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Collingwood’s self-made apocalypse marches on proudly

3rd September, 2017
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Collingwood's Nathan Buckley is under contrasting pressure to Carlton's Brendon Bolton. (AAP Image/David Crosling)
Expert
3rd September, 2017
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Nathan Buckley probably did enough in the last six weeks to keep his job – but did he do enough in the last six years? And really, why wasn’t that the question driving the discourse surrounding his fate?

The argument, oddly, for Buckley keeping his job is that we still have no idea whether he’s a good coach or not. His reappointment is barely a reflection on him – it is an indictment of the club.

As a player, Buckley was almost never put in a position to succeed. In his prime while Collingwood briefly contended, arguably the two best players he played alongside were James Clement and Chris Tarrant.

As a coach, he’s been similarly ill placed. Last off-season was a minor cataclysm for Collingwood, with Buckley remarkably revealing that the disastrous signing of Chris Mayne, who is not good at football, to a $2 million deal, was the result of something approaching miscommunication.

What does that even mean? Was there a muffled phone conversation where a truck suddenly passed and a list manager confused a ‘no’ for a ‘yes’? Did an errant printer accidentally put an additional zero at the end of Mayne’s contract offer that was never picked up on?

The processes behind the scenes at Collingwood since late 2011 haven’t typically approached these levels of farce but they haven’t exactly been clearheaded either. This is a club that tore down a young, ascending premiership squad for culture reasons, and then looked to piece it back together with the sad duct tape of Jesse White, Quinten Lynch and Jordan Russell.

Jesse White Collingwood Magpies AFL 2016

(AAP Image/Julian Smith)

The list management, which to be fair, Buckley has surely had a strong say in, has been abominable. The team has recruited poorly, plucking expired veterans and dedicating themselves to building a team of unskilled battlers.

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Jeremy Howe is the one raging success story, and that appears to be something of a fluke – he was signed to play forward, struggled mightily there, and then only became a revelation in the backline out of desperate necessity.

Adam Treloar and Taylor Adams have been strong additions too, although market value was paid for each.

Other recruits – Levi Greenwood, Travis Varcoe, Will Hoskin-Elliott and so on – have been ‘fine’, but the problem hasn’t been the individual players added, it’s been the complete absence of a plan to form a coherent collective.

The team, while unquestionably talented, still makes little sense – Collingwood has a commitment to high-pressure players who can’t kick akin to Arsenal’s commitment to low-pressure players who kick exquisitely.

How much of this is Buckley’s fault? Quite a bit, you’d imagine.

Has he shown enough over six years to retain his job? Almost certainly not.

But, at the same time, given the turmoil within the club, the failed succession plans, the cup-of-coffee directors of coaching, the comical injury list, and the absence of seemingly any experienced senior figure having the common sense to say ‘It’s probably a bad idea to sign Chris Mayne to a $2 million contract’, could any young coach really have succeeded in this time?

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Maybe not, and that ultimately is why Buckley remains. Not out of a vote of confidence, but out of a concession of club-wide inadequacy.

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