Collingwood defended their decision to fly Nick Daicos to Brisbane to take on the Lions only to have the superstar midfielder withdraw with a calf injury just 15 minutes before the start of the game on Thursday night.
It followed the bizarre move by the Magpies last week to leave skipper Darcy Moore on the ground against GWS when he was clearly suffering from a hamstring complaint.
Moore was later ruled out for the next three to four weeks.
But Craig McRae said Daicos had made the trip to Brisbane fully expecting to play.
“He had a corkie in his calf,” the Collingwood coach said.
“On Tuesday at training he just wanted to get moving, that was the intention. He didn’t train and was hobbling around.
“Nick’s an ultra-positive guy, one of the best professionals in the game, let alone at our club, and we gave him every chance to improve.
“Then he gets out here [for the warm-up], and we thought he’d start improving. He just didn’t.”
When Daicos stepped out onto the Gabba surface for the club’s pre-game routine, he never looked comfortable.
His right calf was heavily strapped, and he could barely run. He wasn’t subject to a fitness test – he failed the warm-up.
“If he was a horse, you wouldn’t back him, would you?” McRae quipped on Fox Footy pre-game, still not knowing at that stage if Daicos would be out of the game.
His shock withdrawal minutes later clearly hurt Collingwood. They were no match for the Lions’ rampant midfield in a 54-point loss, 17.17 (119) to 10.5 (65).
“Honestly, I felt like we got outplayed for most of the night,” McRae said.
“Clearly, the scoreboard would say that. The stoppages really got away from us. When you lose territory against this team, it makes it really difficult.
“I just want to probably give credit more to them than [talk about] us. But I did say to the playing group, ‘There’s a lot of stuff right in front of us that we can fix really quickly, and we need to get to work on that’.”
McRae said he did not expect his side to be affected by the late change, bringing emergency Ed Allan in to replace Daicos.
“Things that happen before the game shouldn’t really affect the first contest or our stoppage structure. They shouldn’t,” McRae said.
“I know you could make a case that you take your best player out of any team, and it is probably going to disrupt them, but you’d like to think not.”
He indicated Daicos would play against Fremantle in next week’s Gather Round clash on Friday night.
“We are hoping it improves,” McRae said. “We do have three days off. We’re back in [at the club] on Monday.
“It’s a corkie. You’d think that it starts to move. I don’t know, unless it starts to express as something else, but we’ll see how that goes.”
McRae said club great Scott Pendlebury was also on track to tackle the Dockers next week at Adelaide Oval.
“I left the club yesterday morning, and he’s there doing rehab, and he said, ‘I feel good’,” the Collingwood coach said.
“He’s got to train, and he’s got to get through training, but if his word’s anything to go by, he’d be hard to leave out.”
Collingwood will sweat on winger Steele Sidebottom, who copped a heavy knock to the ribs during a bone-crunching tackle from Brisbane’s Keidan Coleman.
Sidebottom left the ground just before half-time holding his side and disappeared into the change rooms for medical attention during the long break, but returned to the field in the second half.
“He’s a tough bugger,” McRae said of Sidebottom. “It was a really good hit, and it was sort of symbolic [of] a bit of our night that we didn’t play with good method at times.
“I thought we just didn’t use the ball anywhere near what we’re capable of, and then that puts a lot of pressure on you, handballing the ball out in front of guys to get whacked.”
For Brisbane, it was a night to savour. Two-time Norm Smith medallist Will Ashcroft picked up the mantle as the match-winning midfielder in Daicos’ absence.
He had 36 disposals and snapped a superb left-foot goal from the boundary that could be a contender for goal of the year. He has now surpassed ex-skipper Lachie Neale (29 possessions) as the Lions’ pre-eminent onballer.
The Lions kicked six goals from centre-square clearances, but coach Chris Fagan said the late withdrawal of Daicos had not altered their approach.
“It didn’t change a lot because we made a decision after what happened last week [against St Kilda]just to back our midfield in,” he said.
“We were just going to try and quell Daicos’ influence at stoppage. So, when he didn’t play, we sort of went to [Jordan] De Goey a little bit more to try and, you know, stop him from having a big influence.
“But there wasn’t ever going to be a big hard tag like we had going on Nasiah [Wanganeen-Milera] last week.”
The Lions will be strengthened by the return of premiership skipper Harris Andrews from suspension next week.
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