Is meddling Ed about to chop off Bucks' head?

On Monday morning, the Collingwood Magpies will face their biggest and most important decision in years – do they keep Nathan Buckley on as coach of the club in 2018 and beyond? Or do they swing the axe?

It’s clear from any angle that not all is well at Collingwood at the moment. The club has been through a comprehensive review process of its own operations this year in an attempt to determine where improvement is needed.

The short answer is, basically everywhere. The Collingwood Football Club is firing on exactly zero cylinders at the moment. They’re not the worst team in the league by any stretch, but no part of them is performing as well as they expect themselves to.

How much of that blame though can be attributed to the senior coach? Thank goodness for the story-sniffers who put a camera on the window of the Holden Centre on Tuesday – they’ve given us an inkling of what Collingwood think their problem is, and it’s not all the man in the chair.

Of the items that made the list, there’s a trio that immediately take my attention. “A restructure of the list management division,” also “more input from the club’s leadership group in list management and recruiting,” and finally “review and repair TPP model over next 12 months.”

From these proposed solutions we can reverse-engineer what one of Collingwood’s biggest problems is: their list management is diabolical.

And look, you and I could talk about this for days. The list management decisions made at Collingwood since Nathan Buckley took over as senior coach have been an occasionally thrilling, occasionally vomit-inducing, certainly unique Luna Park thrillride, and they’ve been covered in detail by many people in recent times, including myself at the start of the year.

The better question to ask is why has it been this way? From the outside looking in we tend to define club eras by senior coaches and assume they are all one stable period of management, but the reality of Collingwood under Nathan Buckley is that they’ve had a revolving door parade of football managers, a role that is perhaps equally as important as the senior coach, albeit infinitely less visible.

The fact that Collingwood could go through a process last year where Graeme Allan takes over the club after the season ends, recruits the likes of Daniel Wells and Chris Mayne, and then is forced to resign before the Pies play even a minute of competitive football under his leadership is like something out of the Trump administration.

Daniel Wells has done exactly what it says on the box – play elite footy, but only for about a third of the year – and Chris Mayne the laughably horrendous nightmare failure that literally anyone who has watched AFL for five minutes would’ve told you it would be.

Given all that it’s no surprise that the list management team is in need of some serious feng shui, that the salary cap model is a Frankenstein mess, and that the leadership group among the players would be livid about not being consulted on potential recruits.

(Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

Why has this been allowed to be the case? Well, that bring us to our next entry on the Collingwood fixer-upper to do list, and this is probably the most important. If Collingwood has one single problem they need to solve, this is it.

“Greater transparency in future staff appointments.”

I know, it sounds like meaningless HR buzzwords, but the short version of what it means is: Eddie, you can not make the staffing decisions all by your lonesome.

McGuire and Collingwood headhunted Allan to join the club for the 2016 AFL season in a supporting role in the football department, something of a step down from his role as the footy boss at GWS, but steadfastly denied that they planned to put him in the top role. You can tell where this is going.

At the end of the year, Collingwood announced Allan would move into the leading role. Neil Balme, the current football boss who the Pies had headhunted from Geelong in a similar fashion just a short while beforehand, was unceremoniously tossed out of his job, with a guaranteed-but-highly-ambiguous new, lesser role promised to him.

Balme ultimately turned that down and took up a new role at Richmond where he has undoubtedly played a key part in the club’s return to finals. Make of that what you will.

Of course, as already discussed, it backfired on Collingwood in the most exasperating way possible, and Balme was already out the door. The Pies wound up picking up Geoff Walsh, less than four years after he quit Collingwood to move to North Melbourne, to be replaced by Rodney Eade to be replaced by Balme to be replaced by Allan to be replaced by himself again. They reportedly had a go at trying to pinch Graham Wright away from Hawthorn just recently.

Worse than this bizarre carousel of footy bosses, however, is the suggestion put forward is that these decisions are made silently, presumably spearheaded almost entirely by Eddie McGuire. It is staggering, for example, that Nathan Buckley was not consulted at all on the decision to headhunt Allan, with whom he would be expected to work closely.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not an Eddie McGuire hater, and I say that despite the fact that he regularly makes it more and more difficult not to be. His administration of Collingwood from a financial point of view has been nothing short of dazzling, and any club in the league would kill to have a figurehead with his media visibility and obvious passion.

At some point though it has to be recognised that the football department decisions he’s overseen in recent years – from the Nathan Buckley succession plan to the Graeme Allan disaster – have not taken the club where it wants to be. A rigorous, stable, collaborative team effort is needed to make the right call, hence: “Greater transparency in future staff appointments.”

(Photo by Robert Prezioso/Getty Images)

That has to start now, right now, with the decision of whether or not to retain Buckley, and if not, who to replace him with. It’s time for one last look at the Holden Centre Whiteboard.

“Improving specific areas of Collingwood’s game, including kicking skills, goal kicking, tackling and ruck work.” And also, “providing a mentor for the senior coach.”

Look, that first sentence would be great mid-act one-liner in a stand-up act. It’s the kind of thing that Titus O’Reilly’s wet dreams are made of. I mean that really only leaves running, clearances and tying your shoelaces as the areas of the game Collingwood believe they’re competent in.

That is a coaching issue. That is one hundred per cent a coaching issue. It’s a failure of the coaching team, and what needs to be worked out is what parts of the coaching team can be salvaged and which can’t.

It doesn’t necesarilly mean that Bucks has to go. Richmond faced a simillar magnitude of being remarkably bad last year but through some clever shuffling of the assistant coaches and a bold change of attitude by Damien Hardwick have revitalised the club. It’s rare, but it can be done.

However, I believe the latter of those two quotes tells us whether or not Nathan Buckley is going to be given that chance: “Providing a mentor for the senior coach.”

As things stand, Nathan Buckley is actually the seventh most experienced senior coach in the league. The days where it could be reasonably said that he needs a ‘mentor’ are long past.

On top of that: when’s the last time a senior coach finished the season without a new contract and then was given one? Sorry Bucks, but the odds just aren’t in your favour here.

For those reasons, I believe Nathan Buckley is set to coach his last game as senior coach of the Collingwood Football Club tomorrow. The Pies need change, and they need a lot more change that just sacking Nathan Buckley, but that looks likely to be at least a part of the change that occurs.

Who knows – I could be wildly wrong. But the truth is, I’m already pondering the best headline for his sacking in my head, and I reckon I’ll get to use it.