You’ve never got this Collingwood team beaten. No lead is enough. You know they’ll keep coming. They’ll close like the Grim Reaper, as per Gerard Whateley’s superb call last year. They’ll mow you down with cold relish, as Essendon found out yet again on Tuesday.
The Bombers were 28 points the better at the final break. But it was still too close for comfort. There were more than 95,000 people at the MCG, and every one of them knew what was coming. For Essendon people, it was that sense of impending doom. For Collingwood players and supporters, it was that now familiar feeling: We’ll be right. We’ve seen this movie before. Like Chautauqua at Randwick, we’ll pin the ears back and steam home over the top of them.
Tuesday will go down as one of the great Anzac Day clashes. It felt bigger than those of recent years. It felt like the last sip of summer in Melbourne. It felt, and proved to be, one of the biggest home and away crowds in the history of the game. It felt like Essendon’s biggest acid test in years: Had they matured? Did they have the cattle? And did they have the mettle?
The third term felt like the making of this Essendon side. They’d been challenged in the previous quarter but, unlike last year, they were able to stem the flow and reset. Now they were suddenly the more efficient team. Now they were the ones running on top of the ground. They played a controlled, patient game. They denied Collingwood the corridor. And when Nathan Krueger was subbed out, it was the Bombers who had ruck dominance and all the ascendancy.
But as I said, this was Collingwood. “You’ve got to play the minutes to beat us,” their coach, Craig McRae, said afterwards. “Swing from the hip” is another one of his. They ran the Bombers into the ground in the final term. A recurring image all last season, and again here, was of rotating Collingwood players sprinting for the bench, while the Essendon players staggered off like exitees from a Bikram yoga studio. Jack Crisp is the perfect example of that. He must be one of the best last quarter footballers in the country. All through the final term, he was galloping through the middle of the MCG, setting up multiple attacks.
It’s hard to remember a Collingwood team that has engaged its supporters quite like this one. Mick Malthouse’s band of honest scrubbers in 2002 was beloved, as was the 1990 side. But I doubt even Mick’s crack 2010-11 side garnered this level of admiration.
A lot of that is due to McRae. He’s almost too good to be true. He’s too nice, too sensible, too measured. He makes too much sense. Coaches are supposed to be lunatics. They’re supposed to have scores to settle. They’re supposed to tell you why you should win, not how. Anyone, at any level, who’s ever played under some trumped-up little corporal has the same reaction when they watch and listen to McRae – that’s the sort of man I wished I played under!
But it’s worth remembering who he is and where he’s come from. For all the fluffy talk, all the dad jokes and all the meditation sessions, he’s a Leigh Matthews man. They were killers, those Brisbane sides. And so are McRae’s men. They’re smiling assassins. Jason Akermanis says a lot of silly things but he said something interesting: the two things Leigh Matthews stressed above all else to his players was to use their instincts and to play on at all costs, particularly in the forward half. He probably stressed a few other things, most of which are now illegal on a football field. But they’re the two things that define this Collingwood side, and they’re two things that broke the Bombers.
Having Nick Daicos helped, too. It was a regulation day at the office – 40 touches, two last-term goals, an Anzac medal. A month ago, in the centre square at the MCG, he and his brother paid tribute to their grandfather, who had died that week. Later they were embraced in the rooms by their dad, Peter. “Mate, love you, how fucking good?!” he said to his youngest son. At 6pm at the MCG, 50 or 60 thousand Collingwood supporters would have no doubt concurred.
