Many years ago, fresh from a long stint in England and way too wet behind the ears to deal with a man like Denis Pagan, I contacted the then-Carlton coach with a view to writing a book about him and his club. Denis was open to the idea. “Let’s try and get this off the ground son,” he told me. The next day, if you don’t mind, one of his players was sacked after turning up to training in a shambolic, ecstasy-addled state. “Sorry son,” Pagan said. “Let’s park that book idea.”
History is written by the victors. But footy is mostly about losing. It’s about 17 clubs trudging off disappointed each season. It’s about being cut, left out, shopped around and pensioned off. For the most part, no one’s making documentaries about footy’s losers. There’s no feature length film being released about West Coast’s 2022 and 2023 seasons, as fascinating as that would be. When you win a flag, however, you get to tell your own story. And when you’re as big a club as Collingwood, and you have a digital media team releasing slicker content than the host broadcasters, you get to tell your story in cinemas.
So it is with Take the Steps, released on Wednesday. It’s an already well-thumbed story. After coming up short in 2022, Craig McRae had the entire playing list running to the top of the MCG grandstand prior to the Boxing Day Test. “If you don’t do the work, and if you don’t take the steps, you sit here at finals time,” he tells them. That becomes their mantra for the entire season. They even build a ladder and the best player in each win is chosen to spray paint a new rung. For the three finals, all won by the skin of their teeth, they build a plinth, which is then hammered out by the player of the hour (Bobby Hill, twice).
Footy clubs love a theme, a hook. In a competition ostensibly designed to be even, having that hook, whether it’s cultural or spiritual, is crucial. In 2007, Geelong’s Max Rooke found an old flask made of animal hide in an African second-hand shop. He gathered his teammates and asked them to write down their dreams and goals. He then lit a candle, set the papers alight, tipped the ashes into the flask and waxed it shut. “It was our religion,” he said years later, echoing George Costanza in The Opposite episode. “It was something to believe in.” The Cats barely lost a game for four years.
“What a load of old rope,” men of Pagan’s vintage are probably thinking. “Collingwood didn’t win the flag because of some ridiculous plinth – they won it because they had the best young player in Australia, a resolute backline, an engaged supporter base and some good fortune from the umpires and tribunal.”
But this documentary taps into something else, something that goes well beyond old-school thinking and home-ground editing. What shines through, from the coach to the rookie listed players, is how at ease, how utterly untrammelled by the past, the entire organisation is. In the final years of the McGuire presidency, the club was so tightly coiled. Now they’re so loose it’s verging on becoming irritating. It’s a key pillar of their comms. They’re speaking to their members but they’re speaking to the other 17 clubs as well. “Look how happy we are”, they’re saying. “We’ll get Beau McCreery’s mum to address us, and then we’ll go out and pummel you into dust.”
I’d be loose too if I looked at my centre square stoppage and saw Jordan De Goey and Nick Daicos conferring with Scott Pendlebury. Indeed, some of the iso-footage from the final term of the grand final, and the role of those three men in particular, is truly extraordinary. You can hear the thwack of ball on De Goey’s boot as he gives the Pies the lead.
Still, this is the winner’s cut. We don’t hear from a crestfallen John Noble as he’s left out on the eve of finals. We’re spared the ghoulish footage of Jeremy Howe’s injury, which required four surgeries, or “washouts”, in 11 days. But there are revelations. For all his daggy jokes, McRae is a competitive animal and a Leigh Matthews man at heart. He nonetheless has a remarkable ability to dial that back and connect with his players and supporters. It brings to mind something Jonathan Liew wrote about Ange Postecoglou – “What fans crave above all else is a sense of belonging, a rudder, an emotional stake in a game that has largely forsaken them.”
And there are candid, unexpected moments too. In the subterranean MCG car park after one of the most tense preliminary finals ever played, Darcy Moore is completely incoherent, and on the verge of tears. This is the same young man who gave a pitch perfect speech on Anzac Day, thanking the veterans. Right now, he can barely string two syllables together. “That was fucked,” he eventually splutters. “If we do that next week I’ll probably pass away.” At Collingwood, they pride themselves on gathering themselves, on shaking off bad moments. “Putting the windscreen wipers on” McRae calls it. The captain exhales, laughs and somehow manages to drive himself home. Eight days later, his dad hands him the premiership cup.
Take The Steps is in Hoyts cinemas from 28 February.
