Burying the Colliwobbles for good? How the Pies keep making the deal without sealing it

When Collingwood lost the fabled 1970 grand final, stretching their premiership drought to a then unthinkable 12 years, former Magpies captain and footy media pioneer Lou Richards coined the term Colliwobbles to describe their shakiness in finales. It stuck.

It would be another 20 years before Collingwood finally broke that drought. The following week, Richards dressed as an undertaker and ceremoniously buried the Colliwobbles at Victoria Park. More than 10,000 came to bear cathartic witness.

Collingwood celebrate the 2010 premiership, their most recent.Credit: Vince Caligiuri

But periodically, the ghosts and ghouls stir. Collingwood are back in the granny, but have been hit by injuries and are up against the Brisbane Lions, who have the wood on them both in recent times and in previous grand finals.

Prominent in the Collingwood rooms after their gravity-defying win over Greater Western Sydney in last week’s preliminary final was the still statuesque Peter Moore, former Magpie captain and Brownlow medallist, appearing now in his capacity as father of contemporary club captain Darcy.

But it was hard not to remember that Moore senior played in five grand finals for the Magpies and won none. One of the roles of ghosts is to spook. Darcy has his own grand final ghost to cast out; he missed the 2018 decider because of injury and the Magpies lost by a kick.

Fatalistic as all this sounds, it cannot be shrugged off. Technically, the Colliwobbles applies to a contained period. But the broader picture is even more sobering. Over the long sweep of VFL/AFL history, Collingwood have been by far the best team at getting into grand finals and nearly the worst at winning them.

Collingwood icon Lou Richards.Credit: Joe Armao

They’re the only club with a historic winning ratio of more than 60 per cent. But in grand finals, it’s 34 per cent. By comparison, all of their biggest Melbourne rivals win grand finals at at least 50 per cent and Melbourne at nearly 70 per cent (we pause here to nod to St Kilda, for whom everything is divided into one).

Much has been made in recollections of the late Ron Barassi about his 10 premierships as a player and coach. Six of them were won at the expense of the Magpies, for three different clubs.

Delve a little deeper and this chronic condition becomes even more stark. Collingwood Football Club came into their formidable own in the 1920s and 30s, coinciding with the Great Depression. To 1936, they’d played in 20 grand finals for 11 wins.

Since, they’ve appeared in 24 grand finals for four wins, spread over a period longer than the average lifetime. Famously, the Collingwood “Machine” won four flags in a row to 1930, but the Magpies have also lost three in a row, twice. The premiership has been anything but the cakewalk of their theme song.

Carlton celebrate their comeback win over Collingwood in the 1970 grand final.Credit: The Age archives

Of course, 15 premierships is nothing to sneeze at. Most have won fewer flags, but from far fewer chances and this is the point. The Magpies keep making the deal without sealing it. Their fans are spoilt for choice between good times, but not by an excess of spoils.

Certainly, the competition has deepened and broadened since the Magpies’ halcyon days and premierships are harder to win full stop. The conundrum is that once you get to the grand final - which Collingwood does on average every three years - it’s 50:50, just as it always has been. But not for the star-crossed Pies.

It’s not just how many, but how. It amounts to a grim catalogue of accident, incident and happenstance.

Collingwood have lost a grand final by one point, and four by less than a goal, but they’ve also lost by 50 points and 80 points. They’ve lost when kicking just two goals, they’ve lost by conceding the last six goals of the game and most infamously of all, they’ve lost from 44 points up at half-time (see 1970, above). Most of that team cannot bring themselves to speak about it still. They include some of Collingwood’s greatest players, but none has a premiership to his otherwise-hallowed name.

Dom Sheed kicks the winning goal against Collingwood in the 2018 grand final.Credit: Eddie Jim

They’ve lost to a last-minute goal kicked by a back pocket (Melbourne’s Neil Crompton in 1964) and one kicked from the deepest of forward pockets (West Coast’s Dom Sheed in 2018). They’ve lost to a goal they still say should not have been allowed but was, after Carlton Wayne Harmes’s tap back into play from the boundary line in 1979, and they’ve lost after a goal they say should have been allowed wasn’t, Anthony Rocca’s in 2002.

The Magpies have been set back in grand finals by ebbing form, untimely injuries and unfortunate suspensions. These are footy’s occupational hazards, but they seem to befall the Magpies disproportionately.

Partly, that’s because they’re up there so often. Partly, it’s because of the scale of Collingwood; as Darcy Moore noted recently, everything seems more consequential. But who else could have had their best player suspended for two matches and for them both to be grand finals? That was Phil Carman in 1977.

