How I Learnt To Love The Pies
The Sunday Age
Sunday July 8, 2001
THE first symptoms appeared early last year when Mick Malthouse's young Collingwood team blew away a succession of opponents with some stunning football and I actually enjoyed it. I should have visited the doctor then, but after a short while, the disease appeared to have gone into remission.
You could imagine, then, the horror when those symptoms reappeared with a vengeance around the time the Magpies upset the red-hot Port Adelaide at Football Park in one of the braver wins this season. Things turned even nastier when the likes of Chris Tarrant and Leon Davis began pulling some amazing party tricks.
And by the time the Magpies had clung on for dear life against the Crows last week, turning this viewer, momentarily at least, into the demented grandson of Jock McHale, I knew, sadly, my condition had become terminal.
It might be a long-standing and proud tradition, but you just can't hate Collingwood with the same sort of intensity anymore. And it's not just because they haven't been good enough to hate.
The Magpies have been treading what were once pretty unfamiliar waters down the bottom end of the ladder for close to a decade. Even a player as lauded and honored as skipper Nathan Buckley has known virtually nothing of team success.
Now they can see the results of some smart planning and hard decision-making unfolding before their eyes. And like the emergence of any up-and-coming team that has known little previous success, it's exciting to watch.
There was a brief, temporary moratorium on the established practice of Collingwood-hating back in 1990, when even seasoned Magpie critics had become sick of making jokes about the Colliwobbles and that 32-year premiership drought.
It's doubtful any Collingwood premiership has been as popularly received as that famous win, but the goodwill soon dried up under a torrent of hype and more than the odd gaffe from then-president Allan McAlister.
You would hardly have expected a newer version of the Magpies led by the omnipresent Eddie McGuire and one of the AFL's most famously stern coaches in Malthouse to fare much better when it came to the unconverted.
But they haven't had to. Collingwood is winning over the neutral with its passion, spirit, and sense of excitement, typified in the form of bullocking, spectacularly unorthodox forward Jarrod Molloy, who has managed to become a Magpie cult figure within half a season.
When the likes of Buckley and Anthony Rocca left clubs they clearly hadn't wanted to be with for big-money deals with the Pies, the popular perception was of a couple of spoilt brats who deserved what they got.
Now, after eight years of magnificent, but largely fruitless toil from Buckley, and Rocca's efforts over five years to improve his fitness levels and consistency of performance, there's a reserve of goodwill for two blokes who have probably earned a break or two.
Shane O'Bree might look like Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons but in football terms, is a good, old-fashioned burrower. Tarrant is evoking the same sort of excitement that a young Wayne Carey did a decade before. And who knows just how good Josh Fraser is going to end up?
Not that Collingwood's seeming metamorphosis from entrenched villain to the team you secretly cheer on without admitting it to your mates, is the only about-face we've seen when it's come to popular perception about clubs in recent times.
Once upon a time, Hawthorn was the dour, slightly boring middle-class team that relentlessly courted the corporate sector. It might have taken the Hawks' near-extinction to do it, but the Hawks are now the closest thing this state has to a ``people's club", taking on the same AFL with which it once travelled hand-in-hand, and building a much larger and working-class based generation of supporters in the south-east.
And what about Carlton? The Blues used to be everyone's favorite villain, their shameless appeal to the well-heeled and arrogance about their perennial success a red rag to every supporter of another club.
The only problem is that Carlton the team has gone in completely the other direction, the Blues' moving away from a galaxy of stars to a harder-working, blue-collar outfit with its share of ``battlers" winning it more sympathy from beyond Optus Oval than perhaps the club has ever known, despite the best attempts of president John Elliott to keep them as unlikeable as ever.
Whether ``Big Jack" realises it, Carlton has probably been replaced in the ``hate" stakes by Essendon. The Bombers are super-successful, have the same arrogance perceived in all the game's great teams over the years, and in Graeme McMahon, have a president seen to be obsessed with making his club even bigger and more powerful, regardless of the consequences to the less-fortunate.
The football landscape has changed in every way over the past few years, but nothing signifies the shift better than the breaking down of long-standing and seemingly unshakeable stereotypes about clubs whose images have always appeared cast in stone.
That doesn't mean they won't change again just as quickly, of course. I've learnt to live with my Collingwood affliction for the moment. But get back to me in September.
© 2001 The Sunday Age
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