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At the end of 2011, Nathan Buckley inherited a playing list from Mick Malthouse that just a year prior had become the youngest premiership team in history, and looked ready for a long reign at the top of the ladder.
Four-and-a-half years later, Buckley presides over a team that has missed finals two years running, started this season 1-3, and now has supporters calling for his head. Where did it all go wrong?
Buckley took over Collingwood in something of a unique situation. Most of the time when a new senior coach arrives at a club, it is to replace a failed one, and the supporter base looks to the new man for change and regeneration. The new senior coach wants to mould the playing list into their own image, so is more than happy to provide.
This was not the case for Nathan Buckley. Collingwood supporters would have been very happy indeed to see the same sort of performances and level of success that Malthouse had delivered over the years leading up to Buckley’s appointment as senior coach. Despite this, Buckley set about rebuilding the playing list to fit his own specifications.
Probably the only comparable situation in recent memory is Chris Scott’s arrival at Geelong in 2011. In that situation Scott took over for a departing Mark Thompson who seemed to have decided he no longer wished to be a senior coach despite the team still performing at a high level. Receiving a playing list still at its peak, Scott successfully guided the Cats to a flag, and didn’t really have to tweak the team too much achieve that.
Did Nathan Buckley need to tweak Collingwood in order to deliver another premiership to Magpies fans? We’ll never know the answer. Malthouse’s machinations may have been building towards a period of sustained success, or perhaps they would have quickly crumbled. Whatever blueprint Malthouse had been assembling, Buckley was quick to scrap it and begin working on his own.
Over the course of the next few years this saw a number of senior players leave the club for a variety of reasons, with Dayne Beams, Heath Shaw and Dale Thomas the most prominent, but also Sharrod Wellingham, Chris Dawes, Alan Didak, Darren Jolly and others. The departures netted the Magpies a wealth of high draft picks and some talent from other clubs – a classic ‘rebuild’ strategy.
If you’re going to rebuild a club with high draft picks you’ve got to draft well and develop well. At this stage, it doesn’t look like Collingwood has managed to do either with the seven first round picks they took to the draft between 2012 and 2014 (four of them inside the top ten).
Brodie Grundy, Jordan de Goey and Darcy Moore are the ‘success stories’ of this crop. They are all regulars in the senior side at the moment, though none could be said to be performing at a high level just yet – at least they are getting that development and have shown flashes of talent. But three out of seven isn’t a great strike rate.
Two of the others, Matt Scharenberg and Tim Broomhead, are still on the Collingwood list. Scharenberg was injured when Collingwood drafted him and has remained as such throughout the majority of his career so far, suffering two ACL injuries. You can chalk that up to bad luck if you like, but it’s a negative result either way. Broomhead, a fourth-year player, is still yet to secure a spot in the best 22.
The remaining two have already departed the club. Nathan Freeman, yet to debut due to a series of injuries, moved to St Kilda at the end of 2015, and Ben Kennedy, who could never get more than the occasional substitute role in Buckley’s 22, moved to Melbourne. Another young gun from outside the first round, Paul Seedsman, also departed the Pies last year, lacking opportunity.
Seedsman and Kennedy are currently holding down spots in sides that are significantly out-performing Collingwood, which has to lead supporters to question how well their development was handled. Freeman may not be far away from making a St Kilda debut.
It’s all well and good to draft potential, but you have to turn it into performance – under Buckley’s rebuild, Collingwood have failed to do that with any consistency.
The list of players recruited from opposition clubs under Buckley’s time as senior coach doesn’t make for especially pretty reading either. Here we go: Quinten Lynch. Clinton Young. Jordan Russell. Tony Armstrong. Jesse White. Patrick Karnezis. Taylor Adams. Travis Varcoe. Levi Greenwood. Jack Crisp. Adam Treloar. James Aish. Jeremy Howe.
Now that list isn’t devoid of successes by any means. Adams, Greenwood and Crisp all so far fall into the ‘serviceable’ category, though they are all three of them essentially the same player – a trio of tubs of home-brand vanilla ice cream in a team that desperately needs to be more Neapolitan.
Travis Varcoe has brought a little touch of class to the team that has been handy enough, and Adam Treloar obviously is a blue chip talent that any team in the competition would love to have on their list.
The rest don’t present much. There’s a lot of unqualified failures in the list, and a few names that are still in the mix to become successes but don’t inspire much faith. James Aish has some talent but seems more the result of an Eddie McGuire declaration of war than a smart recruiting decision, while Jeremy Howe doesn’t look any more likely to become that goal-kicking option the Pies so desperately need than Quinten Lynch or Jesse White ever did.
The pain of poor decisions is set to hang around a little while too. The Pies gave up their 2016 first round pick in the trade to secure Treloar, clearly thinking they would rise up the ladder this season and only lose a pick in the teens. Instead at this stage it seems they may have given up a top five pick, and become the first team to overrate their position and shoot themselves in the foot through future pick trading.
The net result is a team that right now looks like a bit of a bust. The midfield is built up predominantly of honest blue-collar triers with little class, the forward line has no reliable options for goal to speak of, and the backline lacks the elite delivery skills that are so essential to modern footy.
That’s very problematic for Nathan Buckley. Collingwood fans, perhaps rightly so, will feel that they had an era of success stolen from them by the club’s decision to shuffle on a premiership coach and bring in a man who has tried to fix what may not have been broken, and in doing so has brought the club to it’s lowest point in more than a decade.
This week the Pies face a potential doomsday scenario when they play the top-up Bombers on ANZAC Day. It was said when the WADA bans were announced that the Bombers perhaps should step aside from this blockbuster fixture to prevent it being uncompetitive. Now, amazingly, there any many – myself included – tipping them to win it.
With a win here Buckley could buy himself a very small amount of respite, but looking at the changes he has made to this team over the length of his tenure and the apparent damage done to the overall playing stocks, I struggle to see any way that this side can truly turn itself around in time for Buckley’s skin to be saved.
It’s a long season still to come, but make no mistake, these are dire times for Nathan Buckley and the Collingwood Football Club.