Selection squeeze at Collingwood: Big guns including De Goey ready to return

The stars are back for moving month at Collingwood.

After spending the past few weeks digging deep into the Magpies’ list to find reinforcements during the club’s injury crisis, coach Craig McRae now has an embarrassment of riches at the selection table.

Jordan De Goey (right) will return to Collingwood’s side this week.

Lachie Schultz will miss due to gastro, but his absence will be more than offset by the returns of premiership stars Jordan De Goey, Scott Pendlebury, Brody Mihocek for the reigning premiers’ trip north to play Gold Coast.

The trio all got through training on Thursday, leaving the Pies with one of their strongest teams on paper for close to two months. Isaac Quaynor did not train due to what McRae quipped as “man flu” but is expected to recover in time, while Oleg Markov and Joe Richards are also back from injury.

Speaking on Thursday before selection had been finalised, McRae was conscious of the dangers of swinging the changes, wary of unsettling what has largely been a winning formula.

“Every week you think about dynamics, chemistry, connection,” McRae, a former VFL premiership coach before taking over at Collingwood, said. “My grounding has served me well. At the VFL level you’re having six or seven changes every week, so coaching connection is important.

“You’ve got these magnets back to play with, but magnets don’t win games. Effort does, roles do. We’ve had some players do a great job in filling voids, but also doing more than that.

“It’s a real challenge right now to think someone coming in who has great experience, whether it’s Pendlebury or De Goey, ‘now we’re right, we’ll plug and play and we’re away’. That’s not real.”

Aided partly by a friendly fixture, the Pies won four and drew one of six games while their playing stocks were stretched. Most experts expect the Pies to finish in the top four but after the bye rounds they are at the front of a logjam that sees only two wins separating fourth from 13th.

“It’s such an even competition, the margins are so small,” McRae said. “You’d like to think if some team that gets a run on here, they can separate from the pack. This is the time to do it.”