THE STEADY DISINTEGRATION OF Collingwood since November’s salary cap debacle and player fire sale has taken a heavy toll.

Coaching great Mick Malthouse, who knows first hand how it feels to exit Australia’s most famous sporting club at a time not quite of his choosing, sensed it in early March when he reached out to his one-time boss, Eddie McGuire.

A story by Herald Sun journalist Scott Gullan revealed McGuire had retreated from public life in the wake of his forced departure as Magpies president.

Malthouse picked up the phone and arranged for the pair to have a coffee at the Bedggood & Co cafe in East Melbourne.

“I just wanted to check that he was OK and a half-hour coffee went for two-and-a-half hours,” Mathouse says.

“It was good. Nanette (Malthouse’s wife) came down part way through it and we just discussed old times and what we all went through.

“We were broke when we first arrived at the club, we were on the bottom of the ladder and based at Victoria Park. You look where Collingwood are today with high membership, a good bank balance and entrenched inside Melbourne’s sporting precinct.

“You very rarely get off on your own terms. That’s just the nature of the beast.”

The magnitude of McGuire’s exit in February, amid the fallout from the club’s botched response to the leaking of the “Do Better” racism report, was matched on Wednesday by the fall of favourite son Nathan Buckley.

The casualty list at the Holden Centre since the trade period fiasco now includes football boss Geoff Walsh, list manager Ned Guy, billionaire director Alex Waislitz, the senior coach and a 23-year club president.

And with a board challenge led by former Channel 9 boss Jeff Browne gathering momentum, another seven directors, including president Mark Korda, could be about to follow them out the door.

ONE LINK IN A DAYNE REACTION

THE UNRAVELLING OF COLLINGWOOD began in the days after West Coast star Dom Sheed broke a million Magpie hearts with a stunning set-shot goal in the dying minutes of the 2018 grand final.

Stories rage about who is to blame for the Pies’ salary cap shemozzle, but in the weeks after that grand final loss, the decision to lure 2010 premiership hero Dayne Beams back from Brisbane on a bumper four-year, $2 million deal in exchange for two first-round picks proved one of the club’s big missteps.

Other deals signed in the years leading up to the 2018 grand final, and shortly after, also tilted the scales of the club’s salary cap to the dangerously upper levels of the limit — without going over.

The Beams deal started with a phone call from the player to the club.

As the Lions captain, he had weeks earlier pledged his support to Brisbane at the club’s best and fairest count.

But following the death of his father a year earlier — being closer to him had been one of the reasons why he returned to Queensland in 2015 — he resolved to come back to Collingwood.

A number of his former teammates urged the Magpies to make it happen, thinking he could make the difference in 2019. He didn’t.

Beams, played just nine more games in black and white before his premature retirement, pocketed an undisclosed settlement included in the salary cap because of an ongoing battle with mental health.

The plot thickened this week when Beams made the extraordinary claim on SEN that his contract had been resolved outside the salary cap.

Magpies great Tony Shaw says the Sheed goal was the sliding doors moment that cruelled his club.

“If Collingwood had won the 2018 grand final, I’m telling you, unless they wanted to leave of their own volition, there is no way known that they (McGuire, Buckley and Guy) wouldn’t be there,” Shaw says.

“The fine line is incredible. You’re only two minutes away from winning a premiership, and you wouldn’t be having these issues now — but that’s footy.

“The ‘Do Better’ report might still have raised its head but you wouldn’t be worried about the board and a lot of things, but that’s what happens when you win and lose.

“Everything that came to a head over the off-season was probably just too much. Can Nathan Buckley coach? Of course he can coach, but it just builds and builds and builds.

“It’s a bloody cruel industry.”

THE CAP DOESN’T FIT

THE BEAMS RECRUITMENT LED TO a heavily back-ended $900,000-a-season contract for Adam Treloar at a time ruckman Brodie Grundy was negotiating a seven-year, $7 million deal.

The club also locked in lucrative deals to keep Jordan De Goey and Darcy Moore, after interest from rival clubs, as the salary cap time bomb ticked away in the background.

The Magpie Army had been blissfully unaware just over 250 days ago when they watched Buckley orchestrate one of the greatest wins of his 10-season coaching tenure as the “dirty” Magpies stunned West Coast in an elimination final classic in Perth.

In the week leading up to the game, Treloar had told the Herald Sun how much the hard quarantine experience in 2020 had brought the Collingwood group closer together.

As it turned out, that proved to be his penultimate game in black and white, having an equal game-high 25 disposals.

The crushing semi-final loss to Geelong the following week convinced those within the club that a list reset was required. But no one knew the full extent of it.

