Noah Anderson barracked for Richmond as a kid. It was a strange choice, given that his dad was a two-time premiership player with Hawthorn. Noah was 11 when a rugby league player beat the Tigers with a kick after the siren. His dad Dean was on the Gold Coast this weekend. That day, he’d learnt that former teammate Paul Dear had died of pancreatic cancer. That night, he watched his son kick the most important goal in the history of the Gold Coast Suns.
It shouldn’t have got to that point. The Suns were 40 points down and playing as badly as they have this year – turning the ball over, missing tackles and allowing Shai Bolton to run riot. But they found their grunt, and the visitors got the staggers. As impressive and important a win as this was for the Suns, it was a game Richmond threw away. Spilt chest marks, set-shot sodas, open-goal squanders – it was a comedy of errors in the second half. It was the biggest lead a team has coughed up this year, and it will probably cost them the double chance. They’ve now left the Sydney, Geelong and Gold Coast games on the table.
But this was Gold Coast’s night, and there haven’t been many of those over the past decade. It’s been a tough run for this club. In the past seven years, they’ve finished 16-15-17-17-18-14-16. At times, it’s seemed like a club bereft of pulse and purpose. It was a club to get out of as quickly as you could. Two ended up at Richmond and won five premierships between them.
But they actually weren’t that bad last year. They were stiff in a number of close games. They lost their captain, ruckman and their best young player for the best part of the season. Even in the off-season, they just couldn’t cop a break. Ben King’s knee buckled in a training drill. “That’s just footy,” he said. There was immediate speculation on whether he’d be snapped up by a Melbourne club. The pressure on Stuart Dew intensified.
It’s still debatable whether this is a proper football club. But they’re a finally a proper football team. A proper football team has players like Touk Miller. A proper team doesn’t shut up shop when seven goals down. A football team has players willing to chase down players running into open goals. Anderson’s clutch goal was the exclamation mark on a season in which there’s been a distinct shift, a season where they’ve finally earned the respect of the football world.
Anderson played in the same premiership-winning school team as Matt Rowell and Nick Daicos. Several hours earlier, the latter had once again put his name in the frame as one of the best first-year players of this century. Daicos, like his father, is a joy to watch. He only played about half a dozen games of junior football during the two Covid years. But he plays a very adult game. Most first-year players are cooked by winter. Daicos is getting better by the week. His 50-metre kick to his brother on the Gold Coast last week was almost pornographic. It certainly swung the game.
This week, his Pies were all at sea for three quarters. They were 28 points down to a North Melbourne team that was supposed to be in complete disarray. It looked like a repeat of the West Coast game – one of the more inexplicable losses in recent years. When Taylor Adams won the first clearance in the final term, there were Bronx cheers. But the Roos, who’d attacked the corridor at every opportunity, went back in their pouches. Daicos’s sumptuous goal was a throwback to Victoria Park in the early 1990s. They were still eight points down, but there’s no way they were losing from that point on.
Collingwood’s former coach is currently on the Kokoda Trail. He reckons the current side reminds him of 2018-19. “It’s pretty much the same team,” Nathan Buckley insists. But there’s been some crucial additions – from the professionally difficult Jack Ginnivan, to the bone-crunching Beau McCreery, to the clean and cool Daicos. The Pies now excel in close games. They attack. And there’s a real sense of calm and purpose at the club. The Jordan De Goey circus aside, there’s been almost no off-field distraction. Craig McRae, like his captain, like his top draft pick, like his team, and like the entire club right now, doesn’t waste energy. In a compressed top eight, with Brisbane and St Kilda both dropping games, Collingwood are as good a watch and as good a chance as anyone.
