BRAD Scott never felt more “helpless” in a quarter of footy, while Craig McRae gave his players the keys to the car when communication between the coaches’ boxes and the benches crashed during the Anzac Day clash.
AFL footy boss Laura Kane gave rare approval for mobile phones to be used during the third term of Collingwood’s eventual 41-point victory over Essendon, the two teams having vastly different reactions to the issue.
It is not yet clear what caused the breakdown in comms.
“It was pretty old school, they said to get the phones out,” Scott said in his post-match press conference.
“It was pretty frustrating. That’s as helpless as I’ve felt in a quarter of footy, when we can’t communicate with the bench. Every time I’ve tried to go down to the bench, they’ve said it’s back on, then it went back off, and we couldn’t work out what was going on. From what I hear, we weren’t the only ones.
“If we did, we’d issue our own ‘please explain’ and we’d get, ‘Sorry, someone left a cable out in the rain’. Like OK, don’t do it again. It’d be nice (to fine the AFL), some soft cap relief maybe,” he finished, tongue firmly in cheek.
By contrast, Collingwood’s much more experienced side – and the fact he already coaches from the bench – made things much smoother for McRae.
“I just said, ‘Be calm’. You know when you get a group who are performing, you have to get out of the way sometimes,” McRae said.
“I know the great Leigh Matthews taught me that, way back. There’s a big snowball, he used to call it, going down the hill, it gets bigger and more momentum – get out of the way of it.
“I’ve certainly been trusting these guys – they know what to do in the moment. So when that happened, I said, ‘Let’s relax, we’re OK, we’ve got this, let the players be’. We give them the keys, they drive the car really well.”
There’s a chance Collingwood spearhead Dan McStay could miss over a month after pulling up with a knee injury, although it appears he has avoided re-rupturing his ACL.
“Dan’s got an MCL of some degree, and we don’t know until we get it scanned,” McRae said.
“I’ll give you some context – ‘Howie’ (Jeremy Howe) did that and played the next week, and I don’t know, he could be out for 4-6 weeks, we don’t know, we’ll know more tomorrow. I don’t want to crystal ball it, I don’t want to guess.”
Essendon battled throughout the game, mounting a comeback to briefly take the lead in the third term after Collingwood had jumped 27 points clear, but the Pies then piled on eight of the last 10 goals to secure the comfortable win.
“We were probably under pressure from the start of the game, when they kicked the first couple and it was obviously going to be one of those games where territory was going to be important,” Scott said.
“I think they had 12 shots at goal from their attacking-mid zone, so that by definition means we had the ball and they got it back. I thought that was a big difference in the game, that they were able to generate their shots from front-half turnovers.
“I think we got back in the game from some simple footy, but then we started over-using the ball, and opportunities to go forward and score. Instead, we tried an extra handball, invited pressure and turned the ball over.”
Scott said that Dylan Shiel spent the final minutes on the bench due to cramp, and Harry Jones had only suffered a minor ankle roll.
