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Even by dead-rubber standards, the acrid smell of burning latex was overwhelming at the MCG on Friday night.
Pressure, it seemed, was optional; so too was tackling, with just 41 laid in the first half by both Melbourne and Collingwood combined and improving not one iota by full time.
The Pies’ 275 uncontested possessions, 95 more than their opponents was the 14th-most by any team this season; that jumps to sixth-best if you remove Richmond, West Coast and North Melbourne. The identity of those six teams – the likes of Carlton with no one on the bench against Hawthorn, Melbourne the day in Alice Springs Fremantle dismantled them and now the Dees again in a mood to end their season with as little resistance as possible – gives you a pretty good sense of how this game was played.
And to round out the statistical summary, the Dees’ pressure rating ended at 161 – the season’s fourth-worst pressure team’s worst performance in that regard for 2024. The Pies, at 178, weren’t a whole lot better, either.
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From the moment Nick Daicos – who else – goalled in the first quarter via a 50m penalty to give the Pies a lead they’d never relinquish after an inaccurate start, this was a tale of two teams: one ultra-keen to end a 2024 in which little has gone right as positively as possible, and one that made its statement of defiance last week against Gold Coast and seemed satisfied enough with it to shut up shop.
Such a match makes analysis difficult and deep introspection all but impossible: by all rights, this would have been a game deserving of the off-Broadway Saturday night slot, or maybe buried on a Sunday morning.
But 54,000 Pies and Dees fans – Collingwood’s lowest MCG home crowd since Mother’s Day last year – plus the AFL’s desire to set up a grandstand Sunday of finals permutations means that from halfway through the second quarter onwards, the nation’s footy fans got to watch the Daicos brothers face stiffer competition from one another for the three Brownlow votes than from any Melbourne player to take the ball off them, Steele Sidebottom tag Jack Viney into invisibility and Ed Allan produce a second game so impressive it makes one wonder why Craig McRae took so long, and with so many VFL journeymen picked along the way, to give him a crack at the top level.
Amidst the boredom, there’s really only one nugget of wisdom I can offer: the Pies will be back. The reigning premiers showed enough, not just on Friday night but in the final month of the home-and-away season, to be confident that 2025 will bring brighter times.
Whether the same will apply to Melbourne is less sure. This is a team that at times this year has seemed fundamentally broken both on-field and off.
In the former, what was once the league’s most miserly defence has leaked alarmingly throughout the season, and minus both Steven May and Jake Lever against the Pies, allowed a team whose leading goalkicker this season, Bobby Hill, has a mere 30 majors to his name to score almost at will.
A Christian Petracca-less, Clayton Oliver-less midfield fared better, especially considering Viney was held to just 11 disposals and a single clearance; but the supply they’ve been able to give a forward line already cursed by inefficiency has dwindled dramatically.
Only St Kilda and the bottom three mustered fewer points across the first 23 rounds than the Dees, an impotence made glaringly obvious by the fact the Pies, whose backline has been alarmingly exposed throughout the season, held them to 57 points without breaking a sweat and with Darcy Moore concussed out of the second half.
The Dees’ off-field woes are well known, though it seems unlikely many or any first-choice players will be following Alex Neal-Bullen out the door, whatever the rumour mill may say. They tell, though, of a playing group still featuring 18 of the premiership 23 that must have thought a dynasty was in front of them as they celebrated on that magical night in September 2021 now coming to the realisation that they may have wasted it, and come too far to wrest the chance back.
Few, I suspect, will back the Demons in to return to September in 2025, even if Oliver and Petracca return to their brilliant best. A team that was once formidable, even when losing four straight finals across 2022 and 2023, is now looking decidedly crippled – though it would be foolish to think the insipid effort a shoestring outfit put together on a Friday night dead-rubber to end a season from hell is in any way reflective of how low they could sink.
The Pies, meanwhile, have a rosier future. For all the woes that have befallen their premiership defence, four wins from their last five games, at least one and maybe two over September-bound teams, leaves them, after Friday night, just percentage outside the eight.
And it means a far more dignified end to their campaign than the miserable cesspool the Demons have been wading in since that miserable fortnight mid-season where they followed Alice Springs annihilation with Petracca’s season-ending knee to the ribs from Moore on King’s Birthday.
Sure, the pressure was minimal and the opposition feeble, but there was plenty of the old Collingwood on full display on Friday night. It was in the ability to find space on the outside, the improved ball use from all non-Daicos Magpies in hitting targets, retaining possession, and remaining efficient inside 50. It was in how a forward line minus Brody Mihocek and Daniel McStay found a solution, with midfielders outworking their Dees counterparts to present as options inside 50 and getting rewarded as often as the frequent leads from Hill, Jamie Elliott and makeshift spearhead Will Hoskin-Elliott.
