Can Bucks buck the trend?

The early signs are not good for the Magpies in 2016. Two ordinary losses and the scratchiest of wins is hardly the stuff that Collingwood fans would have dreamt of leading into the season.

When Buckley took over from Malthouse in 2012 he inherited a team which had won twenty-five matches the previous year. Almost mercifully the Pies lost the last match of 2011 to Geelong, handing the Cats another flag. The loss also prevented the possibility of a head coach ‘resigning’ after winning the previous two premierships.

Who knows what would have happened if Collingwood had won? It’s one of those great ‘what if’ questions. It wasn’t to be and Malthouse moved on.

Buckley stepped up.

Buckley’s first season in the hot seat went quite well and the team finished with 17 wins. It was a more attacking Collingwood and it seemed the great succession might work out.

There were some worrying signs though in the season after. There was talk of some senior players not having a strong relationship with the head coach. There were incidences of player discontent.

Some players were moved on. On the field fourteen wins seemed a reasonable, albeit diminished return.

In 2014 the Pies slumped to eleven wins and last season Collingwood started strongly before the wheels well and truly fell off as the team finished on just ten wins.

The manner in which Collingwood has lost two out of the first matches this season is cause for concern. The Round 1 loss to Sydney looked more like a training run. Last week the Saints seemed to move the ball almost at will, scything through the Pies zone on the way toward a marking target in their forward fifty.

I’ve often mused among friends that the coach cannot and should not be entirely responsible for the performance of his players. A coach cannot tackle, cannot win a clearance or kick any goals. For this reason, the players must bear much of the responsibility for the fortunes of their team.

Rightly or wrongly, supporters, the media, and the Collingwood board will all be expecting Buckley to ‘do something’ to rectify the situation and get Collingwood back into premiership contention. The same people will be tremendously disappointed that Buckley the champion player has not evolved into Buckley the champion coach.

We should remember that champion players do not always make champion coaches. Kevin Bartlett and Michael Voss are excellent examples of this. There are many others.

Champion players are what they are because of the high standards they set for themselves and their overall high level of ability and motivation. Because they set the bar so high for themselves, sometimes they can struggle to empathise with their players who are simply not as talented.

Empathy as a coach is absolutely vital to maximising results from your players.

Those same high standards champion players reached themselves can also lead to frustration with players who cannot replicate with practice what extremely talented players can often do with less effort.

Sometimes players who are good naturally do not think about the technique behind basic skills as often as less gifted players do. Because of this, talented players are not necessarily good teachers. Being able to teach is vital to being an effective coach.

Sometimes, coaches can simply be unlucky. This can occur through injury, match fixtures or simply a lack of resources at the club they are coaching with. Ross Lyon and his Saints probably would have won a flag if not for the kind of freak bounce only an oblong ball can deliver. Will we ever really know if Justin Leppitsch can actually coach?

Another champion player who was considered a failure as a coach is Tim Watson. Interestingly Watson remarked earlier in the week that it was fortunate for Buckley that he had signed a contract extension to the end of 2017 before the season started. I’m not sure that it was.

Given Collingwood’s fairly obvious downward trajectory, Buckley’s contract extension isn’t so much an extension as it is a deadline. If the Collingwood Board isn’t quickly convinced the slide is reversed Buckley’s coaching career at Collingwood is over. In a deliciously clever twist this ‘extension’ also serves as a harbinger to potential coaches that Collingwood is in the market for a coach.

For these reasons the extension will give Buckley about as much security as the Ribbentrop pact of 1939 gave to Soviet Russia. Like the Ribbentrop pact it seems an arrangement of convenience whose only purpose is to delay the inevitable whilst the protagonists jockey for position.