Just over a month later, Treloar was a Bulldog. Jaidyn Stephenson, the AFL’s Rising Star winner just two years earlier, was a Kangaroo, and Tom Phillips was jettisoned to the Hawks. Three 2018 grand final players offloaded for minimal return.

As the blood of Collingwood supporters boiled in the dying seconds of last year’s trade period, when Treloar was shipped off without even a resolution of the salary split between the two clubs, they couldn’t have imagined it would only get worse.

Guy’s attempts to explain the club’s fire-sale by downplaying the extent of the salary cap squeeze (as well as suggesting Treloar’s wife’s move to Queensland to play netball had also been a factor) proved one of the train wreck interviews of the year.

Walsh stuck to a similar narrative the following day, increasing the ire of fans.

It wasn’t until CEO Mark Anderson sensed — or was told of — the members’ anger that he belatedly conceded the club had been forced into the moves by salary cap constraints on top of a belief that the list needed to be regenerated.

That public relations disaster was further heightened when it was revealed Collingwood had to annually pay $300,000 of Treloar’s wage for the life of his Bulldogs’ contract.

While Buckley may not have been ultimately responsible for the salary cap stuff-up, his stark messaging around Treloar’s departure appeared to be a significant departure from the image of the caring coach who had wrapped his arms around his players and connected with them on a deeper level, as had been the case in the club’s 2018 narrative.

After the trade period, Buckley said Treloar took the trade as a “personal” decision, whereas Phillips had seen it as a “professional” one.

The comments stung Treloar and his family. After the trade went down, Buckley reached out to him on a few occasions — without success.

Walsh had been planning to retire and did so late last year. He was replaced by Collingwood’s 1990 premiership wingman Graham Wright, who had been a part of the Hawthorn program through its recent successes.

Guy offered his resignation after the trade period, but the club convinced him to ride out the storm.

He did, until May, when he chose to exit the club following the mid-year draft.

THE LEAK THAT STARTED A TSUNAMI

IF THE SALARY CAP ISSUE impacted on the field — with a 3-9 ledger in the first half of 2021 ultimately costing the coach his job — the leaking and the fallout of the “Do Better” report into a history of systemic racism at Collingwood effectively brought down the most high-profile president in the game.

As much as McGuire has claimed since returning to the football media that he’d still be president of Collingwood if he wanted to be, the reality was he was pushed ahead of his planned retirement at the end of this year.

The board’s decision to sit on the report after it was returned to the club prior to last Christmas was a disaster waiting to happen.

Then McGuire’s decision to go off script at a hastily arranged press conference — where he described it as “a historic and proud day” for the club — started a snowball that ended in his resignation in early February, triggered months of boardroom upheaval and brought about the emergence of a challenger.

The fact that the board — sans McGuire — couldn’t settle on a successor for months gave an impression of division, before Korda — who had been a part of the board since 2007 — was finally elevated to the presidency.

The call to appoint former professional cyclist Dr Bridie O’Donnell as a replacement for Waislitz also backfired when it was revealed she had not been a member for the required two years to have voting rights as a director.

Few around the club took Heritier Lumumba’s claims that he was subjected to racial slurs during his 10-year playing stint at the Magpies seriously until the Pies announced in June last year that its integrity committee, headed by club director Peter Murphy, would investigate “in an effort to search for the truth in the matters raised”.

Oversight of the probe was then handed to two independent professors, who painted a damning picture of the club’s history and culture.

Despite trying to resolve the fallout with Lumumba, a 2010 premiership defender, that relationship looks beyond repair.

The club has adopted all the recommendations of the “Do Better” report, but the pain still lingers.

UPHOLD THE MAGPIES NAME

THE SALT IN THE WOUND has been the resurgence of suburban rival Richmond, which has roared past Collingwood to become the biggest club in the land with 100,000 members and three of the past four premierships. The Pies rightfully point to significant cash reserves in the bank, almost 80,000 members, MCG tenancy and funding for another Holden Centre redevelopment as reasons to dispute suggestions of a decline.

But as Malthouse says, boardroom instability is the ultimate enemy of football clubs.

“Go back over the last 20 years — no team has won a premiership unless the club participates strongly. By that, I mean the board has a vision which is passed down to the administration, which supports the team totally and the coach totally,” Malthouse says.

If you’ve got a good team, that gives you an absolute chance — but if there’s any break in that chain you have got absolutely no hope of winning a premiership.

“And at Collingwood at the moment the board has been distracted, the administration is under the pump and the coach was under pressure, and that does rub off — I can tell you that from personal experience.”

Through all the months of upheaval, Malthouse says it’s the loyal Magpie Army who have hurt the most.

“You don’t realise it until you actually get to that club just how big it is. And the ones I really feel sorry for are the supporters,” he says.

“They are absolutely outstanding. They live and breathe black and white, they are just uniquely fantastic and the ones who suffer most.”

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