Graham Cornes: Collingwood show they deserve to be 2023 AFL premiers

Collingwood has been the best performed team of the season and if they don’t win the flag there is no justice in football, writes Graham Cornes. Do you agree?

We saw the 2023 premier on Thursday night. Collingwood has been the best performed team of the season and if they don’t win the flag there is no justice in football – not that Crows fans think there is such a thing as football justice.

Nevertheless, Collingwood is the real deal. For over a century and certainly throughout the AFL era, Collingwood is the one team the other fans have loved to hate.

However, if you don’t love this Collingwood team of the past two seasons, you don’t love football. The coach, Craig McRae has saved AFL football and for that he should be rewarded.

Gone are the negative, congested, rolling mauls and crowded defensive zones. From the last line of defence, Collingwood attacks, spreading wide to create space and at all times looking to capitalise on any space through the centre corridor.

Watching a Collingwood team in full flight is seeing football at its best. You can’t say that about many modern AFL teams whose coaches seem to value defence more than attack. Yet it is Collingwood’s defenders that are the reason the team has been so strong over these past two seasons.

It’s nothing new. There is an old adage in football: “success depends on how well your forwards defend and how well your defenders attack.”

A pity more coaches don’t adhere to it.

Oleg Markov and Jeremy Howe during first qualifying final match between the Collingwood Magpies and the Melbourne Demons. Picture: Dylan Burns/AFL

Yes, Collingwood defends its territory fiercely, but when the ball is won, the running attack is immediate and instinctive. Other coaches may pay lip-service to the concept of attacking football but Craig McRae lives it.

Collingwood did not have the game completely on its own terms on Thursday night. It came down to the start. It often comes down to the start. McRae had prepared for that.

“I thought we were going to come at them. You don’t always get it right, but I just had this belief in the group that we were going to hit the ground running tonight. Luckily enough, the first quarter was an example of that,” he said after the game.

Melbourne had beaten Collingwood on the King’s Birthday holiday in round 13. Collingwood at that stage had won eight games in a row and seemed invincible, but Melbourne won the contested possessions, had more marks inside 50 and nine more shots on goal.

Collingwood was not invincible. Thursday night could have been the same result. Melbourne had more of the ball and went inside its forward fifty 32 more times than Collingwood.

That’s a staggering statistic which forced Collingwood to defend fiercely. The captain, Darcy Moore, he with the flowing blond locks who resembles more the Viking warrior, played with an heroic desperation.

However it is the constantly improving Isaac Quaynor who typifies the courage of the Collingwood defence. He didn’t make this year’s all-Australian team but he must have been close. His last quarter intercept mark moving back under the ball with the pack charging at him was one of the moments of the match.

In addition to that, he has a beautiful kick and uses the ball to advantage. Then there is Oleg Markov, a perpetual motion running machine.

I shouldn’t take it personally but seeing him develop into an important part of Collingwood’s running defence really rankles. He’s a South Australian. The son of Olympic pole vaulter Dmitri Markov, he was born in Belarus but moved to Adelaide when he was only 10 months old.

A multi-talented sportsman, he eventually settled on football, playing first at Gepps Cross then at North Adelaide from where he was drafted to Richmond. He could never consolidate in that champion Richmond team and was subsequently traded to the Gold Coast in 2020. When it was obvious he would become a free agent, I urged the Crows to recruit him.

Admittedly, they were words in the ether, but no one was listening. Craig McRae recognised his speed and his attacking potential and Collingwood got him for nothing. He’s played 20 games for the flag favourite this season and is fast becoming one of their most recognisable running defenders.

Isaac Quaynor of the Magpies during the qualifying final between Collingwood and Melbourne at the MCG. Picture: Michael Klein.

Despite the unseasonably inclement weather, Thursday night saw football at its best. Collingwood supporters had complained that the team received no benefit for finishing on top of the ladder. After all, Melbourne who had finished fourth, could play the game on the MCG, its home ground, with the advantage of a member’s stand that overflowed with red and blue colours.

They shouldn’t have worried. The Collingwood army drowned them out with that painful “Coooooollingwood” drone.

The crowd was spectacular for a Thursday night on which the heavens had opened up. An attendance of 92,636 was the biggest Melbourne/Collingwood crowd since the famous 1964 grand final.

Melbourne won that game by four points after its back pocket player, Neil Crompton, defied his coach’s instructions, followed his man forward and kicked his only goal of the season. Coach Norm Smith still rebuked him after the game.

Glenelg tried to recruit Crompton in 1965 but he stayed in Melbourne, his name forever etched into MCG grand final folklore.

Ugly moments are never far from football, particularly in finals where the contest is fiercer. So it was on Thursday night when Brayden Maynard knocked out Melbourne’s star midfielder Angus Brayshaw in the first quarter.

It would have a telling effect on the outcome of the game. The adjudication of the incident will become a true test of the game, because this was a football accident, pure and simple.

There was no intent by Maynard to knock Brayshaw out. On the contrary, it looks as if he is trying to avoid contact in the aftermath of the attempt to spoil.

However, he was in the air and couldn’t change direction. It doesn’t look at all vicious but Brayshaw went down and did not move.

The outcome aside, there was no intent to hurt Brayshaw and it appears that Michael Christian, the Match Review Officer saw it that way and believed that Maynard had no case to answer.

Subsequently, the AFL and its new chief of football, Laura Kane, stepped in and insisted the case be referred directly to the AFL tribunal, meaning Maynard faces a minimum ban of three weeks. If that is the case, it would be an extraordinary abuse of power and another indication that the AFL’s powerbrokers have long since abandoned any feel for the game, or understanding of the pressures under which its most important commodity – its players – play.

Collingwood, quite rightly, will pursue this to the highest courts in the land.

Thursday night had everything a final between two top four teams should have. If you looked solely at the statistics, you would think Melbourne had won, such was the domination.

But Craig McRae answered that observation simply: “You can analyse all of the stats, but it doesn’t matter. You just win. You find a way to win.”

If they meet again in this finals series it will be in the grand final and the result may be different. Melbourne is certainly capable.

It’s only week one of the finals, but on Thursday night, we saw the 2023 AFL premier.

Originally published as Graham Cornes: Collingwood show they deserve to be 2023 AFL premiers