Depleted as they were, Collingwood had little chance of knocking over Geelong on Friday night unless Craig McRae threw something at the Cats that they didn’t respect.
It’s both a mark of his irrefutable quality as a coach, and the severe limitations of the playing 23 he had at his disposal to try and implement it, that for a good long while it very much looked like working a treat – only for Chris Scott and his troops to pull away in the final quarter as the Magpies ran out of puff.
It was a strategy that was simple, bare-bones and reeking of the sort of Plan Z, last-shy-at-the-stumps coaching that McRae, he who has had wall to wall success since walking through the door at the Pies, has never needed to turn to.
Effectively, it boiled down to this: get the ball forward as quickly as possible – moving it with any precision was very much an optional extra – keep doing that whenever the ball was in dispute, and try and get as many looks at a spread Cats defensive 50, with every Collingwood forward having pressed high up the ground and attempted to beat their opponents on the turn back, as possible to kick a winning score.
The sight of Nick Daicos losing control of the footy under both the influence of pressure and of a seemingly slippery Sherrin, only to hack the ball in apparent panic off the ground the moment it jarred free, must have been unedifying for one of football’s most skilled combatants. Ditto Steele Sidebottom, ditto Scott Pendlebury.
Hawthorn Hawks
v
Fremantle Dockers
AFL : Head To Head
Sat, 13 Jul 2024, 13:45
Sydney Swans
v
North Melbourne Kangaroos
AFL : Head To Head
Sat, 13 Jul 2024, 13:45
Western Bulldogs
v
Carlton Blues
AFL : Head To Head
Sat, 13 Jul 2024, 16:35
Adelaide Crows
v
St Kilda Saints
AFL : Head To Head
Sat, 13 Jul 2024, 19:30
Melbourne Demons
v
Essendon Bombers
AFL : Head To Head
Sat, 13 Jul 2024, 19:31
Gold Coast Suns
v
Port Adelaide Power
AFL : Head To Head
Sun, 14 Jul 2024, 13:10
Richmond Tigers
v
Greater Western Sydney Giants
AFL : Head To Head
Sun, 14 Jul 2024, 15:20
West Coast Eagles
v
Brisbane Lions
AFL : Head To Head
Sun, 14 Jul 2024, 16:40
* Odds Correct At Time Of Posting. Check PlayUp Website For Latest Odds
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The Magpies’ run to the flag in 2023 – and let’s no discount their preliminary final appearance the year before – was built on chaos, it’s true: but controlled chaos. A helter-skelter, frenetically moving contest with the Pies holding all the cards and always able to slingshot the ball forward with unnerving accuracy? That was the Magpie way.
This looked for all the world like McRae’s attempt to win back the chaos, having seen his side accused of laziness, one-way running and cheating on the outskirts of contests. There could be no secret that against the Cats, his charges were expected to work, particularly the midfielders to push from disputed ball to disputed ball, with an outnumber the aim at as many of them as possible.
The effectiveness of such a ploy was laid bare in the stats: at half time, the Pies had scored from a whopping 64 per cent of their inside 50s. I lost count of the amount of soccered balls forward, but I’m willing to be they were in the substantial dozens and that three-quarters of the team tried one at some point. And as the cherry on top, by halfway through the last quarter the Cats had taken just nine intercept marks – a little over half their average match tally. Hard to pluck them when the balls coming at you on the third bounce.
From that came an inability to score from a usual source of strength: the Cats, who had scored 75 points from intercepts in their commanding win over Hawthorn last week, had just one of these goals to their name by half time. Virtually their entire tally game from stoppages: a stark contrast to their usual profile.
It was hideous, it was desperate… and it kept the Pies in the game for far longer than their threadbare forward line and horrendously out of form midfield had any right to.
The rest of the game plan was working soundly, too: by three-quarter time, the Pies were dominant when it came to post-clearance contested possessions, despite copping an almighty walloping from said clearances. Where from Rounds 13 to 17 they had trailed their opponents by on average 12 of them per game, by three quarter time against the Cats they were 16 in the green.
