flag in 2010, and were arguably one of the best single-season sides in the modern era in 2011, amassing 20 wins and a monster percentage of 167.7 per cent (the largest recorded). The fairy-tale finale almost came to fruition for Malthouse, with the Pies falling one terrible fourth quarter short of back-to-back premierships.

Sliding doors, hey? Would Mick have taken over at Carlton if he’d gone out on such a high? That’s a topic worthy of more space than I can dedicate here.

Buckley took over in 2012, and set about finishing the job his mentor started. A 16-win preliminary final campaign followed in his debut senior coaching year, and the 2013 season was ended on 14 wins by a rising Port Adelaide side that no one saw coming in an elimination final. The juxtaposition was there for everyone to see: Port’s median player age was 23 and change, Collingwood’s was 26.

Add to that rumoured – and very obvious – culture issues, and there was a clear choice for the hierarchy. Have one last dip with a rapidly ageing core, or start preparations for a rebuild.

The latter was chosen, and the shedding of older-age talent was as swift as it was ruthless. Within a year, five of the Pies’ nine oldest players that suited up in that qualifying final loss were gone, either to retirement or to other clubs. Others, like Quentin Lynch, Ben Hudson and Andrew Krakouer were moved along.

Nathan Buckley. (Photo: Michael Willson/AFL Media)

It was time for Buckley to build his team, on his terms, with his players.

In their place came a bevy of drafted talent, with the Pies assembling five picks inside the top 30 of the past two drafts. It’s meant they have gone from playing with one of the oldest, most experienced lists in the competition to among the youngest, and indeed when you restrict consideration to players whom have played games this season, the Pies are trotting out a playing group nearly as young as Greater Western Sydney.

While many of the links to the premiership run are gone, there’s one guy that’s been there through it all, and who is building a solid career. But that hasn’t stopped the football community from sticking the boots in in recent weeks.

The new Australian captain?
In an industry that breeds cardboard cut-out, ‘credit to the boys’, ‘game of two halves’ comments, Scott Pendlebury’s insight into the mindset of his players, coming into the end of a disappointing season, were refreshing. This line in particular sticks out:

“I’ve never played in a game like that; it was my first time playing in a game that didn’t mean anything for the football club.”

The do-gooders were out in force after that interview – so much so that coach Buckley felt compelled to stick up for his captain on social media.

Yet it was a statement of a true leader, one who can see the forest from the trees, knows his playing group and their mindset well, and spoken with an authenticity that is lacking from many of his contemporaries.

Pendlebury is among the game’s most sublime, moving around the ground with the efficiency of a snake gliding through the desert. He never looks rushed, creates space through congestion in a way that almost no other player can, and you just know he’s going to make the best possible decision. He’s an underrated threat without the ball, mostly because it doesn’t show up in his counting statistics like tackle count.

They don’t call him ‘The Cadillac’ for nothing (Okay, maybe I’m the only one who calls him The Cadillac).

He’s had another stellar season, in which he may end up kicking a goal a game for the first time since 2011, a product of him playing more time up the ground. He will most certainly break his goal assist record (again from 2011), and will record a disposal efficiency of more than 75 per cent for the third straight year.

At 27, and with an almost unblemished injury or suspension history, Pendlebury will be the starting centre for his team for at least another five or six years, and perhaps longer should his mind and body remain intact.

With a young list around him, Pendlebury’s performance must see him selected in this season’s All Australian team. He could be in contention for the captaincy, given the ho-hum years of many of the game’s other on-field leaders.

Bucks and Pendles withstanding, that doesn’t change what’s happened to their team in recent times. Collingwood have capitulated for two consecutive years, a term Buckley prickled at when it was put to him by The Age journalist Caroline Wilson.

So it is fair to ask some questions. What’s going on, and why has this happened twice now?

More questions than answers
Part of this season’s funk can be explained by strength of schedule. When I took a good look at the run home for every team on the first day of July, I found that the Pies were set to go from playing the league’s easiest run of games to nearly the hardest, notwithstanding a very kind run of games in their home state (and at their home ground).

