He has become renowned as the most positive, optimistic coach in the AFL – but Collingwood coach Craig McRae was anything but in the aftermath of the Magpies’ horror loss to Hawthorn on Thursday night.
Managing just 46 points, their lowest score since McRae took over for the 2022 season, the Pies were thrashed by 64 points by the unfancied Hawks, with the loss putting their top-four hopes in serious jeopardy – an unthinkable turn of events for a team which sat 10 points clear atop the ladder just four weeks ago.
Since then, though, the Pies have lost four of five matches, all to fellow finals contenders, with an animated McRae bemoaning his side’s ‘really poor’ effort at the MCG – particularly on a night where veteran Steele Sidebottom was celebrating his 350th game.
“I apologise to our Magpie Army. That’s a disappointing performance, you can’t sugar coat that,” McRae began.
“We owe Steele Sidebottom way more than that, too. He’s a legend of the footy club.
“We’re hurting. That one really hurt.”
When asked what issues contributed to the loss, McRae was adamant a ‘lack of system’ and ‘lack of fight’ were tough to watch from his usual spot on the interchange bench.
“We just had some really poor efforts at times. Aerial on the goal lines, just really poor,” he said.
“This is the reality of what we’ve got right now … we’ve got to get our system back in check.
“For a long time, I don’t recall us having that poor of connection in the way we moved the ball and the way we defended the ground.
“Credit to Hawthorn, they were always going to challenge us in nature parts of the game. It doesn’t matter who you play this time of the year, if you’re playing top-eight teams, you give them a chance to play to their strengths, you’re going to get hurt. And we got hurt really bad.”
McRae was particularly scathing of the Magpies’ defensive efforts, which saw the Hawks pile on 17 goals and take a remarkable 10 marks inside 50 in the second quarter alone.
He made particular mention of a second-quarter incident in which Hawks young gun Calsher Dear leaped unopposed for a spectacular mark on ruckman Darcy Cameron’s head.
“Three guys flying at the one ball, spoiling at the same time is not system. And we’ve worked on that all pre-season, so there’s desperation, and there’s desperation in ‘I’ve got the ball and I’m going to spoil and I’ll be the guy!’ No method in that!” McRae exclaimed.
“And poor Darcy Cameron’s sitting under the ball, and everyone’s letting his man fly and take Mark of the Year on his head. That’s not system!
“Those things we can fix; the effort stuff I’d like to think is an anomaly. That hasn’t been there for us in that regard for, I can’t remember, maybe Round 0 when we were old and slow?
“You’re 114,000 members, you expect a certain amount of effort, and we didn’t have it! So you get disappointed with that … we put that jumper on, there’s an expectation that we represent it better than what we did tonight.”
The Pies under McRae have become renowned for staging unlikely late comebacks to steal victory, with the 2023 premiership coach upset his team appeared to throw in the towel early, given the Hawks won all four quarters on Thursday night.
“When we get behind we want to chase. Six goals is not enough for me for our fans to watch at home,” he said of his team’s impotence in attack.
“I don’t know how many kept watching right to the end – we’d like to fight to the end so they never turn it off. Tonight, they might have turned it off a bit early, which disappoints us.”
McRae refused to blame the concussion sustained by veteran defender Jeremy Howe in the opening minutes of the match, in which he collided with Hawk Jai Newcombe and needed to be stretchered from the field, for the Pies’ performance, though he conceded the team was ‘rocked’ by the incident.
“I don’t want to make excuses. It rocked us, it was right in front of us, and it rocked some of our staff,” he said.
“But I don’t want excuses. I hope he’s okay. I hope this family’s okay too, those things aren’t great when you’re watching live. I hope you’re okay, buddy.”
McRae, though, isn’t giving up hope on the Magpies’ season, though their top-four hopes likely rest on an upset victory over ladder-leaders Adelaide at the Adelaide Oval next Saturday night – a venue the Pies haven’t lost at since 2017.
“Judge us on the full turn, and judge us on our response. That’ll create a headline, but bring it on,” he said.
“We’ve got to turn up, not just because we’re going to Adelaide and who we play, it’s just because that’s what we want to do. We want to be a team that turns up every week.
“I’ve never believed in form and I’ve never believed in confidence, because my next action will be the one that decides if I’m confident or form-wise. We coach that hard. But we’ve got to glue our system back together, and we’ve got four weeks to do that.
“19 or 20 100-game players, they know how to play their role.”
“We’ve got to live in process, and we are going to get better every day. We turn up on Monday with a big smile on our face, let’s get better, as we have done for a number of years now.”
The Pies will be without Howe for the crunch clash with the Crows, with the defender entering concussion protocols and sent to hospital for further scans.
They can be leapfrogged by Brisbane and Geelong should they defeat Sydney and Essendon respectively this weekend, while Gold Coast are now just eight premiership points behind and four games to play compared to the Magpies’ two.
A clash with Melbourne in the final home-and-away round of the season may prove a must-win for McRae’s team, with their finals spot not set in stone just yet.
