“What is tackles?” Pep Guardiola asked not long after he had arrived in England. The robust Premier League way of playing held no interest for him. But tackles were everything to Collingwood on Thursday night. They’d barely stuck a decent tackle in the preceding three weeks. All week, they spoke about rectifying it.
By the early part of the second term at the Gabba, they had 32 tackles to Brisbane’s dozen and by game’s end it was 84 to 52. For all the ebbs, flows and momentum shifts of the grand final rematch, it was the Pies’ tackling that was the difference. “We need to get more tackles and we need to get more effective with them,” Chris Fagan said afterwards. Brisbane’s tendency to over-handball, he said, invited Collingwood’s pressure.