In the end, McRae’s men simply had nothing left in the tank for the final quarter: the Cats, content to keep calm and take control of the footy as much as possible, finished with a staggering 131 uncontested marks for the evening, more than double what the Magpies mustered, with 45 marks alone coming in the final quarter.
Jordan De Goey is challenged by Patrick Dangerfield. (Photo by Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)
13 of them were taken by Lawson Humphries, the pick 63 in last year’s draft who has spent much of his footy-playing life in the seconds at Swan Districts, who after three games already looms as the sort of classy, assured hidden gem the Cats seem to find every year. The usual suspects in Mitch Duncan (nine marks), Tom Stewart (nine), Max Holmes (nine), Jake Kolodjashnij (ten) and Jack Henry (ten) all filled their boots as well, with the Pies content to keep their press back, let them rack up the stats, and try to turn the ball over when at last they needed to take the slightest of risks.
The Cats simply had no lack of classy, composed, patient ball-users at half-back to, once the Pies stopped outnumbering them at most every contest, keep control of the footy, spread the field, find gaps in Collingwood’s defensive press, and most often, eventually force a stoppage from which they’d pounce time and again.
By match’s end, four Cats goals had come from clearances – a staggering number from an on-ball group regularly derided as one of the AFL’s worst AND with a makeshift ruckman in Sam De Koning mustering just seven hitouts (Mark Blicavs added 12) to Darcy Cameron’s 58.
Three such goals came in the first two minutes to hint at the stoppage carnage to come; and as an aside, no moment could more perfectly sum up Darcy Moore’s fall from the game’s best intercepting defender to a shadow of his past self than the second of them, where he neither made half the ground he needed to to support a teammate with a timely spoil, or guard opponent Shannon Neale, who saw the ball fall into his lap having ricocheted past Moore’s despairing claw, and kicked the easiest goal of the night.
It’s full credit to McRae that the Pies were so comprehensively slaughtered in midfield, so repeatedly unable to win the ball back from the Cats’ defenders, and yet were close enough – 11 points in arrears – at three-quarter time to threaten a classic Collingwood comeback from the clouds.
That it didn’t eventuate is another concern: this Pies team used to cut teams to ribbons at the clutch at nearly every opportunity, their fitness in running themselves into the ground until the final siren and the psychological stranglehold they appeared to hold over every rival when things got tight, made them the best close-game team our game has seen.
The Pies ended Friday night not with a bang, but with a whimper: hardly so much as able to touch the football, the Cats toyed with them for the final ten minutes, not giving them a sniff until they had the four points well and truly wrapped up.
Geelong are a fine opponent, and they have spent the last three weeks handing would-be finalists a lesson in execution, composure and fierce precision – first Essendon, then Hawthorn, and now the Pies have felt their wrath.
The problem for McRae is in the solution he found – there’s no way known he’d need to have pulled such a rein unless he knew, in his heart, that man on man his Magpies were no chance any other way.
Hawthorn Hawks
v
Fremantle Dockers
AFL : Head To Head
Sat, 13 Jul 2024, 13:45
Sydney Swans
v
North Melbourne Kangaroos
AFL : Head To Head
Sat, 13 Jul 2024, 13:45
Western Bulldogs
v
Carlton Blues
AFL : Head To Head
Sat, 13 Jul 2024, 16:35
Adelaide Crows
v
St Kilda Saints
AFL : Head To Head
Sat, 13 Jul 2024, 19:30
Melbourne Demons
v
Essendon Bombers
AFL : Head To Head
Sat, 13 Jul 2024, 19:31
Gold Coast Suns
v
Port Adelaide Power
AFL : Head To Head
Sun, 14 Jul 2024, 13:10
Richmond Tigers
v
Greater Western Sydney Giants
AFL : Head To Head
Sun, 14 Jul 2024, 15:20
West Coast Eagles
v
Brisbane Lions
AFL : Head To Head
Sun, 14 Jul 2024, 16:40
* Odds Correct At Time Of Posting. Check PlayUp Website For Latest Odds
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