Scott Pendlebury opens up on finals pain, his health and his future at the Magpies
It was the talk of the town – a Collingwood v Richmond Grand Final that would be the biggest thing to hit the football world in decades. There was just one problem. The Magpies never made it. Now their skipper reveals exactly what went wrong.
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Collingwood was still playing dry-weather footy in a wet-weather final.
When it comes to the crunch, it’s not the last-minute missed scoring opportunities in last year’s preliminary final that bug Magpies captain Scott Pendlebury.
It’s the third term, when a surging Greater Western Sydney poured on five straight goals, which cost the Magpies a shot at a second-straight Grand Final.
The problem was Collingwood waited too long to switch modes and ditch its high-possession style for something more direct and simple, to better suit a rain-soaked MCG.
“Ultimately, we were just really slow to adapt,” Pendlebury told the Herald Sun.
“If anything, it’s that third quarter which annoys me. We were still playing possession, or dry-weather football … what we had to do was surge the ball forward, get it going at all costs, just get territory.”
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Missing some of their biggest names, GWS led by 32 points three minutes into the last term when Giants superstar Jeremy Cameron banged home another one.
One of the biggest preliminary final upsets of the modern era was in full swing, before the Magpies rallied from a near-impossible position. They were five points down when a Taylor Adams shot hit the post in the frantic final minutes.
“You looked around at the three-quarter time break and we were pretty flat as a group,” Pendlebury said.
“You thought, ‘Where is the spark going to come from? Is this even possible?’ But that’s when we started peppering the goals in the fourth quarter. We just couldn’t kick one in the end.
“So while I was unhappy we couldn’t get the job done, I was proud of the way the guys fought back when it looked like we were shot.”
In the aftermath of the shock loss, coach Nathan Buckley called it a wasted season, as Richmond romped to a thumping win over the injury-hit Giants a week later.
Collingwood, on the other hand, got caught out on their home deck by the plucky underdog.
Were they mentally off? Did they get ahead of themselves?
“It is a good lesson for our group to take nothing for granted, because we played a really good first final against Geelong,” Pendlebury said.
“Everyone was saying it was going to be a Richmond-Collingwood Grand Final and we didn’t buy into it.
“But maybe on a subliminal level, you can believe the hype happening.
“I thought we played well early, we were just slow to adapt.”
That sort of adaptation will be a strong theme for all clubs as they prepare for an extraordinary 2020 season which has already been drastically reduced and reshaped to protect players from coronavirus.
Pendlebury, 32, unwittingly found himself at the centre of the health crisis when he fell ill mid last week and was tested for COVID-19. He was quarantined for four days.
While the chances of him having coronavirus were small, the medicos said, every precaution had to be taken. The season kicking off rested on his results.
After spending time on the couch, the father-of-two is ready for Round 1, coming off his sixth All-Australian season. And it is Richmond, a club just a few hundred metres away from Magpies HQ, which has lit the path for Collingwood’s season of redemption.
After all, it was the Tigers who bounced back from their own gut-wrenching preliminary final loss to Collingwood 18 months ago to win last year’s premiership cup.
“We don’t have to look too far down the road for motivation,” Pendlebury said.
“I feel like we are still on the right path. But the question is, what are you going to add to your game? How are you going to evolve? You just can’t lose yourself in the process.
“Richmond was favourites in 2018 and for that prelim (against Collingwood) they didn’t look past us at all, but they played us and they got shocked and they got beaten.
“But they come out in the next year hungry and they did tweak how they played a little bit. They started to possess the ball a little bit more and they played (Dylan) Grimes out the back, like a goalkeeper.
“There are going to be a lot of teams challenging, but if we can keep our players on the park and build chemistry, it goes a long way.”
The Magpies lost the third-most games to injuries last year, including Darcy Moore, Jamie Elliott, Jordan De Goey (hamstring), Taylor Adams (groin) and Ben Reid (quad).
In his return from a late-season hamstring injury, De Goey went down early in the first final against the Cats, and saw world-leading soft-tissue specialist Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt in Germany in a bid to be ready for the Grand Final.
While the mission was to no avail, Pendlebury suggested De Goey would be more patient in his comeback next time.
“Jordy himself would probably learn from that, as much as our physios do, because he was pushing so hard to play (against Geelong),” Pendlebury said. “Then you speak to him now, and he says ‘What I know now is I would do it differently’. I would take a little bit longer.”
Pendlebury echoed football manager Geoff Walsh’s comments that Collingwood has had one of its best pre-seasons in years.
Aside from the COVID-19 scare, Collingwood’s brilliant midfielder has enjoyed his 15th-straight full pre-season and had 14 disposals in the first term of the second Marsh Series clash against St Kilda.
Father Time appears a long way off catching a man now widely seen as Collingwood’s greatest player.
“I still feel edgy before the Marsh games,” he said. “It’s always the same question, can you still do it? No matter how good your season is the year before, can you still play the way you want to play? Still find the ball? Do all of these things?
“How do I feel? Fine. Speed of the game? Fine. If I am being run-down and hit when I am not ready, maybe that is when it (the game) is going past me.
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“How long do I have left? It’s not something I think about. If I won a flag this year and next year I’d be happy. So maybe anywhere between two and four years.”
The 301-gamer is on track to break Tony Shaw’s games record of 313 matches for Collingwood.
While the individual accolades mount, more than anything he wants another premiership.
Encouragingly, he said, the Pies are physically and mentally well-placed.
But some luck would be nice, too.
“In the past two finals series, we have been down some extremely key players,” he said.
“We trust players to come in and play a role. But when you have a look at the sides who traditionally win it, they’re the sides who are set in the back half of the year and have that chemistry.”
METICULOUS CHAMP TO EMBRACE ‘FATHER TIME’
Scott Pendlebury has changed a little since becoming a father.
One of the most fastidious men in football has maintained an immaculate diet and unwavering discipline throughout his champion career.
But the father of two smiles when he says he has had to relax a bit to cater for the unpredictability of parenthood.
“I’ve sort of got rid of the whole ‘you need to get a good sleep before a game, or you need to do this a certain way’. All the routines, you just get over it a little bit when you become a father,” Pendlebury said.
“I can go play now and all the extra stuff that you think is important, is not as important.
“So I couldn’t care if I have to play a game tired because Jax has been up all sick all night, I’m happy to be up with him.
“So I have relaxed some stuff. Your kids’ health and all that comes first, even before footy.”
These days, dad life is busy for the Collingwood captain, who is often having a kick of the footy or shooting hoops in the garage with his two-year-old son, Jax, when he is not helping wife Alex look after four-month-old Darcy.
Every morning when Jax wakes, he looks for his sister, saying on repeat: “Darcy, Darcy, Darcy.”
But the night before a game brings a new level of excitement in the household.
It’s footy night. So Jax has to have the same pre-game meal as his dad.
“We call it footy dinner, so he eats chicken risotto or something that is the same as me, and he is that excited because he knows footy is the next day,” he said.
“As soon as we got in the car to drive down to Morwell the other day for the Marsh game, we heard from the back seat ‘fooootty, yessss’.
“He came to the game and watched the first half of the game. He has a Collingwood jumper and Collingwood flag that he waves around after every goal.
“And then the next day he wants to watch the replay and when I go off the (television) screen he tries to find me again, and then he wants to go for a kick or shoot the basketball.”