Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley has changed to give himself a rare chance to be a premiership winner
COLLINGWOOD coach Nathan Buckley was on edge this time last year as his club went through a searching review. Now he is taking the Magpies to his first AFL grand final as a coach — and is favoured to win in Hall of Fame Legend Malcolm Blight’s eyes.
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EVERYONE has an opinion on Nathan Buckley. But how many of those clear-cut thoughts about the Collingwood boss have changed now that he has reached his destiny as an AFL grand final coach?
A year ago many wondered if Buckley would survive for his seventh season as Collingwood’s coach, particularly after missing finals for four consecutive years with the tracking record showing the Magpies on the slide to 13th on the ladder.
Buckley’s father Ray — a former team-mate at Woodville — and his wife Karen came to the Gold Coast last year to catch up over breakfast with Patsy and I. It was impossible to ignore what loomed for Nathan while he was the subject of so much chatter on his coaching future at Collingwood.
Not only has Buckley survived a challenging review at Collingwood, he has thrived. Perhaps, like Mark Thompson at Geelong at the end of 2006 and Damien Hardwick at Richmond at the end of 2016, a coach has to get to breaking point to change — and succeed.
Buckley clearly has changed this year.
The moment Buckley — after years of dismissing the merit of a tagger — put his captain Scott Pendlebury on Carlton midfield powerhouse Patrick Cripps earlier this year told of a man who had changed his approach, if not his thinking.
Buckley does appear to have a different tone this year. Every time he has spoken publicly, he has addressed every issue — those directly linked to him and those that circle his club — in a very sensible way. It seems easier to listen to Buckley this year without feeling there is a lecture in his responses.
Perception and reality always have been very interesting with Buckley. As a player — a star we keenly sought at Geelong in 1994 as he made the inevitable move from Brisbane to Collingwood — he was clearly very demanding of himself ... and his team-mates.
As a coach, Buckley has remained very demanding. He does not appear to have backed off in setting the standards at Collingwood since the review declared there was need for change if the Magpies were to succeed.
But clearly Buckley has seen better ways to do things.
Both grand final coaches — Buckley and West Coast’s Adam Simpson — are being admired for the way they have bonded with their teams with greater understanding of their players and their needs.
Buckley clearly is the most-interesting story of this grand final. He would become only the third Brownlow Medallist (after Dick Reynolds at Essendon and I) to achieve premiership success as a coach.
Buckley will have proven the task of coaching your club — a challenge that consumed fellow Brownlow Medallists Michael Voss at Brisbane and James Hird at Essendon — is not a death sentence. Had anyone asked me, the response from experience at North Melbourne would have been: “Go away for a few years — and then come back.”
Buckley has been on quite a journey — without leaving Collingwood — and has still carved out a fair coaching record with a 53 per cent winning rate after taking over a grand final team that was always destined to fall. The way Buckley has picked up both his personal standing as coach and his team’s status in the AFL premiership race is a tribute to an ambitious man who might just have learned he could not do it all himself.
Simpson is returning to his second AFL grand final as a coach after leading West Coast in the 2015 defeat to Hawthorn. He could become the fifth former North Melbourne player (along with Denis Pagan, Alastair Clarkson, John Longmire and I) to win 10 of the past 22 AFL flags.
Simpson’s task is certainly made more difficult by playing Collingwood on its home deck of the MCG. History across the past two decades still says the home team carries a four-goal advantage — a penalty that seems too severe for the Eagles, more so when they are higher ranked than Collingwood and beat the Magpies in the qualifying finals.
It seems this grand final is to be Collingwood’s moment — and a reward for Buckley having his Magpies play fast football that always keeps the ball moving forward (rather than backwards and sideways).
Some notes on the preliminary final losers. Richmond — why did the Tigers play Dustin Martin when he clearly was not right? Now the challenge for Hardwick is to make sure Richmond does not follow Adelaide’s path of over-reacting to a grand final loss with wholesale changes.
And Melbourne? Simon Goodwin’s best course of action today is to have quiet one-on-one sessions with his players to learn just what happened in Perth. Perhaps the moment did get to them.