How do you measure greatness?
This is a question that football historians and pundits grapple with constantly – even if there’s rarely a definitive answer. We love ‘best of’ or ‘GOAT’ lists and the lively debates that inevitably follow.
But with Scott Pendlebury about to break the VFL/AFL’s record for most games played by anyone in history, it’s time to ask: where does Pendles sit in the pantheon of Collingwood greats?
*****
Let’s start with the obvious. Scott Pendlebury up against some big names, some of the most famous in footy history. Dick Lee, a couple of Coventrys, a brace of Colliers, Des Fothergill, Bob Rose, Len Thompson, Peter Daicos, Nathan Buckley and more.
Ranking them is a nigh-on impossible task, of course. There’s always the difficulty of comparing players from different eras, especially those from the game’s earliest days. The game was so different then as to be almost unrecognisable today.
But it’s not just that. For example, how do you evaluate longevity against achievement? Brilliance against consistency? Dominance of a position over general footballing ability? What role should team success play? Big-game performances? Is the ‘best’ player also necessarily ‘the greatest’?
Luckily, for this exercise, I’ve been able to rely not only on direct observations of the more recent contenders but also on interviews conducted over many years with former teammates of those from earlier days.
Until now those interviews and observations have led me to rank either Buckley or Rose at the top (it really is a ‘toss of the coin’ job to separate them), with Machine alumni Syd Coventry and Albert Collier leading the next batch.
But Pendlebury has climbed inexorably up the rankings in the past decade as he’s added more and more accolades and records to an already extraordinary career. He absolutely deserves to be in the GOAT conversation.
So what does it take to be ‘The Greatest’? I think it’s some kind of combination of the following:
Brilliance/skill/ability
Anyone under consideration for this title is going to have these attributes in abundance. But even so, some manage to stand out from the pack.
Pendles is unlike any other player we’ve seen at Collingwood. His understanding of time and space, and ability to create both, is unparalleled. He glides rather than charges, dissects rather than assaults and picks apart rather than bludgeons. And underpinning all this is an exquisite level of skill. His kicks and handballs are almost always both perfect and perfectly weighted, his ball-handling sublime.
His style couldn’t be more different from that of Buckley and Rose. They were super-strong, full-on, forces of nature, bursting through packs and charging towards goal. Buckley’s biggest weapon was his kicking – he is still rated among the finest the game has known – but every other aspect of his game was elite too. Rose couldn’t match Bucks when it came to kicking (few could!), but in almost every other way was at least his equal.
All three have been unbelievably good to watch, just in different ways.
A sidenote here: in terms of pure skill, you can’t go past Peter Daicos. He had the freakish skills that made the impossible seem routine, and he could make the football talk 20 years before everyone else caught up. His career highlights reel is the best ever. Old-timers say that Des Fothergill was cut from the same cloth, but without footage it’s impossible to know.
Consistency
It’s not enough to be brilliant but to only produce it intermittently. Pendlebury and Buckley are among the most consistently elite performers the game has seen. Even their rare bad games are still better than most players’ good ones. To play at that level, for so many years, almost defies belief.
Gordon Coventry was a model of goalkicking consistency once he got going – 1299 goals in 306 games is strong evidence of that. Rose, too, was a wonderfully consistent performer.
But Pendles and Bucks? Absolute freaks of high-level consistency.
Longevity
Pendles has everybody else covered here. Steele Sidebottom, Tony Shaw and Gordon Coventry are the only other Magpies to have passed the 300-game mark. Buckley and Rose played 260 and 152 games respectively in the black and white. By the time he finishes, Pendles will have played nearly three times as many games as Rose and two-thirds more than Buckley. It’s mind-blowing.
But we know that longevity on its own is not enough. Just look at the other members of the League’s 400 Club – Brent Harvey, Michael Tuck, Shaun Burgoyne, Kevin Bartlett and Dustin Fletcher. With the greatest of respect to them all, perhaps only KB would be in serious discussions about being their club’s greatest-ever player (Harvey and Tuck would be top half-dozen or so).
So Pendles clearly ranks No. 1 at Collingwood – and now everywhere else – in the longevity stakes. And as we saw on Anzac Day this year, he’s continuing to play stunningly good football.
Individual achievements
This is undoubtedly one of the most valid metrics: which individual awards has a player won along the way?
At Collingwood Buckley stands alone with six Copelands and seven All-Australians. It’s a phenomenal record. Pendles has five Copelands and six AA blazers. Thompson, the ruckman who redefined the role with his athleticism, also has five Copelands, with Rose having won four in his 10 seasons including one in a premiership year.
But let’s look a little more broadly at top-three Copeland finishes: Pendles has a scarcely believable 14 of those, while Buckley and Thompson each have eight. That’s a staggering testament to the high-quality output he has maintained over 21 seasons.
