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The Collingwood Magpies are entering the pre-season without a football manager after Graeme Allan was banned from the game and announced his resignation after just a few months in the position on Tuesday. When a new person arrives to fill the role, they’ll be the fifth to hold it in the space of four years.
The Magpies aren’t in the best of places – they’ve sunk down the ladder every year since Nathan Buckley took over from Mick Malthouse in 2012, the core of their 2010 premiership team has mostly been retired or traded away, and they just signed Chris Mayne to a four-year, two-million dollar deal. These are confusing times to be a Collingwood fan.
But despite Allan’s abrupt departure leaving the Pies with no football boss and no clear direction to embark towards over the 2016 pre-season, don’t worry folks, Eddie says it’s all just fine.
“The bottom line is that it is what it is and both Craig Lambert and Gubby Allan and Lachie Whitfield fell on their respective swords yesterday and did the right thing by the competition, which I think is a big change up from two years ago with Essendon,” McGuire said on Wednesday, after Allan’s resignation. “So I think there is some good out of all the bad that has happened in all that situation.
“But what is going to happen and what I can see from one hundred miles, is that, papers, the cricket is no good and they want to get a story going and the story that they are all trying to rev up is that Collingwood, and disarray, and I’m under pressure et cetera. It is not happening. It is a made-up attack on the football club and me and it is as simple as that.”
Sorry Eddie. I’m sure that tapping into the us-against-the-world emotion that runs so deep among AFL fans will sway at least a few to your way of thinking, and the old mention-the-Essendon-drug-saga-whenever-vaguely-relevant move is a classic of the genre. But you can only deflect so much.
Simply put, Collingwood is a club that doesn’t know what it wants to be, because so many people within the club seem to have differing points of view on where they are headed and what their goals are in 2017.
On one hand you’ve got the senior coach, Nathan Buckley, openly telling the media that he thinks he’ll get the sack next year if he doesn’t bring the Magpies back to the finals.
On the other hand you’ve got the club president trying to distance himself from those comments and ease pressure around the team’s performance wherever possible.
Then of course there’s the football boss, who thinks… ah right, there is no football boss.
Consider the Magpies’ scattergun off-season – signing older hands like Mayne, Daniel Wells and Lynden Dunn, none of them without risks attached, while moving on other old hands like Travis Cloke and Nathan Brown. Throw into the mix one Will Hoskin-Elliott, and one early retirement for Jonathon Marsh – this is a puzzle that’s not easy to piece together.
If this was some brilliant master plan, I’ll admit, I can’t figure it out. And the bloke who was behind it all just washed his hands and left the building.
The end result is that Pies fans don’t know what they should be expecting in season 2017, and key figures in the club appear to be different pages regarding what they’re trying to deliver.
The good news is they’ve got a whole pre-season to figure things out. But when Round 1 2017 rolls around – a match against the reigning premiers first on the fixture – they’d better have it together.