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Collingwood are unreal.
After a week where the vultures began to circle, with the Brownlow Medal favourite and their most significant player in Nick Daicos done for the home-and-away season, with questions over their ferocity and work in close, and THEN losing their captain and intercept marking king Darcy Moore within 15 minutes of the first bounce on Friday night, to not just beat Geelong anyway, but do so in such spectacular, devastating fashion, was honestly obscene.
Good teams win games like this with missing personnel all the time – but they do it in a grind, by locking up contests, guarding their defence and by dragging the game down to a defendable level. Not by ripping open the reigning premiers from navel to sternum with an incredible display of gut running, fierce speed from defense, and an utterly overwhelming pressure performance to hit the Cats with everything their battle-wearied bodies fear most.
A final margin of eight points doesn’t do the Magpies justice for the way they wrested control back after a shaky start, held their nerve as the Cats threw everything at them in the final term, and truly never looked likely to lose from the moment they hit the front in the first minute of the third term. And you could argue the two boundary-line controversies that gifted Jeremy Cameron a pair of goals, the first a dubious missed out of bounds on the full and the second Brad Close blatantly handballed to him while in the MCG carpark, were the only reason the Cats even had a sniff after half time.
Given the context, it’s the Pies’ finest win of the season, clearly distanced from their twin wins over Port Adelaide for the absence of Moore and Daicos; actually, you could go further and say it’s the Pies’ finest home-and-away win in, what, ten years?
Who knows how the season will pan out for Collingwood – as their losses to Carlton and Hawthorn proved, no team is too good to have a bad day, and if Moore’s injury is serious, then Brisbane at least in their final fortnight before finals will fancy their chances. Then there’s September itself, when just one shocker could undo a year’s worth of good work – look at what the Pies themselves did to Richmond back in 2018.
But right now, there can be no denying it: the minor premiership is Collingwood’s beyond all reasonable doubt, and the flag is almost certainly theirs to lose. Play the way they did to tear the Cats limb from limb, and no one else has a prayer.
Having warned Chris Scott on Fox Footy pre-match that his side were going to bring the heat, Craig McRae had his men deliver, and then some.
Their pressure rating was a colossal 193 – and I’d suggest their intelligent chipping around of the ball in the last five minutes to take time out of the game, the only time all night they went away from their trademark, takes that down a bit. Up until three quarter time, it was well north of 200, and up to 216 in the third quarter when the Pies took the game by the throat.
It’s rare for a team to win both the disposal and tackle counts (379-345 and 74-64, if you’re wondering) and have the focus not be on the team with lower numbers not wanting it more. The reason was clear: when the Cats got the ball after quarter time, they were swamped, and when they lost it, away the Magpies blossomed, like a black and white flower blooming in one of those time-lapse videos.
Five of the Magpies’ seven consecutive goals on either side of half time came from defensive-half possession chains – and all from turnovers. The Cats have been decried as Dad’s Army for the better part of a generation, but I’m not sure they’ve ever looked as old as they did at the MCG on Friday night, with Patrick Dangerfield, Zach Tuohy, Isaac Smith and a score of others left eating dust chasing the Pies’ younger, hungrier and speedier band of far less recognisable names.
Any one of their goals could be picked as the epitome of the frenetic, electric ball movement the Magpies employed from half-back, but I like the below one best.
What makes the Magpies, in my view, the most watchable team since prime Geelong in the late 00s isn’t just their speed: it’s their total embrace of imperfection, crucial to maintaining that style given they don’t have a murderer’s row of Hall of Famers like that champion Cats team did.
To start this chain, Josh Daicos, otherwise just about best afield, missed two handball targets, both of which spilled a loose ball in front of a Magpie player amid a throng of Cats; at any single stage, there could have been a turnover to expose a sans-Moore backline.
But no team makes you go, as a supporter, from ‘keep the pressure up, they don’t want it!’ to ‘oh my God a goal’s inevitable they’ve cut us open’ as quickly as the Pies do. It takes Daicos’ third handball to find both target and space, going inside to Scott Pendlebury to catch the Cats off guard.
The Pies basically ride an overlap from there; it’s Pendlebury to Jordan De Goey over the top, and then on to Bobby Hill (again, not a perfect handpass, but good enough to let him run onto it), then a chip to Jamie Elliott (again not hitting him – you might be seeing a pattern here), and then finishing with the AFL’s clutchest player running in and drilling the goal that really got the Magpie Army believing.
Worse teams turn any of those missed passes over, precisely because they lack the gumption to keep pushing when the mistakes arrive. The Pies have the word ‘gumption’ tattooed on each of their foreheads.