Bucks, Thommo, Dane Swan, Fothergill, both Colliers and Syd Coventry all won Brownlows, something which has (so far) eluded Pendles. Bucks and Pendles won Norm Smith Medals. Gordon Coventry won six League goalkicking titles, as well as a Copeland. Dick Lee won the VFL goalkicking seven times. Fothergill had won three Copelands and a Brownlow by the time he was 20!
Many individual accolades, such as Norm Smiths, Anzac Medals and All-Australians weren’t available to players from earlier eras so comparisons are tricky here. But Buckley, Pendlebury, Thompson, Rose, Gordon Coventry and even Lee are clear standouts.
Team success
It always seems slightly unfair that a player’s greatness can be judged, at least in part, by the success or otherwise of the teams in which he played, when that’s largely an accident of timing. Plenty of average footballers have played in premiership teams. Plenty of absolute legends have not. It’s not Buckley’s fault, for example, that he came to the Magpies as they hit one of the longest slumps in their existence.
The Machine team Magpies, of course, had it the best of all. The Colliers each played in six flags, Gordon Coventry five and Syd four. Lee played in three. Bobby Rose was a key part of the team that won in ’53 and played in three Grand Finals in four years.
Pendles’ record here stacks up well against all but the Machine stars. Two flags, 13 years apart, plus two other Grand Finals and 10 preliminaries. He has been an integral part of what has been mostly a successful era.
Big-game performances
It’s often said that you can’t be considered a true great of the game unless you’ve shown the ability to turn it on when it counts the most. And all of our GOAT contenders have remarkable track records in crucial matches.
Rose was renowned as a big-game player. He played a key role in the 1953 premiership, having 30 touches and nine shots at goal, including kicking the sealer. He’d also kicked the two last-quarter goals that had turned the semi-final two weeks earlier. Indeed he was huge in pretty much every crucial game the Pies played that year (he won the Copeland and finished second in the Brownlow) and throughout his career.
Buckley had fewer opportunities to shine in finals, given the team’s struggles for much of his time, but when his team finally played in a Grand Final in 2002, he went out and won the Norm Smith in a losing team, then followed up with a Brownlow in another Grand Final season. His big-game credentials are unquestioned.
Pendles is something else again. A Norm Smith in 2010 speaks for itself, and the crucial role he played in his second flag in 2023, especially with the match-turning Jordan De Goey goal late in the game, has gone down in footy folklore. In between those two premierships were no fewer than three Anzac Medals – followed by a record-breaking fourth just a few weeks ago – in the biggest home-and-away matches every year. Anyone who has watched the Pies in the past 15 years will tell you: Pendles always shows up when it matters most.
The complete footballer – and watchability
Some wonder why Gordon Coventry isn’t higher up in the rankings, with his 1299 goals from 306 games lasting more than 60 years as a League record. The reason is simply that, while he is undoubtedly the greatest full-forward in Collingwood history, he wasn’t as ‘rounded’ or complete a footballer as many of the others. In my view, that matters.
Buckley, Rose and Pendlebury are essentially midfielders, and all superbly skilled in all aspects of the game. Bucks was the most flexible of the three, able to play off half-back, wing, midfield and even as a key forward or (rarely) a key back, famously standing Wayne Carey one day. Rose played midfield and forward and indeed was so effective in the latter role that he averaged nearly 1.5 goals a game (Bucks averaged one across his career and Pendles 0.5). Pendles, despite occasional phases spent in the back or forward half, has mostly stayed true to midfield. But no matter where they have played, they are complete players with few weaknesses.
Then there’s watchability. The older players are disadvantaged here, both because of the way the game was played back then and the dearth of video footage. But in the past 60 years it would be hard to go past Peter Daicos and Pendlebury as the two Magpies who were most pleasing to the eye, albeit for totally different reasons. (John Greening and Phil Carman are two others who were simply thrilling to watch in their relatively brief careers. And Daics’ boy Nick goes alright in that regard too.)
Leadership
This is hard to quantify, but you know it when you see it. And when you think of great Magpie leaders, names such as Syd Coventry, Harry Collier, Lou Richards, Murray Weideman and Tony Shaw immediately come to mind.
Bob Rose was regarded as one of the most inspirational players in football in the 1950s. It might seem odd he was never named captain, but he was stuck behind Lou and might have grabbed the title in 1956 had he not retired.
Bucks spent 161 games as captain and did everything he could in each of them to drag his team over the line. Pendles holds the record with 206 games in charge, and while not as overtly fire-and-brimstone as some of the others, set the example for others to follow week-in, week-out. He was also a brilliant on-field leader – more of that shortly – and even without the captaincy continues to show teammates how to prepare for League football to get the best out of themselves. He is the best role model in football.