The Pies have thus far played five of the current top eight in their past eight games, and travelled to Adelaide to take on a much improved Port team.

Collingwood’s lone respite over that period was a fortnight of Melbourne and Carlton, which they managed to split 1-1 with a negative points differential. A final fortnight of Geelong, playing for their season, and Essendon, with players playing for contracts, will be tough.

That says to me it’s not just about who they’ve played, it’s as much about who they have playing for them.

In observing the Pies on and off throughout the year, their playing stock is still very raw, both in terms of age but also in skill execution and ability to make the best decision. The Pies were one of the youngest lists in the competition coming into the season, and in recent weeks have been playing like it.

These were the knocks on Collingwood heading into the year. The Roar‘s Cam Rose concluded there were more questions than answers on the Pies list, and I agreed.

And yet they managed to be one of the leading sides at the halfway mark. That’s where Buckley deserves all the credit in the world: he built a system that compensated for his team’s numerous shortcomings and lack of experience.

As a playing group, the Pies rank 16th in the league for effective disposal percentage, per Footywire. Last season, they were ranked 17th.

Jamie Elliot (Photo by AFL Media)

Now, the difference between last and first isn’t particularly huge – Hawthorn are at the top, of course, with a disposal efficiency of 75.5 per cent, compared to Collingwood’s 71.8 per cent – but when you take into account variance, the difference can mount over the course of a game. It’s like having 22 Scott Pendleburys running around versus having one.

The Pies, these Pies, won’t beat you with their skills.

How does Buckley compensate for that? With an emphasis on contested play, closing down space, pressing hard and scrapping towards a score. Early season Collingwood was a tour de force, and no one wanted to play them. The Pies would make you earn every single point you managed to put up.

Tactical victories
In the first 11 rounds of the season, Collingwood had the league’s third-best offence, putting up over 100 points per game, owed in large part because of a high number of inside 50 entries (56.5 per game, ranked second behind you know who). They were kicking it through the big sticks at an above-average clip, but in watching the tape that appeared as much to do with good fortune as system – nothing stuck out as an obvious emphasis on getting the ball in deep or within the corridor.

The Pies were also an above-average kicking team, recording a kick-to-handball ratio of 1.34, ranked fourth in the competition. Their opponents were significantly less likely to kick, collectively recording a kick-to-handball ratio of 1.25, ranked 12th. Sure, the kicks weren’t necessarily bullet passes to teammates working into space: Collingwood were ranked 17th for marks outside of their own 50-metre arc, recording just over 67 per game.

Through the middle, it was all about cramping opponents for space, and looking for territory once the ball was cleared from the contest. Collingwood were +8.6 on contested possessions in those first 11 rounds, but tended to lose the uncontested battle by close to 20 per game (ranked 15th). That was driven in large part by their smaller, less bulky bodies in clearance situations, with only Dane Swan able to meaningfully influence set piece situations as far as winning the ball and getting it away.

But it didn’t matter, because the territory game meant the ball was more often than not down Collingwood’s end of the ground. The full ground press meant a lost clearance didn’t result in a goal to the other team, and in fact more often than not the ball would just come shooting back.

On the defensive end, Collingwood were getting the job done, conceding about two goals less per game than the AFL average. It was largely a product of their territory game, with the Pies letting their opponents inside the stripe at a below average 47.9 times per game. But it was also due to their defensive prowess, with opponents scoring just 44.4 per cent of the time, which was around five per cent better than the defensive average over that period.

The Pies were getting it done on the ground and in the air, conceding a pretty typical number of marks on inside 50 kicks but still managing to be that two goals a game better than the league average.

The footy world was abuzz with the Pies’ newfound defensive talent, with Jack Frost breaking out, Tom Langdon a revelation as a key defensive player, and Marley Williams picking up the crumbs. The three were the emerging core of mid-sized defenders that every side craves right now. Alan Toovey got into a rhythm after an injury-interrupted couple of years, and Nathan Brown was taking scalp after scalp on some of the game’s biggest key forwards.

