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Just imagine, if you will, a universe where your team has the best intercept-marking colossus to mould your entire defensive structure around.
Let’s call this man Darcy, give him perfect hair, excellent public speaking skills and also every single attribute you’d want in a footballer, from height to speed to sticky hands to actually seeming like a decent human.
Now imagine that you come up against a team with a plan to stop this titan, or at least to give him something to think about. They plonk next to him a 21-year old wunderkind with even stickier hands, with designs on staying in your man’s eyeline at every opportunity and preventing him from his usual shtick of sagging off, reading the play better than anyone else and pulling down mark after mark after mark.
You might think the reduction of your intercept king down to the realms of mere mortals – even making him look, on occasion, a touch *shudders* vulnerable, would present a problem for your team.
But fear not, for there is another Skywalker: a guy about a foot smaller, without the fancy eye-catching hair or the incredible athletic gifts or the famous name, who goes through life without needing to make big speeches or present as the face of your team. Who never gets his face on the front of the paper, or leaves the commentators gushing, or has opposition teams scrambling to try and work him out.
Someone who quietly just goes about having a really good season, doing his bit for the system, stopping the dangerous small talls, lacing out targets time and time again and hardly anything as eye-catching as the spectacular feats performed by the colossus next to him; biding his time for the moment where said colossus became a diminished force, and the world had a chance to see just how good he can be when it’s really needed.
Forget Darcy Moore. Isaac Quaynor is a bona fide superstar in the Collingwood backline too.
I’ve mentioned him briefly in these pages in the past – I hinted at him being a smoky for All-Australian contention in last week’s six points, and I’ve long had the suspicion he was a key ingredient in what makes the Magpies not just the most lethal counterattacking team in the game, but unexpectedly stingy when it comes to conceding scores.
But I wasn’t expecting a performance like this under the Friday night lights. If you’d told me before the match that the Western Bulldogs would reduce Darcy Moore to three intercept marks for the night, and none of them contested, I’d have said they were in that match up to their eyeballs.
I wasn’t too far wrong – but I wasn’t expecting the 180cm guy with cornrows also responsible for marking the Dogs’ most dangerous small forward in Cody Weightman to become Moore anyway.
Quaynor had eight intercept marks on Friday night – remember, the footy world lost its absolute mind when Moore pulled down ten against a Carlton team that spent half the time kicking it down his throat. For a player of his size, that’s a staggering effort.
Two of them were contested, and really more deserved to be – it’s just that he read plenty of them so much better than anyone around him off the boot as to remove the need for a contest to begin with. Time and again Weightman, an exceptional aerial exponent himself, was simply nudged under a high ball with perfect timing, the Bulldog only able to look over his shoulder and see the steady hands of Quaynor with the ball lodged betwixt them.
Billy Frampton being required to plug a hole up forward – me and Craig McRae probably disagree on how necessary that was – in the absence of Brody Mihocek was always going to mean extra responsibility for Moore against the Bulldogs’ trio of talls in Ugle-Hagan, Aaron Naughton and Rory Lobb (yes – he WAS playing).
But what was most noticeable of all was that in the final minutes, with the Bulldogs surging back into the realms of ‘they can pinch a draw here’ with the last four goals of the game, that the Pies never felt the need to throw Frampton back and free Moore up as the intercept marker. Instead, whenever the Dogs had the ball, Moore would position himself next to whoever was nearest out of Naughton and Ugle-Hagan… and there would Quaynor be, five metres off that pair, biding his time.
The actual intercepting, though, was only half of Quaynor’s influence. There was also what he did with it.
This game was always going to rest on one thing: whether the Bulldogs could somehow prevent Collingwood from enacting their modus operandi, of pacy, end-to-end ball movement with silky skills and a wave of gut-runners from half-back coming in a black and white wave.
For 18 months, the Dogs have struggled with curbing ball movement of that style against teams of all shapes and sizes, and the Magpies are just about that style ramped up to 11. For a defensive structure that couldn’t even clamp down on North Melbourne two games ago, it presented as a mighty tough ask.
For a quarter and 26 minutes, the Dogs did a stellar job, forcing regular turnovers, slow ball movement and ensured the Pies’ forwards, built for lead-up marking rather than their contested work, had their work cut out for them.
But a remarkable passage of play from Beau McCreery – handballing to himself over James O’Donnell at half-back, creating the overlap and keeping on running, getting on the end of the chain and passing inside 50 to Jamie Elliott – proved the firestarter.
And a minute later, they’d do it again.
A high kick forward from Caleb Poulter was intercepted at half-back. The marker would switch via a handpass to John Noble, who’d go wide to Oleg Markov, and then on to Josh Daicos in space. Daicos then gave over the top to Bobby Hill, ran on, accepted the handball receive and speared the pass inside 50 to Elliott.
Bang. Another Magpies goal.
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Who took the intercept mark, I hear you ask? Well, his name starts with Q.
All up, seven of the Magpies’ goals came from defensive half possession chains – even for them, that’s a lot. Half of those came from stoppages, with the superb in-close work of Jordan De Goey and Nick Daicos funnelling the ball forward and the half-backs loose.
The other three had a Quaynor hand involved, one and all. Of his four score involvements, three by my count finished in goals. For a deep defender, that’s phenomenal.
He’d finish with 27 disposals – sixth-most on the ground – and at 89 per cent efficiency. He’d also have a game-high six rebounds 50s to go with all his intercepts, time and time again repelling to get the Pies out of trouble and to start the process of turning defence into attack that makes this team so lethal.
Isaac Quaynor takes a mark. (Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
Then, in the last minutes with the Dogs surging, a long ball inside 50 was intercepted by that man again. The Dogs had struggled to find a way past him all night, and it would continue right to the end.
I’ll be honest and say the Magpies’ number 3 was, by a significant distance, my best afield on Friday night.
As clean and as spectacular as Nick Daicos was, and for all De Goey’s explosive brutality from the stoppage, this was a game won in classic Collingwood fashion: slingshot, frenetic football from half-back, slicing through the Bulldogs like 18 black and white knives through butter.
And more than anyone else, it was Quaynor starting those chains. The Magpies simply don’t win without his brilliance.
The Isaac Quaynor for All-Australian petition starts today.
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