In season 2015, Collingwood diehard Steve Fahey will be taking fellow supporters on a trip down memory lane as he revisits some of the match ups that define our recent history with our opponents.

First cab off the rank is the Brisbane Lions, a team against whom Collingwood met in two successive Grand Finals during the early 2000s.

In the lead-up to our game against Brisbane, today I look at the best wins the Magpies have had against the team from the sunshine state.

This piece covers four games, two in their incarnation as the Brisbane Lions, one when they were the Brisbane Bears playing out of Carrara, and, given their merger in the 1990s, I will also include one of our best wins against Fitzroy from in a year in which the clubs played three great games.

Ironically, our best two wins against Brisbane were in the years that ended in great pain.

The 2003 Qualifying Final is the pick of the crop.

We finished second and the Lions third, so we hosted them at the ‘G with a place in the Preliminary Final up for grabs. It was a tense, torrid and low-scoring affair from go to whoa in which we trailed at all three changes, but never by more than a goal.

At three quarter time we trailed by three points but the Lions were without their inspirational skipper Michael Voss who had gone off injured and had several other sore bodies.

There were no goals kicked for over ten minutes in the final quarter, but we edged level with a string of behinds.

Enter a young Alan Didak, who put us in front on the run from outside 50, and then kicked the sealer from a set shot hard against the fence on the wrong side for a left footer.

Nathan Buckley had 32 possessions and kicked two goals and Chris Tarrant kicked three. We all went home dreaming that this might just be the year, but sadly, yet again it wasn’t to be.

The match in round eight, 2002, at what was then known as Colonial Stadium (now Etihad Stadium) was also a classic.

The Pies hadn’t made the finals since 1994 and had built steadily from a very low base after Mick Malthouse took the reins in 2000, reaching the breakeven point of 11 wins and 11 losses in 2001.

After a shaky beginning in 2002, the Magpies had strung together four successive wins leading into round eight, including a season-defining win on a very wet ANZAC Day over the Bombers, who had been to the big dance in each of the two previous seasons.

The first half was a shootout that the Lions had the better of, leading by 13 points and 8 points respectively at the first two changes.

In a rugged affair, Buckley enjoyed the company of Brad Scott for much of the evening, and often an umpire or two was in tow in match that had multiple reports.

Only three weeks after winning the ANZAC Day Medal, the seventeen year-old Mark McGough got the run-with job on Voss and did well before breaking his leg in a nasty collision.

Collingwood took control in the third quarter, kicking six goals to two and took a handy 15-point lead into the last break.

When Tarrant kicked his fifth, we led by twenty points with about 15 minutes remaining on the clock.

Predictably, the reigning premiers didn’t roll over and we didn’t score again, hanging on for grim death in the dying minutes with Shane Wakelin and Jason Cloke repeatedly gallant.

There was massive relief when the siren went with us three points to the better to join Brisbane on six wins at the top of the ladder.

There were actually no particularly significant games between the two clubs during the Bears era, but one certainly memorable for the Magpie Army.

In Round 20, 1991, at Carrara, the Macedonian Marvel, Peter Daicos, snagged a lazy 13 goals against the hapless Bears, including one of his very best, superbly described by the Herald Sun as follows:

"Daicos stole possession of the ball beside the right-hand post with (John) Gastev all over him like a cheap suit, with no visible space between the goals, and Gastev slinging him hard to the ground. Daicos managed to steer a dribbling check side through the middle.”

Only 9302 spectators were on hand to see Daicos’ maestro performance but none of them will ever forget it.

Collingwood had some epic tussles with Fitzroy, but these three stick in my mind.

The most famous of these occurred in 1981.

We opened our season at the Junction Oval, fielding ex-Royboy and later gun administrator Graeme ‘Gubby’ Allan as well as boom South Australian recruits Mark Williams and Mike Taylor for the first time.

The Pies led all day after kicking 6.13 in the first quarter before withstanding a last quarter charge from the Royboys that reduced the margin to less than a goal to kick away and win by 26 points.

Daicos kicked six and Craig Davis four.

Remarkably, the sides didn’t meet again until the final round of the home and away season, when they played a high-stakes game on a Victoria Park mud heap.

The Pies entered the game needing a win to ensure top spot, which was a massive advantage under the Final Five system with the incentive of a week off.

The Royboys headed into the round in fifth, with Hawthorn and Richmond breathing down their necks for the final spot in the five.

Collingwood was jumped and never in it after that, not kicking a goal until the third quarter and only four for the match, losing by the same 26-point margin they had won by in round one.

In the first week of the finals, the Magpies lost to Geelong in the Qualifying Final, while the Royboys got over Essendon, who were in the midst of their run of losing Elimination Finals. Thus the Pies and the Royboys saddled up again in the First Semi-Final.

The Royboys’ team contained both Leigh Carlson and Des Herbert who had both played senior footy for the Pies early in the season before seeking more opportunities elsewhere.

Just as in round one, the Semi-Final was a high-scoring affair in which Collingwood got out of the blocks well and enjoyed a healthy lead of 38 points at half time before being pegged back and headed.

Trailing by 10 points at the 27 minute mark of the last quarter, it looked like a season which had promised much was going to end with three ignominious losses, before Daicos and Ross Brewer goaled to pinch a remarkable victory.

In three games for the season, the aggregate scores resulted in a one-point advantage to the Pies, and we had got the chocolates when it mattered most.

Will Saturday night’s game result in a win to be included in future re-writes of this article?

Time will tell, but any win will do!

About the author
Steve Fahey’s grandparents ran a fruit shop in Collingwood, and his father was a volunteer with the Magpies for 25 years, so his cards were marked early in terms of his passion for the Pies.

He had just turned eight when he attended his first Grand Final in 1970, which ended spectacularly sadly.

In 2005 he started (and appointed himself as leader of) the Floreat Pica Society, a group of family and (old and new) friends who share both a passion for the Pies and writing about them. Footy is still a family affair for him, attending each match with his daughter and his younger brother and his three sons.