X-Factor
We love our heroes to have something about them that’s unique – something that truly sets them apart from the rest.
With Rose his former teammates often talked about his inspirational qualities. With Bucks it was his phenomenal kicking. And with Pendles it was, until recently, his aforementioned ability to seemingly bend time and space to his will.
But in the past few years he has added another string to his bow – that of on-field general. Coach Craig McRae has spoken often of Pendlebury’s importance to the team through this role, as have many of his teammates.
We saw it most famously in the dying stages of the 2023 Grand Final, when his on-field orchestrations in the final minutes helped engineer a close win by the Magpies in a decider for the first time since 1903. Ever since then, observers have increasingly come to appreciate just how important he is in maintaining structures, directing teammates and making in-game moves on the fly.
His understanding and reading of the game is second to none – he should make a great coach one day – so he knows which levers to pull on-ground, and when. As McRae says, it’s like having an extra coach on field.
Iconic status
One thing that stands out about Collingwood’s legends is that they have always enjoyed a special bond with the Magpie supporters. That’s hardly surprising: if you’re good enough for long enough to be in these sorts of conversations, then of course everyone will love you.
But there was a reverence for Rose that went beyond that. Partly that was because of the way he played. Partly it was because of the way he carried himself as coach through all those cruel finals losses. And partly because of the way he loved and cared for his son Robert after the youngster was left a quadriplegic in a road accident in 1974.
Buckley, too, was beloved, partly because he was one of the few bright lights in the otherwise bleak second half of the 1990s. He stuck with us, his standards never dropped and we loved him even more for that.
As for Pendles, there was a point in his career in the mid-to-late 2010s where he’d already won just about all there was to win. The fans admired and respected him enormously and were in awe of his abilities. But there was a sense that they didn’t quite love him the way they had with Bucks and Bobby. It was almost as if his approach to football, as well as his style of play, created an impression – perhaps unfairly – of there being some sort of dispassion or distance.
But the longer Pendles has gone on, the more loved he has become. The fans better understand and appreciate the beauty and magic in his game. And he’s opened up a bit too, allowing outsiders to see more of himself and his passion for the game and the club. The culmination of this evolution came on Anzac Day a few weeks ago: the entire Collingwood crowd genuflecting and chanting his name as one on an afternoon that turned into a glorious, joyous celebration of a player now deeply adored by the Magpie faithful.
And the GOAT is…
As a Collingwood supporter since the age of five, I’ve seen first-hand many of the players mentioned in this story. In my role as Club Historian I’ve interviewed some of the others, including Bobby Rose and Harry Collier, and spoken to teammates of those from the 1920s and ‘30s through to the ‘60s.
From those interviews the general consensus was that Rose was the greatest player of his generation. Whether roving or up forward he was simply unstoppable. Fast, tough, supremely courageous and highly skilled, Bobby had it all. His fearless and fanatical play frequently lifted his teammates and turned games in Collingwood’s favour.
Many who saw him play believed he remained the best until Nathan Buckley came along. And we all know how good Bucks was.
The older players, survivors of The Machine era and 1930s, marvelled at the flair and audacity of Des Fothergill and said he could have been anything if not for his contentious departure to Williamstown and then the intervention of World War II. They were in awe of Gordon Coventry’s ability to kick bags of goals week after week. But they spoke most glowingly of all about Syd Coventry and Albert Collier.
Syd was a supreme leader and a magnificent ruckman/follower who won a Brownlow, two Copelands and one other best player award before the Copeland was introduced. Albert, better known as ‘Leeter’, was a schoolboy prodigy who initially starred as an elite centre half-back before later becoming a tough and feared on-ball ‘enforcer’ who was part of the soul and spirit of those 1920s-30s teams. Again a Brownlow and three club best-and-fairests followed.
These are the kinds of players, and history, against which Pendlebury is being measured. Clearly, he belongs there.
To be the GOAT you have to be brilliant, consistent and complete as a footballer, a big-game performer, a leader. You also must have a long and proven track record of sustained performance of the highest levels, week-in week-out for season after season. And ideally you have something about you that nobody else possesses, as well as a truly special connection to the club and its fans.
Rose was all those things. So was Buckley. If I was choosing a team to play a one-off game for my life, Bucks would still probably be the first one I’d select, mostly because of his extra dynamism and ability to play in more positions. If I was choosing a team to play purely for entertainment, it would be Des Fothergill or Peter Daicos (ideally both!)
But look at Pendlebury’s overall impact and contribution – at all he has done, all he has achieved and all he has become. It is beyond extraordinary.
So after years of tossing up between Bob Rose and Nathan Buckley, I believe we have a new No. 1: Scott Pendlebury is the greatest player in Collingwood history.
Michael Roberts is the Collingwood Historian, and the Curator of the Collingwood Museum. He has written or edited 13 books on Collingwood.
