This Collingwood seems like an impostor, a poor imitation of the team that stood on the MCG on the last Saturday in September 2018 after losing to West Coast by five points, and whose month of football suggested “We’ll be baaack.” What happened?
On Friday night, the Magpies were down by eight goals to Richmond before Brian Taylor had uttered his first banality, and finished the night with their fourth loss in five games. To say Nathan Buckley has some serious issues is to dabble in understatement.
One issue is injuries, and on that front things got worse with a low-grade hamstring strain to forward Jordan De Goey. He, along with draftee, Isaac Quaynor, will miss at least this week’s game against Gold Coast. Two weeks ago, this game would’ve been talked about in terms of a percentage boost. But that was before the Suns were competitive against Carlton and a 34th-minute goal away from beating an in-form Essendon, and sending a wave of Schadenfreude rolling through the football world.
The Suns have shown more than enough over the past two weeks to nudge this firmly into the ‘danger game’ column. Much like it was on Sunday night, the camaraderie among non-Pies in barracking for the Suns will simply be too much fun to pass up.
The Tigers, on the other hand, are everything we expected before Alex Rance clutched at his right knee in the season opener. Dustin Martin is again a brute, an animal, an assassin, doing as he pleases through the middle of the ground. The difference now is he has Tom Lynch to kick it to. Eleven times Richmond went to a one-on-one Lynch in their forward fifty, and six of those he won. By night’s end, Lynch had five goals and a 32-point win in the wet. Trent Cotchin’s hamstring and whether or not Rance’s knee heals come spring appear to be the only concerns the Tigers have four games from September.
Carlton’s season will be done by then, but right now David Teague would have to be the best coach in the AFL with no shot at making the finals. Teague’s seven weeks as the Blues’ senior coach serves as a stark contrast to the sole unhappy narrative of the club’s first dozen games. On Saturday, his team beat Adelaide on just about every measure, including by 27 points on the scoreboard. And no Crow had the measure of Carlton’s sui generis centreman, Patrick Cripps, who finished the day with 39 disposals, seven tackles and a record-equalling 19 clearances. For context, that is one less clearance than the top four Adelaide players combined.
An even more damning statistic for the Crows is the number of tackles they laid in their forward 50 in the first half … three. A number emblematic of a team that, by coach Don Pyke’s own admission, is lacking in energy and low on confidence.
“We’ll keep going, keep trying some different things and one key thing I know - as disappointing as today was and as disappointing as the last three or four weeks have been, our season is still very much alive”, said Pyke, reminiscent of the poet Ada Limón, who wrote: “I cannot tell any more when a door opens or closes, I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.” Although right now you’d back Adelaide to miss the door entirely and crash into the wall.
Meanwhile, the walls keep getting knocked down by a Brisbane team that refuses to be contained by expectations and will break a 10-year finals drought after it defeated Hawthorn in Launceston – its fourth consecutive road win since losing to Carlton before the bye.
On current form, the 13-5 Lions (coincidently the same number of wins as their past three seasons combined) are set not just to play finals, but to host them. On Sunday they return to the Gabba to close out Round 20 against the Western Bulldogs, who shrugged off last week’s loss to St Kilda to blow the doors of Fremantle at the Docklands and have them a step closer to playing finals for the first time since the 2016 premiership.
Like then, you sense the flag could be won by the team that can “bring the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler and a corkscrew” at the right time of year. Looking at it right now, with the ladder topped by the L-W-L-W-L-W Cats, the teams poised holding the corkscrew are the Lions and Tigers. Conversely, the sixth-placed Collingwood and eighth-placed Adelaide have four weeks to try and force a solution from the soup. On the weekend’s showing, that appears something of a stretch.