In the first eight weeks of the season, the Pies conceded more than two goals to any key forward just twice; four to Jack Reiwoldt and three to Tyrone Vickery in Round 7, and four to Charlie Dixon in Round 8, after Frost went down just before halftime and Dixon kicked three in a burst.

It was looking great for the Pies. The high water mark was a Round 9 victory over North Melbourne before the Kangaroos were looking anything like a good football team. The Pies were pitiful in the first half, kicking 4.3 to North’s 10.6, and the match was set to be the blowout the Roos needed to kick start their year. An abject failure of North Melbourne’s defence allowed a third quarter for the ages from Jamie Elliott, as Collingwood kicked 13 of the last 17 goals for the win.

A couple of business-as-usual wins followed, and we get to the 8-3 record at the bye.

Then the Pies had an incredible stretch of games decided by less than two straight kicks, losing to Fremantle away by seven points, Hawthorn at home by 10 and Port Adelaide by three. Also in this five-week stretch were losses to West Coast (by 31 points, with four goals of that margin coming in the last quarter) and a three-goal loss to the Western Bulldogs, which looks mighty impressive in hindsight.

That squared the ledger. Then they lost to Melbourne, and the knives were out. Six in a row, and the Pies found themselves all but out of contention.

So you know how Collingwood were playing that very contested style, and it was working? Well, over this stretch, and in the past couple of weeks, all of the things they were doing well faded away. Gone is the territory game, the contested possession victories, the outperformance of their defensive set up, and the ability to convert in front of goal. What they were doing well, and what was winning them games early in the season, is no longer.

To Collingwood’s credit, their opponents are still struggling to play against them, with Collingwood conceding the league’s lowest kick-to-handball ratio in the past nine weeks (1.14). However, the ball is getting on the outside more often, which is being reflected in a higher rate of uncontested possession and field marks conceded by the Pies.

A lot of that comes down to who they’ve played: Hawthorn, West Coast and the Bulldogs are the three biggest uncontested possession teams in the league – yes, the Bulldogs.

But it’s also personnel driven. I wouldn’t feel comfortable stating that any of Collingwood’s rising brigade have played better in the second half of the year than the first, with their defenders in particular feeling the heat. The Pies rank 13th for both offensive and defensive efficiency in the past nine weeks, which works out to be about a goal a game worse than St Kilda, their fellow late-2000s rebuilder.

In the first 10 or so rounds, their distribution of possessions was decidedly egalitarian; no one player stood out with a huge number of touches, with most of the Pies’ midfield sitting in a range of 20-30 a game. In recent weeks, the likes of Swan and Pendlebury have started winning more of the Pies’ possessions, as the youngsters drop away.

It’s a taxing game plan, but Buckley really had little choice. Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. His young team lack the physical factor to match it with teams such as Hawthorn and Fremantle, and his charges are still learning what it takes to be an AFL player from a skills perspective. So what to do? Play hard, fast and aggressive.

Do you know what though? This season almost precisely mirrors Collingwood’s 2014 campaign, from a strictly statistical point of view. Other than contested possession differential, which I’d put down to a young list, Collingwood’s 2015 season is unfolding in an eerily similar fashion to 2014. That 8-3 start was less about offence and more about defence, but the scale of the fall was just as dramatic.

For the second year running, the Pies have simply run out of steam. Which is a reasonable excuse at this stage of the team’s development, particularly given the way Buckley had them all playing.

If you take that perspective, there’s not a great deal to worry about. Collingwood’s last season slumps aren’t because they are weak of character or mentally fragile; they’re simply spent.

The gorilla in the room
This laborious game style hasn’t really meshed well with Travis Cloke, either, and he looks set to record less than two goals per game for the second straight season. Cloke is just hanging on to a spot in the top 30 goal kickers in the competition, which is a far sight from the 400-pound gorilla we were all convinced was set to monster the game after a 70-goal effort in 2011. He’s kicked the same number of goals as Joe Daniher, and, well, have you watched Essendon’s forward 50 recently?

