By Greg Baum
The singular mind that plotted the instantly legendary Jamie Elliott goal that won Collingwood Sunday’s blockbuster against Essendon first revealed itself more than 20 years ago.
As a budding 13-year-old elite basketballer, Scott Pendlebury would spend long car or bus trips to faraway tournaments devising set plays, over and over. “I would draw a defence and he would draw an offence to beat it,” his coach at the time, Jo Crawford-Wynd, told The Age’s Jake Niall in 2020.
Collingwood players celebrate Jamie Elliott’s post-siren match-winner.Credit: Getty Images
Further, pre-pubescent Pendlebury already could read people and anticipate their moves. “If you ever play rock, paper, scissors with him, good luck,” Crawford-Wynd said.
All Collingwood hearts rose into their throats as Bomber Harry Jones took the kick that would have iced the game on Sunday, but the Magpie skipper’s was beating evenly, and that mind already whirring away.
Jones hit the post. Pendlebury took the ball, and charge of the match. It was too late for the coaches or runners to intervene, but Pendlebury could see in real time - and before it happened - what everyone else discovered only later in slo–mo, frame-by-frame replay.
It was Essendon on paper, but he had the scissors. He knew not to go the rock.
A dejected Essendon after the match.Credit: Getty Images
“[It was] not really a set play, just common sense,” Pendlebury said on Monday as he unspooled his thinking on Triple M. “Most people think in that situation, you’re going to get it, you’re going to play on, you’re going to kick it as far as you can down the middle.
“We spoke really quickly. I said to Darce [Moore], if he kicks a point here, take off down the middle, but if you see a gap left or right, just shoot off.
Collingwood captain Scott Pendlebury.Credit: Fairfax Media
“Everyone kicks it up the guts. I reckon there were 24 players standing in the middle of the ground. We didn’t want to be the side that goes, just boot it up the middle and hope someone takes a big pack mark.
“I said to Darcy, run, left or right. Darcy’s probably the quickest player in our side. He had Peter Wright trying to chase him, but you’re not going to catch him.”
Poring in anguish over the behind-the-goals footage on afl.com.au on Monday, Essendon great Matthew Lloyd could see this all too clearly. “You want to keep every Collingwood player in front of you and not let them get out the back of you,” he said.
“The bad start is that Peter Wright is pretty much with the crowd [behind the goals], and he’s going to let Darcy Moore go. There’s already one player that’s spat out.”
Pendlebury was the conductor now. “Darcy made the decision go left,” he said. “It was a really easy kick for me to hit. He took off, Trent [Bianco] got out the back, then “Billy” [Jamie Elliott] got out the back. [We] moved the ball really quickly.”
Initially, Brayden Ham had Bianco in his eye, but as Moore took the ball, Ham was caught in no-man’s land. “Ham has already let Bianco out the back, and then does nothing,” Lloyd said. “He doesn’t impact Bianco, and he also does nothing with the player coming with the footy.”
In hectares of space, Bianco weighted his kick perfectly to the leading Elliott, over the head of his opponent Jake Kelly, but not so high that Kyle Langford could reach it from behind.
That kick.Credit: AFL Photos
Lloyd wondered why it was Langford, a midfielder, and not a key defender like Jordan Ridley. Perhaps Ridley, not reading Pendlebury’s mind as Pendlebury had read all of Essendon’s, had been expecting a kick down the middle.
Still, Lloyd was flabbergasted that Elliott was able to take an uncontested mark. “What he [Langford] has to do is make impact with player and ball,” he said. “He has to come through. He does nothing. That ball should have been 10 rows back into the grandstand. He didn’t hit hard enough. You need to take bodies, the works.”
Elliott might have run on. The two Essendon defenders were stranded behind him and the goals were still distant. Instead, perhaps mindful of the fateful decision of Richmond rookie Noah Cumberland to play on with the siren imminent on the same ground on Friday night, Elliott stopped and held up his hand.
You know what happened next. You’ve spent most of the intervening hours watching it again if you’re a Collingwood supporter, averting your eyes if you’re Essendon, or thinking grudgingly admiring thoughts if you’re neither.
The whole play took 13 seconds. Some teams, some days, spend whole quarters trying to move the ball that far. It was Collingwood’s signal strength, and Essendon’s signal weakness, all in one.
It needed skill. It needed iron nerve. It needed Essendon’s collective mind to go blank. And it needed luck, lashings of it. It needed a possible 50-metre penalty to Jones to go unpaid. It needed Jones’s kick to hit the post. It needed each of the four kicks in the Collingwood sequence to fall just so. They did.
But it was the luck that compounds out of spirit and belief, the fortune that favours the bold, the luck that half fell to the Magpies and half was made by the multi-terabyte mind of their puppeteer skipper. Scissors, paper, he rocks.
And so Collingwood’s 2022 joyride goes on.
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