Collingwood will bring back veterans Jeremy Howe and Steele Sidebottom for Friday night’s clash with Brisbane, but coach Craig McRae remains guarded over whether the club will rest tired players ahead of their looming sudden-death wildcard final.
McRae said Brayden Maynard (leg) failed a fitness test and would not play against the Lions at the MCG, while Isaac Quaynor (glute) will be another omission from the team that drew with Hawthorn last round.
But the Collingwood coach declined to comment on whether the Magpies would manage individual players, such as Nick and Josh Daicos, for their final home-and-away match.
The Magpies, who announced an AFL record of 113,362 members on Wednesday, are sitting eighth with potential to move to seventh, while Brisbane need to win to avoid dropping from third to outside the top four.
“I’ve heard the narrative, everyone’s trying to take us towards the Bulldogs (ninth), which is a potential (wildcard) match-up, but it could be Carlton (10th), it could be anyone else,” McRae said on Wednesday ahead of their match committee meeting.
“Everyone’s trying to take us to towards the future, and we’re really just determined to stay here, what’s relevant right now, and control what we can around that.”
McRae said his playing group and club were “really hungry” to take momentum and rhythm into a new-look finals series.
“No one’s had this in the history of a game – in this format, anyway. So we’ll learn some lessons along the way,” he said.
“There’s no perfect answer to it. We rest five players, we’ll be judged on that. We don’t rest five players, we will be judged on that.
“I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t had sleepless nights thinking about all the scenarios around what could be and what may be, but the reality is that we’ll just deal in what we can control.
“And, I’ll repeat, there’s an appetite to keep playing. All our players are really hungry to keep performing really well.”
McRae said Collingwood’s selection process would not be affected by an AFL memo earlier this month that warned clubs they would be fined if they rested players en masse.
“They set parameters in place for a reason because they want the integrity of the game to be in place,” McRae said.
“But management of players is delicate. There’s so many layers to it. There’s training, there’s playing, there’s all sorts of things that we have the data around, and we’ll make the appropriate decisions regarding all that.
“I didn’t read it [the memo]. I know [Collingwood football manager] Charlie Gardiner read it and articulated that to us, and I think it’s a bit of a common-sense thing that they don’t want 15 players rested. But, again, we’ll do what’s best for what we think we need for this weekend and beyond.”
McRae said he understood the ongoing interest from rival clubs in games record-holder Scott Pendlebury, but could not imagine a future in which he was not at Collingwood next year.
“I probably can’t [imagine it] because the black and white looks so good on him,” McRae said. “But I can see the attraction from other clubs because they only have a perception of what could be.
“Well, we have the reality of what is and how influential he is to our players and to our culture, so I can see there’s an attraction, and why that would be the case.”
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