Travis Cloke is the man (Photo: Michael Willson/AFL Media)

Cloke makes bank on his ability to take challenging marks in contested situations, with his conversion for goal no better than average. In that respect, Cloke’s ability to impact on the game is improved, or hampered, by his teammates up the ground.

Cloke would be hanging out for some better ball users in the forward half, to help him overcome what must be a frustratingly permanent double team situation. I struggle to think of times where Cloke starts the game in a one-on-one battle with his direct opponent, such is the respect that his top form is regarded.

He’s only 28, and given a pretty much completely clean bill of health to this point – excluding this season’s calf injury – you would think Cloke, like Pendlebury, has got a good five or six seasons in him yet, and perhaps more given the less taxing position he plays. Which leads us to the future.

Two birds, or just one?
Collingwood are at that stage of list development where they should be content throwing players at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Jamie Elliott is an excellent example of this. The small forward has shown flashes in his play inside the forward 50 that suggest he could be a very useful on-baller, particularly in stoppage situations through the middle of the ground and on the wings. His cleanliness with the ground ball is very useful in the forward half, but it would be doubly useful in getting his players first use and to speed up the Pies’ movement.

Ben Reid looks to have been earmarked as a forward now he’s back from a long injury lay-off. He had played back for much of his career, creeping forward as required or when Collingwood needed a little bit of spark. That’s a good move, given the development underway in the back line. But then the question comes: what to do with Jesse White?

Three-prong forward lines are in vogue, with the third tall expected to play as a high link man. Tom Lynch is the prototype at Adelaide, although like everything Hawthorn were the leaders in this. Could White play that role? His athleticism is his best trait, so it’s very possible.

As far as the list goes, they, like Port Adelaide, should consider themselves in the talent acquisition phase. Five top 30 picks in two years is a great start, and given the age profile of the list perhaps it’s time to chase some more established talent. If they can kick a Sherrin at an above average clip, even better.

The Pies have made overtures about securing Brisbane’s James Aish and the Giants’ Adam Treloar in the coming trade period. There’s talk Collingwood may even leverage up their 2016 draft stocks to get them. But it’s not clear that these two players will address Collingwood’s need for good ball users; Aish is a career sub-70 and Treloar is only a touch better (although in saying that, neither of them have necessarily been kicking to the best set of teammates in the league).

James Aish (Photo: Michael Willson/AFL Media)

Neither really give Collingwood anything they don’t have, either, with both standing just over 180 centimetres tall and weighing in below 85 kilograms. If you ask me, they’ll look at one of these two, but not both.

Someone that does fit the good ball user bill, at least some of the time, is Hawthorn’s Ryan Schoenmakers. The Hawks defender has been in and out of the side for the past couple of years, and given Hawthorn’s defensive stocks could be surplus to requirements. The Hawks won’t be drafting at the top of the chart for another year, and given they are starting to get a little on the old side as a list, regeneration may soon be in order.

You know who else would be a great addition? Number 32 from Adelaide.

It’s all quiet on the western front when it comes to Collingwood and Patrick Dangerfield, since the Pies got out their megaphone and shouted they had the cash to fit Danger in. I had a deep look at Dangerfield’s football options a few weeks back so I won’t revisit here, but it makes a lot of sense for both he and his potential new club.

Those that jump all over Dangerfield’s kicking skills forget what his presence would mean for the rest of the Collingwood team, particularly the captain.

The Pies have got a very bright future. Another bottom 10 finish will put them in the box seat for a kind draw – not that they, you know, tend to struggle with that anyway – and another off-season of work for their young players will do no harm. They have the captain, the key forward, and the coach all rock solidly in place.

The Herald Sun reported this week that Collingwood had been overtaken by Richmond as the best supported Victorian-based side, at least as far as paid-up memberships and match attendance goes. If you ask me, that’ll only be a temporary phenomenon.