Within this study of the ill-starred, there are quirks. One is that across all these grand finals adventures and misadventures, the Magpies have rarely been the unanimously agreed best team of the season, nor the outright favourite.

Collingwood players celebrate with the 1990 premiership trophy.Credit: The Age

Take their most recent defeats. In 2011, they lost only three games, all to Geelong. In 2018, they played West Coast three times and lost them all. Yet again on Saturday, they will go in as the minor premiers, but not automatically the logical favourites. They’ve lost only five games this year, but two were to Brisbane.

Even Collingwood’s premierships have a habit of rebounding on them. In 1990, then president Allan McAlister declared Leigh Matthews coach for life and Lou Richards said this would be the first of 10 or 12 flags in a row. It wasn’t really hubris, more a euphoric rhetorical flourish. Matthews said this week that was the favourite of his eight premierships.

But Matthews was gone five years later (but would return as Brisbane coach to beat Collingwood in grand finals twice) and none of that premiership team won another final for the Magpies, let alone a grand final.

In 2010, the world was again Collingwood’s oyster, but a Kirribilli agreement ushered in the unlucky Nathan Buckley era a year later and the well again ran dry. From that team, only Scott Pendlebury and Steele Sidebottom remain.

New age Collingwood coach Craig McRae.Credit: Paul Rovere

Collingwood’s long, mystifying log of grand final misfortune has nothing to do with the current cohort of players and they won’t give it a second thought. Craig McRae is the least likely coach to dwell on it. For one thing, he’s relentlessly upbeat. For another, he contributed to the malaise when playing for Brisbane, twice triumphing over Collingwood.

Mathematics says the Pies’ ledger is no more than a trick of numbers; each grand final is independent of the others. Common sense says the idea of a curse or syndrome is absurd because a club is merely the sum of its people at any one time and they turn over completely every 20 years or so. The Magpies have been radically remade on and off the field even since their last grand final in 2018.

Previously, some have proposed that the Magpies are hostage to their own blue-collar history and so are innately wary of success, or that they are victims of their own strength, making other clubs chary of dealing with them lest they grow stronger still. But these are red herrings. They would explain why Collingwood struggle to make it to grand finals, but they don’t. It’s winning them that they find challenging.

But there have been a couple of clear themes in the short McRae era. One is that footy has to be fun, because footballers who have fun relax and play better footy. So it seems. Another is that a club is more than the sum of its list and the dimensions of its home. It’s a living amalgam of all its people - fans included - and all that they were and are and want to be, ever growing, ever changing.

The Collingwood cheer squad at home in the Ponsford Stand.Credit: Paul Rovere

On those terms, it’s possible to think of the club as organic, with its own DNA. And that makes it possible that all that happens, for better and worse, is cosmically linked to what has gone before. And that makes possible the idea that there is a metaphysical dimension to the peculiarly Collingwood business of making grand finals and faltering in them. It works that way in families and in political parties and even corporations, so why not in a football club?

In the clubrooms, in the changerooms, in the stands, this will all amount to so much bunkum. That’s nearly the point. At the MCG and all points beyond on Saturday, only the day will matter, but that’s because Collingwood people know more than most how far and fraught is that last step. So many have lived it, and it lives in them. Their staff and fortification is that you have to be in it to win it, and more than anyone else they are. The obverse is that being in it comes with no guarantee; you have to win it again.

With their unexpected romp into the grand final in 2018, Collingwood gave their fans one of their most enjoyable seasons. As Buckley said this week, it was fun until the second-last kick. Last year and this, the Magpies and their high-wire act under McRae might even have surpassed 2018 for the pleasure they’ve brought. Unthinkably, even fans of other clubs have warmed to the way they play.

Now the Magpies are back on that threshold, for the 45th time. Will the wobbles rise up again or is exorcism at hand?

Darcy Moore with father Peter after Collingwood’s preliminary final win.Credit: Getty Images

The symbolism will tell. If the Moores are seen together again on the MCG on Saturday, it will be not only for father to present the cup to son, but for the leader of one ill-fated generation to be delivered from his yearning by the leader of the next.

That won’t necessarily mean the 2023 Magpies have thrown off the yoke of history. But it will mean they’ve subverted the paradigm at this time. Who knows then? Even the most freighted history has to turn at some point.

Keep up to date with the best AFL coverage in the country. Sign up for the Real Footy newsletter.