How good is your memory?
Do you remember last week?
It was that long ago utopia where diesel was a mere $2.50/litre.
When the war was only weeks away from ending, as it is now.
When footy was basketball because scoring was out of control.
Well, here is a column about a team’s repressive defensive structure because this weekend, footy wasn’t basketball anymore! I don’t know if it’s an opening round induced malaise or if it’s something else, but footy has entered midseason form early this year with mostly terrible games populating the weekend with few exceptions.
Even in their heavily compromised state, GWS trotted out five star or superstar level players: Greene, Hogan, Callaghan, Ash, Oliver compared to the Pies two to four depending on how you rate Jamie Elliott and Isaac Quaynor alongside the Daicos brothers.
And yet, the Pies won handily.
Why?
Because while they don’t have great players, they have probably the best defensive structure in the AFL and are the best, broadly, at making teams play left-handed. They constrict you, sucking the life out of you and ensuring that your attempts to wriggle out of their grasp only make it tighter. Playing them must be what it was like to fight Khabib.
Against GWS, a team that can only play right-handed and has a bigger tantrum than Hegseth when he doesn’t get his 11th vodka soda (gotta watch those calories) whenever they can’t, it was a recipe for domination.
The Pies played that game with them early because they too are a pretty strong front half turnover side.
In the second quarter, however, the Pies changed completely.
They reverted to a heavy kick mark game when they had the ball to try and choke GWS’ pressure game and, when they did turn the ball over, the Pies defended turnover perfectly.
Despite turning the ball over relatively often, the Pies only gave up 49 expected points off turnover, which is comfortably their best mark of the season. They did it with relatively defensive ball movement out of their back half until they could stretch the GWS press enough to attack the corridor or only dialling up their risk appetite when they were out past halfway.
Whenever GWS did get a turnover and fashioned a shot, it was a hard shot.
The Pies are almost like a method actor in terms of their ability to become a different team completely. They went from Daniel Day-Lewis as an all over the place Gerry Conolon in the first quarter, to a more measured Abraham Lincoln for the last three.
The other thing the Pies did was completely clog up the corridor, choking up GWS’ only way to win the game which was to run and gun through the middle. Lachie Ash especially was lost in the Collingwood constrictor.
At the best of times, when Ash starts running he’s a bit like Michael Scott starting a sentence and not knowing where it goes. Sometimes it turns into Martin Luther King. Against Collingwood it was more like an improversation.
Even with Darcy Moore limping around, the Collingwood deployment of numbers was enough to kill Ash’s run and carry and, in turn, GWS’ game. Maybe it’s worth getting Craig McRae to the Pentagon to try and talk them through troop deployment.
What that meant was, like with the turnovers, the lack of corridor access meant GWS was largely lobbing prayers at goal and calling them shots. Even though the Giants had one more shot than Collingwood, they lost the expected score by three goals.
That ability to completely control the geography of a game sets a floor for Collingwood, almost irrespective of their defensive personnel. It’s been true all season. Collingwood is top 2 in opponent expected score per shot in both general play and from set shots.
They are just hard to play.
But with that floor comes a defined ceiling that will prevent them from being one of the best teams, that we saw play out against GWS.
Collingwood just can’t score. They haven’t scored over 100 points since July 4th, 2025. They scored 87 against a GWS team that relies entirely on star key backs winning, that was missing its two best backs.
Their entire offensive system is built around executing a handball chain that ends with the ball in Nick or Josh Daicos’ hands to kick it inside 50. Those two have combined to average exactly 11 kicks inside 50 this season. It takes the next five Collingwood players combined to match that total.
Even more than the Saints with Nas, the Pies are a get the ball to those Italians footy team.
That’s a fine approach because they’re incredible players, but even with a Pies system that keeps the ground long and forwards separated, they just don’t have any winners to kick to. Jamie Elliott is out of form, with just four goals for the year and well down on scoreboard impact.
Their other key forwards, Dan McStay and Tim Membrey are fine players but don’t have any particular gravity and aren’t going to win a lot of games for you. At least Membrey, unlike McStay, can feast on inferior players like he did against GWS.
Beyond that, if either Daicos misses any time, I genuinely don’t know what Collingwood can do to manufacture goals.
This is a team that forces you to play left-handed but has no right hand themselves. This is not the 2023 Pies that had a lethal transition game that you could set your watch to.
No. The 2026 Pies are a boa constrictor. They’ll suck the life out of you slowly and deliberately. But they won’t bite. They can’t.
And teams that can’t bite don’t win premierships.