Nick Daicos celebrates a goal with Will Hoskin-Elliott. (Photo by Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)
This is not a bad football team, as the last month has proven; indeed, their drop from last year’s premiership isn’t as seismic as Richmond’s fall from grace in 2021, or the Western Bulldogs in 2016, or Hawthorn in 2009, or even Geelong of last year. The phrase ‘best reigning premier ever to miss the eight’ is an utterly ludicrous one, but it’s also somewhat apt.
The Pies will no longer be the hunted in 2025, a burden they’ve struggled with regularly this season, particularly in the early rounds when they face opponents keen to send a message and take the most prized scalp in the land.
The Daicos brothers will only get better – 40 disposals and two goals from Nick, still four months shy of his 22nd birthday, might end up nabbing him the Brownlow Medal, while Josh matched him in the former but found the goals harder to come by.
Both are exceptional talents who will form the fulcrum of the Magpie midfield for the foreseeable future; the key, then, to success in 2025 might be in either wringing another strong season out of Steele Sidebottom and Scott Pendlebury, more inconsistent than usual in 2024 but with plenty of excellent footy between them, or finding capable alternatives to prevent the on-ball brigade dissolving into chaos as the Cats’ did when Joel Selwood hung the boots up after the 2022 grand final.
Allan could scarcely have asked for an easier time of it, but the second-gamer stood out as the high draft pick he was with his cool head, sound decision-making, and most of all, with a team-high six tackles, his defensive intensity. All are traits McRae holds dear, and should serve his fledgling AFL career well in the years to come.
He may also be remembered as the single player on either team to benefit from play resuming after the lightning delay, snapping through his first goal to earn a hearty cheer from Magpie fans who’d braved both the elements and the chance to head home on an earlier train and get to bed before midnight.
The Pies have no shortage of running small defenders, but Wil Parker, the mid-season recruit, showed plenty as well against the Dees; as did Joe Richards, whose clean hands below his knees, goal nous and pressuring would make him a long-term small forward at the Pies if he didn’t have a four-year contract offer from Port Adelaide that he’d be mental to not snap up.
The defence as a whole now has another six months to devise a plan to cover for Nathan Murphy, whose absence was a glaring hole all season long while also seemingly destabilising the once-impassable Darcy Moore, and in an ideal world squeeze another strong season out of Jeremy Howe without needing to use him as a last-ditch forward option when all the talls were unavailable again.
Moore’s season ending via a concussion that wiped out his second half is an unfortunate but fitting full stop on a season in which he has gone from the standout key defender in the game to one of the most criticised figures in footy; I don’t think there’s a single player in the AFL who will benefit more from the clean slate and fresh beginning a new season offers all.
At the other end of the ground, whether Mihocek can be relied on as a 40-goal-a-year spearhead at 32 years of age off the back of an injury-riddled 2024 remains to be seen; but McStay, who battled manfully on return from last year’s knee injury in five senior games, might just be ready to assume the mantle with a full pre-season under his belt.
Jamie Elliott, like many Pies central to their 2023 success, is getting long in the tooth, while Richards is surely likelier to leave than not; but Bobby Hill is as crafty as ever, and Lachie Schultz a better footballer than what he has shown in a difficult first year in black and white.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that, while nine of the premiership 23 played every game, the Pies throughout the season were every bit as depleted as the Dees, whose nightmare injury run added to their tale of woe.
Tom Mitchell could only muster six games; Mihocek 11; Elliott 14. Most significantly of all, Jordan De Goey featured just 13 times amid a slew of injuries both minor and major, and less than half of those were at anything resembling his full fitness.
Difficult decisions await for the Pies, because the core of their list is an ageing one, and difficult decisions will have to be made to avoid an en masse retirement.
But try telling Sidebottom, redeployed with great effect late in the season as a tagger and hard body around the ball, that he’s not in the next premiership side. Good luck explaining to Howe that it’s time to play the kids, or Mitchell that his best years are behind him, or Pendlebury, having battled through broken ribs to stay in the team even for a final-round dead rubber and have it hardly affect his output, that the fire doesn’t still reside in his belly to get the Magpies humming again.
The Pies went into 2024 with nothing to prove. Now, the biggest club in the land heads into the off-season with a score to settle with the footy world – and the opportunity to remind everyone they have unfinished business with September.
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