So what changed from their demolition at the hands of Hawthorn? For starters, a 3-18 centre bounce annihilation finished as a far more reasonable 11-15 against a Cats group without the leg speed to make the most of their takeaways as the Hawks had done.
Pressure, though, told: where last week Will Day and Jai Newcombe had strolled freely out of centre bounces and blasted the ball inside 50, rarely if ever was Patrick Dangerfield given the same latitude. There’s a difference between being 10 metres in the clear when looking to hit up a target, and needing to do it with three blokes clinging off you.
That pressure made Moore’s absence coverable by limiting the Cats’ efficiency going inside 50 to anyone not named Jeremy Cameron, who with six goals strapped the Geelong forward line on his back in the absence of Tom Hawkins and very nearly carried them to victory. Notably, he and Ollie Henry ruled the skies in attack, plucking seven of the Cats’ 15 marks inside 50 for the night (the Pies concede on average 11.3 per game); from quarter time onwards, though, scoring once the ball hit the ground became all but impossible.
Bobby Hill celebrates a goal. (Photo by Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)
19 inside 50s from the Cats in the last quarter, with a red-hot Cameron and minus their best key back, could easily have resulted in more than five goals. While they missed their chances with six behinds, to hold on despite the onslaught was every bit as captivating from Collingwood as their offensive brilliance earlier on.
Isaac Quaynor has had a rough few weeks since I started my All-Australian campaign for him again but was superb on Friday night, as was Brayden Maynard. Oleg Markov and a hobbled John Noble provided their usual dash but were just as vital clamping down on Gryan Miers and Close, the Cats’ best two distributors inside 50. And Jack Crisp, who wasn’t, despite widespread calls, injected into the on-ball brigade with Nick Daicos out, had probably the best game of his season to provide a strong body at defensive half stoppages and dash off the back of the centre square regularly to start the Pies’ wave forward and clamp down on any Cat escapes.
But what might please McRae the most was the series of unsung heroes who, when they were needed the most, collectively stepped up to make up for the superstars’ absences and make selection exceedingly difficult when they return.
Moved forward, Jeremy Howe battled manfully as a quasi-key forward; despite being undersized, his leap and his competitiveness equalised many a contest with the taller Sam De Koning and Esava Ratugolea; with just 52 intercept possessions for the evening, the Cats could never take the ball from defence to attack with quite the same authority as the Pies managed.
Zipping at his heels, Jack Ginnivan didn’t kick a goal and had just 10 disposals after being subbed in for Moore, but his impact was more significant than that. Things tend to happen whenever Ginnivan is in the vicinity of the ball, and it was telling how many Cats found themselves under perceived pressure with him nearby, affecting the kick; plus his three goal assists was a match high, epitomising his intelligent, creative ball use.
More obviously superb was Bobby Hill, who for the second time this season tore the Cats a new one in the premiership quarter. Up and down this season as a small forward, Hill roamed further up the ground than I’ve seen him, to the point where I strongly believe McRae’s strategy was for him to suck his opponent as far away from the 50 as he could and then beat him for pace on the way back.
Hill had seven inside 50s for the night, five of them in the third term; a beautiful kick, he set up two goals before kicking another himself with a piece of crumbing so beautiful you could hang it in the Louvre.
I saw more than a few Collingwood supporters call for Patrick Lipinski to face the chopping block after a lean few weeks – who, then, could have foreseen he’d be the one to take up Daicos’ vacated on-ball minutes?
Usually off a wing or at half-forward this season, the former Bulldog relished the chance to get into the thick of the action, with a team-high eight tackles and some sharp work in close with 13 contested possessions and five clearances. Both those areas have been a weakness for the Pies of late; his involvement compensated for a hobbled Jordan De Goey and allowed him to do his best work on the outside.
Brody Mihocek, hardly sighted for a month, reminded everyone he’s as crafty a key forward as you’ll find with a bag of five, benefitting tremendously from the Pies’ rapid ball movement pulling the Cats’ defence apart but also goof enough to always find the dangerous space. In terms of the kicks themselves, he might never have an easier bag, but it takes skill to be consistently getting the ball so close to goal, and it wasn’t totally of his teammates’ doing.
But the moment that summed up the evening was when an ambitious Isaac Smith kick in defensive 50 was cut off by Josh Daicos: having run himself ragged on a wing all night and racked up disposals by the barrelful, this was the sort of desperation that exemplified Collingwood as a whole.
Swooping on the loose ball, Daicos gathered and executed another pinpoint pass across the ground to Ginnivan in the pocket: he marked, then chipped over the top to Mihocek. Goal. Game, set, match.
It was magnificent. So, incidentally, are Collingwood.
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