The change in Nathan Buckley that has inspired Collingwood to greater heights
EVERYTHING was a competition for Nathan Buckley, even jogging the Tan, which would drive best mate Brenton Sanderson crazy, but this year the Collingwood coach is more relaxed and it’s showing in his team’s performances.
Mark Robinson
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ONCE a week for two years Brenton Sanderson and Nathan Buckley would meet at the Royal Botanic Gardens at 6.30am and run the Tan.
It was during the 2015-16 seasons after Sanderson had been sacked as senior coach of Adelaide and was working for the AFL, and Buckley was dealing with his own issues coaching Collingwood.
They’d rarely talk about footy. Most of it was about family and friends and staying fit.
With Sanderson being godfather to Buckley’s oldest boy, Jett, there was never a shortage of subjects.
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Then one day, Sanderson didn’t turn up.
“I just stopped running with him,” Sanderson said.
“He’s such a competitive prick and it started to s--- me.”
Sanderson is Buckley’s right-hand man at Collingwood, joining the Pies for the 2017 season, and his best mate for 25 years.
Few people would know Buckley better.
They arrived at Collingwood for the 1994 season, Sanderson from Adelaide and Buckley from Brisbane via Port Adelaide via every mainland state in which Buckley had lived in the first 12 years of his life.
They shacked up in North Balwyn, 10 minutes drive east of Victoria Park, and that’s when Sanderson was introduced to that unique, compulsive, overwhelming and absorbing quality of Buckley — competitiveness.
They had fun all right, but there was always an edge to their games. Such as when they played Nintendo. Or when Buckley wanted to race home in their cars from training.
“That’s what we were like back in 1994, everything was a competition,” Sanderson said.
Bucks was fun.
“We lived together for one year and he went on to that great career as a superstar at Collingwood and I went to Geelong and played a few games there,” Sanderson said.
“We had such a great time. We had fun. It was great release from the pressures of footy even back then.
“He was 18 months older. He was 21 and I was 19 and we did what most mates do. Beers. Movies. Sport. There was always lots of laughter and to be honest that’s one of his strengths this year.
“If you ask all the players and all the staff, and he’s had some fun with your guys in the media ... he just seems to be doing everything with a smile on his face.”
Unbelievably, Sanderson said he didn’t know Buckley the coach — his power, his methods and communication — before he signed with the club as an assistant.
The first season was cataclysmic. The Magpies won nine games. They missed September.
The media hounded him and most expected he would be sacked, until a post-season review — the likes of which Collingwood had never endured — saved Buckley’s bacon.
History will record it as having fixed a broken club.
Maybe it saved a half-broken man.
Born from that internal scrutiny and public lashing was a coach with greater zeal, an extra awareness of mindfulness, a trust of staff for delegation and, perhaps most importantly, an understanding that external noise didn’t matter and that everything and everyone inside the football club mattered most.
The change in Buckley, while not easily observed from the outside but boasted with enlightenment from within, became the puzzle of 2018.
“I’ll tell you something,” Sanderson said.
“We’d run the Tan ... and this is the difference between Bucks then and Bucks now.
“Because he’s such a competitor and, remember we were only jogging the Tan and catching up as mates, but he would always run about a metre in front of me and would always be looking over his shoulder like it was a race. It used to s--- me.
“I stopped running with him because it was too hard. He wants to win so bad, even going for a run with him was like a race. He wants to win so hard that I think it sometimes comes across in his personality in everything he does.
“The difference now is, when we go for a run, he’s right next to me. That’s the difference. It’s not a competition. It feels like we’re doing it together. If you ask the staff and players, it feels like rather than him managing top down, we’re that classic Collingwood side-by-side.
“That’s why I reckon he’s coaching so well, he’s next to you and not in front of you. He’s got everyone into the mindfulness stuff and everyone is present and in the moment.”
Sanderson arrived a year before the sea change. Staff left or were re-positioned and Garry “Buddha” Hocking and Justin Longmuir, among others, joined the football department.
Sanderson guesses — from an informed position, mind you — that Buckley made the mistake all coaches make when he started.
“It’s hard thing to do as a coach, delegating, and I’ve been there as well,” Sanderson said. “You want to control everything. And then it’s so powerful when you trust people enough to give them the platform to execute their role.
