DANE SWAN, MY STORY:

“I’d love a dollar for every time I had been asked about Mick Malthouse, Nathan Buckley and the whole coaching transition at Collingwood at the end of 2011.

It’s the issue that never dies, and it still won’t go away.

As recently as the 2016 season, it kept bobbing up in the media, and when I do talks at sporting clubs, it is always on the agenda at question time for the punters. They never miss.

ADMISSION: Dane Swan admits illicit drug use during career

When the transition was first announced in July 2009, it was pretty much universally praised — that’s before we’d become a premiership team.

At least two AFL clubs were interested in hiring Bucks as their head coach after he retired as a player and was working in the media, so the succession was Eddie’s way of keeping two good footy people at Collingwood, both men he respected.

The timer was set for the end of 2011, when Mick had agreed to move into the role of director of coaching as Bucks took the coaching reins for 2012.

It was a new concept, the succession plan, although Sydney Swans were in the process of doing something similar with Paul Roos and John Longmire.

Roos put that arrangement to Longmire himself, and then the pair of them went to Sydney’s board to ratify it. The difference at Collingwood was that it was driven by Eddie.

With hindsight, the problem was always going to arise if we had success, and that is exactly what happened.

I’ve heard a story that my mate Benny Johnson said to Ed on the day of the announcement in 2009, “What if we win the next two flags?”

That makes me smile now, because it is almost exactly what happened.

We were absolutely flying through those two years, and that’s what made the whole thing difficult.

I loved playing under Mick and I wanted him to stay on as coach, definitely.

That was the case right through 2011, his last year — I wanted him to stay on in 2012, and I was not alone in that.

The senior guys that I raised it with mostly were keen for him to keep coaching and while it was not an issue in 2010, our premiership year, it was everywhere in 2011.

I can remember rumblings within the playing group about forcing the issue and there was one instance where it was raised with Mick directly.

At round 16 of the 2011 season a couple of players discussed the issue and at least one — it wasn’t me — ended up approaching Mick in his office.

I am told they said to him quite clearly that the players wanted him to remain on as head coach beyond that year.

In other words, they asked him to help seek a change to the arrangement, to delay the transition to Bucks.

The idea was for a petition to be signed by the players and taken to the board.

I have a good idea which players were driving this, and I was on their side, but the problem was that it was not Mick’s decision to make.

It was Eddie and the board who created the transition arrangement, and in any case, Mick sent the players away and told them to forget about it after they knocked on his door that day.

The transition was something that he had agreed to, and signed up for, and Mick felt obliged to go along with his word, and that was that.

But the way we looked at it, arrangements can be broken, or deferred at the very least, if it is in the interests of the footy club. That’s why the approach happened.

It wasn’t out of spite for Bucks, I should add, and that is the truth.

It was done out of concern that Collingwood was about to make a change at a time when we were in with a chance to win back-to-back flags.

Never ever was it about Bucks at all.

I never had a real problem with Nathan taking over; it was purely about timing and it would have been the same issue for anyone who was coming in to replace Mick.

The players’ approach to Malthouse didn’t come out publicly at the time, but the noise was deafening outside the club, and the media would not let it go.

Even during the 2010 finals, Leigh Matthews had flagged a potential problem with the News Limited newspapers: “Mick is a fantastic coach, but when he hands over the reins to Bucks, I don’t think there is any great value in Mick being really hands-on around the place to be honest.

“It just creates ‘Who is in charge?’ issues.”

Malthouse was the only coach I had ever played under at Collingwood to this point; he had saved my career, turned me around, made me the player I was.

Us older blokes loved Mick because he let us play good footy, doing it our own way.

He found out the best way to motivate us, and he let us do that.

For instance Ben Johnson might not do many weights, because he hated it, but Mick didn’t care about those things, and he allowed the players room to find their method of preparing if they were delivering on game day.

He knew that we needed to find what made us feel good, and to enjoy coming to the footy club.

Mind you, he also demanded that you performed, and he delivered a few almighty sprays if you did not.

