Paper Magpies: Collingwood’s offseason has a scent of desperation

In recent years, the team with more grand final appearances than any other has had to settle for its biggest victories coming while players are on holiday.

The Magpies have had declining win totals in each of Nathan Buckley’s five seasons at the helm. The linear deterioration of what was a young premiership squad has been as improbable as it’s been absurd. But the club’s fall from relevance hasn’t been from a lack of offseason endeavour.

Last year, Collingwood curbed its modus operandi of looking for delicate puzzle pieces to fit in, specific veteran roles to fill. There would be no more Clinton Young and Jordan Russell nonsense. They made a ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ move, cashing a lot of chips to bring Adam Treloar, James Aish and Jeremy Howe to the club. On balance, it’s been a win so far for Collingwood.

Treloar is somewhere between a star and a superstar already, and on an upward trajectory. Once the delusion of ‘good mark = good forward’ was shattered, Howe settled into an important role of intercept marking defender, albeit with the inevitable Howesian hiccups. Aish was the least impressive of the recruits, but towards the end of the year came into his own, adding some hardness to his deft skills.

This offseason, Collingwood are going all-out again, but in a different way. The Daniel Wells signing is astounding – a big money three-year contract for someone who will be 32 before he takes the field for his new team is unheard of. But Wells is precisely the player Collingwood need – a smooth, outside mover with sumptuous kicking skills to distract from the shanked reality of Levi Greenwood, Taylor Adams and Jack Crisp.

Theoretically, age should be kind to Wells given his polished boot and the awareness he shares with his now captain. He can still impact the game without bursting into light speed. The injuries across 2014 and 2015 are a worry, but Collingwood’s revered training staff, which has allowed the team to be … crippled by injury the past three years … should keep him healthy? The injuries are a worry.

The downside of Wells is enormous – seven digits prefaced by a dollar sign enormous – but the upside is too. That’s not the case with Chris Mayne, Collingwood’s other ‘marquee’ signing.

If this Collingwood team has one area it doesn’t need help in it’s a ferocious tackling pressure player with questionable foot skills. They already have 12 Chris Maynes.

Collingwood’s other moves were logical. The team got nothing for Travis Cloke and Nathan Brown, but their new teams will likely get nothing from them too. Marley Williams going for pick 105 was fitting, because that was the same amount of needles that Magpie fans stuck into their Marley voodoo dolls during his final round implosion against Hawthorn.

Jack Frost has the determination and endeavour to play in the AFL but not the skills, and Jarrod ‘Guy Richards’ Witts had little role to play in a team rightfully invested in Brodie Grundy.

Will Hoskin-Elliott brings much needed speed and goal sense to the squad and meshes with Collingwood’s age profile, while Lynden Dunn is a fine if uninspiring stop-gap, someone who adds depth and competence to a defensive unit lacking in both those areas.

The broader issue with Collingwood’s offseason is that it speaks to the hugely optimistic idea that the Pies are on the verge of contention.(Click to Tweet)

Dane Swan, everywhere at the moment, recently made the astute observation that premiership teams are built through continuity, when a young core plays three of four seasons together and grows accustomed to the tendencies and idiosyncrasies of their teammates.

To hear Swan wax lyrical about how he and Scott Pendlebury grew to instinctively know which way the other would turn when they found the ball at a stoppage was enough to gift Collingwood fans a brief ecstasy over memories of 2010, and make them lament how improbably long ago those days feel.

If there’s a premiership in this present list, it’s going to be built around the big three of Treloar, Darcy Moore and Brodie Grundy, and whether enough of the potential of Adams, Aish, Crisp, Jordan De Goey, Josh Smith, Tom Langdon, Jackson Ramsay, Rupert Wills, Tom Phillips, Brayden Maynard, Mason Cox and Ben Crocker can become reality.

It’ll depend on whether Jamie Elliott, Tim Broomhead, Matt Scharenberg and Alex Fasolo can stay healthy, and whether all this youth rises quickly enough to catch the primes of Pendlebury, Sidebottom and Reid.

These are the questions that will determine Collingwood’s future, and the answers are still too fuzzy to go all in on a player like Wells (no question exists where the answer coheres with Mayne’s contract).

Hidden beneath the disappointment of the Buckley era has been the accumulation of a depth of exciting youth. It’s success at the draft that propelled Collingwood to their last flag, with the final added push of grabbing Darren Jolly and Luke Ball in the fateful spring of 2009. It’s the same draft success that will drive Collingwood’s next tilt at contention, but they’re not at the stage where the pushes of Wells and Mayne are anything but overexcitement. With a coach in the final year of his contract, it has the faint scent of desperation.

Last offseason the additions of Treloar, Aish and Howe made sense because all three could feasibly be a part of the great Collingwood team. Maybe a player with Wells’s skills will be invaluable for the Magpie youth, putting them in better positions to succeed all across the ground. There’s a significant difference between Taylor Adams booming passes ten metres over Darcy Moore’s head and Wells placing them delicately down his throat. But $1.8 million is a huge investment in someone whose impact might be more pedagogical than anything.

Maybe Collingwood know something that we don’t about these additions, their fit, and where the list is. Or maybe they just have a coach who doesn’t have time to wait for an uncertain future, and has to double down on an even more speculative present.