Collingwood champion Dane Swan brings Malthouse, McGuire and Buckley back together

THERE’S only one bloke at Collingwood who could get Mick Malthouse, Eddie McGuire and Nathan Buckley on the same stage, sharing a laugh.

Collingwood Magpies player Dane Swan. Picture: Getty Images.

THERE’S only one bloke at Collingwood who could get Mick Malthouse, Eddie McGuire and Nathan Buckley on the same stage, sharing a laugh.

Dane Swan achieved that feat on Tuesday as he officially ended his career as a Collingwood player at the first of many promised parties in honour of his retirement.

For Swan — and in front of his family, current and former teammates, club staff and a good proportion of Melbourne’s footy media — the central figures in the 2011 coaching handover that ended in Malthouse’s acrimonious departure left any lingering differences at the door and a spirit of goodwill pervaded as the champ was in equal parts roasted and emotionally farewelled.

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In an event that was more This Is Your Life than regulation retirement media conference, Swan, 32, set the tone by declaring at the outset: “Pretty big crowd for a one-year deal.”

His deadpan, self-deprecating humour was on show and there were plenty of laughs in a session that lasted more than an hour in Collingwood’s Glasshouse Theatre.

Swan noted he had “become a much better player in the past 30 minutes”.

Magpies president Eddie McGuire, former head coach Mick Malthouse and current head coach Nathan Buckley pay tribute to retiring Dane Swan Picture: Getty Images

On his favourite football memory — singing the club song arm in arm with teammates under a darkening MCG sky after winning the 2010 flag — he added: “Then the alcohol kicks in. It's a bit hazy, the next six months.”

On the catalyst for deciding to knuckle down, get fit and have a real crack after a dressing-down by Malthouse in the mid-2000s: “I thought I was going to be sacked ... Mick said it was my last chance. I proved him wrong. I’ve had more than one chance since then.”

And being grateful that media scrutiny wasn’t once what it is now: “I got six or seven years of s--- being swept under the carpet.

“Then nothing at all got swept under the ­carpet.”

And on the 2016 season that might have been, if he and Jamie Elliott had been able to team up in the forward line, as Buckley had planned: “Without me and Jamie in the goal square, we lost 70 or 80 goals. Not sure how many Jamie would have kicked.”

Chided by Swan for letting him go as low as pick No. 58 in the draft, Malthouse noted that with one foot pointing east and the other west, he’d been sure the kid with the peculiar, ­waddling gait would still be available.

The gags were fitting — but so were the tributes. McGuire called Swan the player of his generation and described, without a hint of exaggeration, a goal kicked in the third quarter of the replayed Grand Final — to the Collingwood cheer squad end — as one of the ­moments of his life.

Buckley said that, although Swan would not want it known, he cared and he tried: “That’s in fact what we saw internally and, if he wasn’t doing it out on the track, he’d be building himself on the treadmill and doing his six 500s, which was his ­staple.”

Malthouse spoke about Swan’s pride in his performance, his desire to do right by the team and his habit of collecting loyal friends.

Dane Swan with his parents Deidre and Billy. Picture: Michael Klein

But all jokes aside, Swan did not want it to end this way, with the injury that wrecked his season deciding his fate.

“I’ve probably known for a while that I didn’t think I could play (again) …,” he said.

“I was probably trying to push that decision in my head. In my heart, I wanted to go on but my head knew that I couldn’t go on.”