He is the best coach that I ever played under, a father figure to me (although I have a great father already!) and along with Dad, the biggest influence on what made me the player that I was.

We were close (although not socially, since you would not find Mick in a nightclub), and a lot of the players from that time were close to him; it was the reason we wanted to play for him so badly.

We thought it was unfair on Mick to effectively put a time limit on his coaching when Collingwood was dominating.

I have heard people say that he was finished, but that is rubbish. I don’t know how anyone could say that. He had just coached us to a premiership and taken us to the next grand final.

As for the Rat Pack, we wanted him to stay because we had a great bond with him.

I cannot speak for everyone, but the people I did talk to — and it’s not hard to figure out who — were happy for Bucks to take over when we thought it was time.

We understood that no one was bigger than the footy club, and that Mick’s time was coming to a natural end.

But our feeling was: “Let’s try to win another flag, let this play out, and then Bucks comes in fresh, with no expectations on him.”

Were all the players against the change at the end of 2011? Possibly not. The ones that I spoke to wanted Mick to go on as head coach, but I would not be the slightest bit surprised if some of the younger guys were keen for the change to happen.

There would have been a few guys who were out of the swim under Mick’s coaching who would have been happy to see a change of environment.

If we had missed the finals, or dipped to seventh or eighth, it would have taken the pressure off Bucks, any bad blood would have passed, and I would suggest even Mick, who is a coach first and last, would have understood that it was time for a change.

It would have been a win-win situation.

But we also understood that contracts had been signed. Mick had agreed to stay at Collingwood for three more years starting in 2012, and Bucks had a contract to be head coach for three years.

He had declined other offers from AFL clubs to sign it, so of course it was going to be difficult to get around that, we knew.

No doubt it would have been hard on Bucks after the commitment was made, but you have to ask what’s best for the footy club. As players, we could not sook about it, so we had to move on, and we got to a grand final.

Did it cost us the flag in 2011, all the distraction?

It’s hard to say. Geelong was flying when the finals came, and we were in front going into the third quarter.

I could not actually blame the situation throughout the season for losing that game.

But I know one thing for sure. Unfortunately, no matter what Nathan Buckley does with Collingwood, the issue is always going to be there.

He has never had the clear air to coach the football club as he wants to.

The only way to put it away is to win a flag, and we know that’s not easy.

And no matter who it was that took over from Mick — whether it was Ron Barassi or Leigh Matthews or Jock McHale or Bucks — it was always going to be the same, a hiding-to-nothing situation. And we all know what has transpired.

The transition is used against Eddie McGuire by people who want to whack him — and there are a few of those — because we haven’t won another flag since the changeover.

But hindsight is a wonderful thing to have, isn’t it. I wish I had it when I made a few poor decisions along the way.

I have no doubt that Ed and the board were trying to make the right decision for Collingwood.

It was never done because Eddie McGuire is closer to Nathan personally than he is to Mick, or anything like that, it was never about mateship.

In the space of a few years nine of my best mates left the club or were moved on — Maxwell, the Shaws, Johnson, Didak, Tarrant, Wellingham, Thomas, Beams.

Did Collingwood deliberately break up the Rat Pack?

From the outside it probably looks like that.

What I do know is that I would have loved to have Heath Shaw, Dayne Beams, Sharrod Wellingham and one or two others in the team in my last few years at the club.

There was a camaraderie to the Rat Pack that no one else really had, and Mick Malthouse loved it.

Over the years the Rat Pack legend had grown legs.

Guys from other footy clubs, out in suburbs or the bush, would send us photos of a group and say, “This is our Rat Pack.”

Groups like that exist in any footy club, bunches of guys with something in common, and I certainly loved it at Collingwood.

I would rather be a bit off-centre, not quite straight down the line, than be a robot.

I never wanted to be a generic guy, a beige kind of person who got lost in the mud, and at least with the Rat Pack we stood for something.”

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ADMISSION: Dane Swan admits illicit drug use during career