“We all make that mistake early in our careers. If there’s something wrong, you want to fix it and you don’t give that person whose job it is, you don’t say, ‘go and fix it and tell me the answers’. But Bucks has been super in that regard this year.’’
Buckley, he said, was internally focused.
Part of the review was to reel in egos, perceived or real, and that included Buckley and president Eddie McGuire not allowing the outside noise to dictate Collingwood’s narrative this year.
McGuire still has spats and headline moments when he feels the need to defend the coach or the club, but Buckley has appeared more relaxed.
“Footy clubs ... we’re in the bubble and you’ll have to ask him, but I feel he’s worried less about outside and focused more on what’s inside,” Sanderson said.
“Obviously you follow your leader and because he’s focused more on others, I reckon the group has done that, too.
“The group is tighter, maybe that’s player-driven as well, maybe winning helps that as well, I don’t know. It’s a question you have to ask him.”
It’s the personal touch that resonates with Sanderson.
“He’s so close with my family, he’s so close with my kids, he loves my kids,” he said.
“He’s always asking about my family, how’s my mum going, my father, and I reckon that’s what good leaders do.
“He’s so engaged, not with the first layer, but the second layer.
“And he’s like that with the players. He’s always been like that with me, as one of his mates, but I reckon this year he’s so engaged with everyone.
“It really knocks people for six when they meet him and they see how much he cares, not just for the individual but that person’s next layer.
“Maybe sometimes as a coach you don’t want to show your compassionate side, your emotional side, but he’s done it more this year. I don’t know if it’s by choice or it’s just happened.
“People know now how he feels.”
Buckley’s autobiography, All That I Can Be, reveals a young boy pushed to prepare and achieve by his father, Ray.
Hard work brought results, working harder than others more so.
Buckley tells a story about Ray writing him a letter and accusing him of being soft.
“You were a very tough kid from age three to nine and then you slowly eased off the pace, became a thinker and chose the easy way,” Ray wrote.
This week Ray told the Herald Sun he feared his son would be sacked at the end of last season, but he added how proud he was of his son’s achievements.
In some ways, and to extrapolate what Sanderson said, Buckley’s caring, sharing and empathetic approach to his coaching this year, is his new soft approach.
As Eddie McGuire has said several times this September, maybe they were all trying too hard.
“For me, my contribution to the adjustment probably came two or three years ago and has progressed since,” Buckley told Triple M.
“That’s to look at the 95 per cent that’s working well and not the 5 per cent you want to fix.
“That’s been a fairly difficult journey for me to take … shining a light on the strengths and things that are working well rather than chasing those marginal incremental improvements.’’
The pursuit of perfection, an attribute of Buckley’s from a young age, can be found with more honey and less vinegar.
From the start of pre-season in November, it was obvious to the players there was a change in the coach.
Magpie winger Tom Phillips was perhaps too candid.
“I can feel just walking in over the last week, he is much more relaxed and not I guess as full-on and overbearing as he has been in that coaching role for the last few years,’’ Phillips told SEN.
Players have since talked about the fun Bucks and the joke-telling Bucks and it’s not lost on Sanderson.
He saw how stressful 2017 was on his mate and the family.
“He obviously got through it really well and maybe it was a lot harder than we all thought, because we’ve seen a different person this year. He’s been calmer, he’s laughing, he’s having fun.”
You knew about the sledging of Buckley’s boys at school?
“Yeah, I knew it was happening,” Sanderson said.
“There’s just so much pressure on a family. All you can ask is: ‘How you going and is there anything I can do to help?’ Once you provide that bridge, it’s up to them if they need it.
“When I got sacked by Adelaide at the end of 2014, two guys rang me every day for about 10 days.
“Tom Harley and Nathan Buckley. I’m still good mates with Tommy Harley and he rang me every day, just checking in.
“And Bucks was the senior coach at Collingwood. Sometimes in crisis, you know who your mates are and who you can rely on.”
Fleetingly, he has visualised winning the premiership.
“I hope we can do it,” he said.
“Also because we’re mates. You know when you have those little moments when you think ahead, and I’ve thought of that moment, when we can sit on the MCG with the Cup in between us, between mates, side by side. That would be awesome.”
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