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Collingwood went into their round 14 bye well outside the top 10, with only five wins, seven losses and a draw.
They had lost three players to season-ending knees, including their most productive match-winning forward Jamie Elliott and promising spring-heeled ruck Oscar Steene.
Bobby Hill had not played, his AFL future in significant doubt. Soon, skipper Darcy Moore’s season would be over, too, having endured an injury-wracked season.
Scoring was laboured. Brody Mihocek’s exit to Melbourne had deprived the Magpies of a reliable target. Ball movement wasn’t sharp. The Pies were playing with a grim resolve, without the verve that characterised their rise under Craig McRae in 2022 and 2023.
Within the playing group, however, there remained belief that they could make a fist of a season that then held little hope of a meaningful finals action.
They had Nick Daicos, arguably the competition’s most influential player, who would express confidence that his team was far from done. In mid-July, after they hung on against the sinking Suns and North Melbourne, Daicos asserted that the Pies could still win the flag.
Yep, in 2026.
Often, leaders of teams are simply parroting a party line in that scenario.
Daicos wasn’t. His team’s inner belief – based in-part on the fact that Collingwood had pushed Fremantle and Sydney to the line (losing by a kick), had drawn with Hawthorn and then lost in the final two minutes to the Demons on King’s Birthday – was genuine.
Today, Collingwood is inside the top 10, placed eighth and if they can surmount the other team that has been written off more than old Ford Falcons (Geelong), they will be an outside chance to challenge for the top six despite a nasty run home.
Geelong, like Collingwood the night before, was beset with issues when they met Melbourne last Friday.
Jeremy Cameron, one of the game’s greatest forwards, was out with a busted collarbone and potentially done for the season. Max Holmes was gone with a fractured ankle for at least the home and away remains. As Chris Scott observed after their thumping of St Kilda, if there were two players they didn’t want to lose, Cameron and Holmes would be the first nominated.
The Cats trailed Melbourne in the first quarter. No “Jezza”, Holmes-less and Patrick Dangerfield was soon hobbling.
Yet, like the Magpies the previous evening in Adelaide, who had turned a 27-point deficit into a resounding 34-point triumph, the Cats found a way. At half-time, they’d galloped to a 20-point advantage. Shannon Neale was playing like the mountainous Tom Hawkins.
Tom Stewart was intercepting and launching counter-attacks, and at his side, Connor O’Sullivan was reiterating that he would be one of the competition’s best defenders soon.
Having lost five from six before they met the Saints, the Cats have a reasonable shot at the top six – yet again – if they can continue their winning run against the Magpies.
Collingwood and Geelong have proven unkillable, the competition’s cockroach clubs. Each have been labelled too old. Lacking midfield star power (Geelong), rucks (Geelong), potent forwards (Collingwood) and top-end youth (Collingwood).
Both have had to deal with untimely injuries and the distraction of losing highly talented small forwards (Hill and Tyson Stengle) to personal travails.
The Cats and Pies have played in the most preliminary finals of any clubs this century (15 and 13 respectively); if both have been blessed with freakish father-sons – struck on the arse by a rainbow, as Paul Keating put it, given the various sons including N. Daicos and G. Ablett jnr – they nonetheless managed to extract more from their players, to develop the iffy into average and the average into above average, than most rivals.
The Magpies have unashamedly adopted a list management model that the Cats pioneered in the 2020s, if not earlier.
Observing Geelong and Collingwood’s capacity to hang around despite setbacks, Geelong’s long serving ex-chief executive Brian Cook said that both clubs were committed to using all the available levers, not just the draft, but free agency, trades, category B rookies, Ireland (Geelong more so) and placed a heavy emphasis on development.
“Both clubs now have practises and systems in their footy departments ... where they won’t go to the bottom,” said Cook.
Both have consistently fielded teams that are among the most experienced – Geelong’s 2022 and Collingwood’s 2023 flag sides were the oldest then on record. And they have refused to yield to the notion, as Richmond did (however reluctantly), that clubs eventually need extensive youth policies/rebuilds, to compete for the premiership.
The attitude of these unkillable teams is defined by a couple of factors:
1. The list management model, which Collingwood has more recently adopted, of retaining their first pick – except for a difference-maker (eg. Bailey Smith) and using free agency, and especially taking unrestricted free agents who bring no draft cost.
Collingwood’s pursuit of Lachie Neale is an echo of Geelong’s chase for Toby Greene. Neither club is as worried by birthdates as many rivals, who pay greater heed to a perceived premiership window. The Cats’ recruitment of Norm Smith medallist Isaac Smith in 2020 was a template.
2. Retaining experienced players, especially team leaders, for longer than the competition convention.
“Most people think the biggest decisions are made in the boardroom,” said Cook who just completed a period as Melbourne’s interim CEO. “But they’re made in the change rooms.”
Geelong and Collingwood have never wanted for leadership within their playing groups over two decades.
The Cats just committed to Dangerfield for 2027, securing him on a contract despite his chequered year with injury and struggle to come up every week. Collingwood, meanwhile, has set records by retaining the troika of Scott Pendlebury (38), Steele Sidebottom (35) and Jeremy Howe (36).
While the Pies are expected to shuffle off at least one of their three tenors, there’s a fair chance that they will be bringing in Neale, and potentially others.
Their turnaround since the bye has been marked by 31-year-old Daniel McStay’s career zenith as a key forward (ranked among the AFL’s best forwards over that stretch) and the steady productivity and safe boot of ex-Saint Tim Membrey, 32, who had been brought in as a restricted free agent and is now, as McRae suggested, a strong prospect to be re-contracted for 2027.
The most critical factor in the unkillable Cats and Pies has been their sheer unwillingness to accept that they must have a stint in the cellar. Collingwood’s 17th placing in 2021, sandwiched between periods of contention, is the outlier.
As Cook notes, teams that are mired down in the ladder’s lowest reaches find that the climb takes a long time. The advent of free agency – and quality players’ preference for contenders – has made the uphill trek harder.
“I don’t believe it’s on their radar at all,” he said of Geelong’s aversion to bottoming out. Ditto for the diehard team they meet under lights tonight.
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