Beneath that “one of the boys” exterior, there’s a romantic side to Eddie McGuire. There has to be. How else could you explain him giving up everything he’d worked so hard for just to keep the man he loves?
What he worked so hard for, of course, was to make Collingwood a premiership-hogging juggernaut. Under Mick Malthouse, they were poised to be just that. They started 2011 as reigning premiers. They ended that home-and-away season with the highest percentage in AFL history. Up until grand final day, they’d lost just two games.
It was a team with all the hallmarks of one that could define its generation. Yet it came as no surprise when they failed to claim back-to-back flags. In football, as in politics, disunity is death, and Collingwood were clearly not a side that was sticking together that September.
We can’t quantify just what a destabilising force the Magpies’ Kirribilli agreement had on the team in that grand final week; we can say it was certainly a novel approach approach taken by the Magpies. Clubs usually do everything in their power to smooth the path to success. This is Collingwood, however. They thrive on finding new ways of letting glory fall from their grasp.
Of course, none of this would be a problem if Nathan Buckley had been able to match the achievements of his predecessor. But the gamble to dethrone Malthouse hasn’t paid off. Buckley’s time at the helm has been remarkable for the way things have fallen apart: from first under Malthouse, to fourth, then sixth and, last season, 11th.
The Magpies have won just one final in that time. They didn’t even come close to making September last season. They were so lamentable at one point that Buckley said he couldn’t remember seeing anything like it in his two decades in the game.
And this season? It looks likely to be the fourth successive fall down the ladder under their former captain. Their bright start to the year has been exposed as fools’ gold. They’ve beaten all bottom six teams, but none of the top six. Last weekend in the City of Yarra derby, they just switched off.
Collingwood can point to excuses for these past few years. Geelong and Sydney – who both lost coaches at the top of their game around the same time as the Magpies sacrificed theirs – can point to the premierships they’ve been able to pick up. They’ve been highly competitive in most other years. It points to healthy, mature club cultures where seamless coaching transitions are possible.
The unhappy departures of a number of popular Collingwood premiership players in past seasons has been revealing. Leigh Brown didn’t want to play on once Malthouse was gone; Darren Jolly and Heritier Lumumba both slammed the door on their way out; Dale Thomas followed Malthouse to Carlton; Sharrod Wellingham was traded west, where he might star in another premiership; Andrew Krakouer was delisted; Heath Shaw headed to Greater Western Sydney.
Buckley was given the scope to disassemble a team in its prime and rebuild it in his own style. He may be building a team for future success, yet it’s still not clear what was wrong with the one he had. If that team wasn’t the right one for Buckley, perhaps the time wasn’t right for him to take the top job when he did.
There’s a nice romance about elevating one of your own as coach, especially a legendary Brownlow and Norm Smith medal-winning captain. But it’s an increasingly redundant approach. Between 1950 and 1980, the only “outsider” coach to win a premiership was Ron Barassi at North Melbourne. In the past 20 years, 15 flags have gone to outsider coaches.
Collingwood have prospered in the modern game (even if some of their potential has gone unfulfilled). They are the only one of the VFL’s big five (* )to be competitive in the past two decades.
And their best years in the AFL have come under a couple of outsiders: Malthouse and Leigh Matthews. They have been lean times under former captains Tony Shaw and now Buckley.
Fairfax’s Rohan Connolly recently wrote that smaller clubs have found success by not getting “too caught up in who they’ve been or how history dictates they should act.” He added, “They just do what needs to be done without agonising over reputation or record. That requires the capacity to swallow pride.” It applies to Hawthorn and Geelong too. It’s a salient lesson.
On the other hand, powerhouses like Essendon and Carlton have been getting high on their own supply. They have banked on reputation, name and past glories, wary of outside influence. And look at where they are now. They have failed to adapt to the AFL age. Collingwood suffer when they do likewise.
Buckley’s career has run in parallel with those of James Hird and Michael Voss. With Hird’s messy departure at Essendon last week, Buckley is the last man standing. But is he a dead man walking? The cases of Hird and Voss show that no matter how bad things are going, club legends are extremely difficult to crowbar out.
McGuire once slammed the selfish culture that had crept into the club since 2010. “We won [that year’s premiership] by being side by side. Side by side means being that always ... Any form of selfishness will not be tolerated.”
Yet it is hard not to think the problem might be coming from the top. Certainly, no other club in AFL history has sacked a coach who just achieved league-record percentage. Or maybe it’s just the old case of smart people checking in their brains at the door when they start working at their club.
Over the years, Collingwood fans have had so much to thank McGuire and Buckley for. In these past few seasons, maybe the rest of us have too, because they have quite possibly saved us from years of Magpie domination.
* based on premierships (excluding Fitzroy)
