Every match that Collingwood plays feels like it's the most important game in the world.

But the truth is that some games matter more than others. And some have impacts that last for decades, even if that significance isn't always apparent at the time.

So here is a trawl through the history books to come up with the most significant games in Magpie history. These aren't just the biggest wins or the most memorable days, but the games that had a significant influence on the club's history.

We've excluded all finals, simply because otherwise the list would almost be completely taken up with premierships and a few painful Grand Final losses. But the home-and-away games covered in this series have had a huge impact on the club – sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. They've led to club turmoil, coaches being sacked, major changes in the game or sometimes set us on the path to a flag.

Whatever the outcome, these games represent major turning points in our club's story. And they're worth recalling.

The Exhibition Game in Tasmania

During the first 50 years of its existence, the Collingwood Football Club enjoyed a productive relationship with Tasmania.

A number of Tasmanian players filled spots in the earliest Magpie teams, while Collingwood as a club took a number of trips to the Apple Isle – and two of those ended up producing a couple of the most significant moments in the club's history.

In 1906, a new player to the club, Tom Nelson, added some words to an old war tune and produced what turned out to be Collingwood's anthem, Good Old Collingwood Forever. It was written and performed for the first time during their late-season Tasmanian sojourn.

Four years earlier, during the club's first visit there, the players had inadvertently developed a style of play that not only brought them two premierships, but also achieved such renown that 'the Collingwood system' was still being talked about decades later.

The match where this system emerged was an otherwise forgettable exhibition game played early in the club's 1902 Tasmanian tour.

The Pies had wobbled after a good start to the 1902 VFL season, and the idea of regrouping with a mid-season tour down south seemed like a good one. The touring party landed in Launceston on the SS Coogee and played games both there and in Hobart against combined local teams.

As expected, the games didn’t provide any real test for the visitors. They played against 21 locals in the first match, and five regular Magpies had to be dragooned into the opposition’s line-up to make up the numbers in the last match. So it’s hardly surprising that the Magpies didn’t take things too seriously. They began playing around, almost toying with the home team, trying dinky, low, short kicks to their teammates that they would place just out of reach of their opponents.

It was the team’s most highly skilled players – Dick Condon, Fred Leach, Charlie Pannam Snr and Ted Rowell – who started playing this way, but at this stage it was just a bit of fun and nobody took too much notice. Not yet, anyway.

The tourists returned to Launceston when the games and socialising were done to board the SS Coogee for the return journey home. In a crazy bit of scheduling, they were due to arrive back in Melbourne on the morning of Saturday 5 July – then promptly jump on a train to Geelong to play that afternoon!

But choppy conditions in Bass Strait made the crossing a stressful one, and – more importantly – delayed the boat. As the Coogee slowly made its way to Melbourne it was looking more and more like Collingwood would miss its train and have to forfeit the game to the Pivotonians. So club secretary Ern Copeland stepped in, and convinced the Coogee’s skipper to signal a request to Queenscliff for railway officials in Melbourne to delay the train.

Remarkably, the message got through successfully – and the railway bosses agreed. The players changed on the train on the way down, and had their rubdowns on-board too. The train made it into Geelong less than 10 minutes before the scheduled start time of 3pm, and the players went straight from the station onto Corio Oval – with about a minute to spare.

Most of the players were still suffering the after-effects of the sea voyage, not to mention the chaos of their late arrival at the ground. Geelong must have thought it was in for an easy ride, but the Magpie players, perhaps feeling not up to their normal game, decided to experiment with the short-passing tactics they’d been playing in Tasmania. It worked so well that Geelong players simply didn’t know which way to turn. The Pies won by 40 points.

Collingwood, buoyed by the early success, continued using their new style of play. The effectiveness of the tactics was further underlined in the next three weeks, when the Pies bested their chief rivals Fitzroy by 23 points, then belted St Kilda by a massive 117 points, before also defeating the other main flag threat in Essendon.

The system was deceptively simple – each time a Collingwood player got the ball, a teammate would instantly run to space to allow the ball to be passed to him – but it baffled all their opponents.

Beyond players running into space, the system also relied on precision, pinpoint passing, as The Argus described after one game:

“What served Collingwood best of all was the marvellous quickness with which they picked their own men and the certainty in passing to each other. In half-kicking their length was nearly always perfect and … when they saw one of their own men unguarded, they played to him with a low, quick, skimming kick which got there promptly.”

In years to come this style of play would come to be defined by the type of kick at the heart of it – the Pies would be credited with 'inventing' the stab kick. But it was actually more about the system as a whole rather than any one type of kick.

Through the combination of low, zooming passes to leading teammates, Collingwood was able to move the ball systematically, quickly and with fewer instances of what now would be called turnovers. From today’s standpoint it sounds simple, but in 1902 it turned football on its head.

Until this point, football was a slow, static game. There were lots of packs and scrimmages, and movement of the ball was so slow that players at one end of the ground had been known to sit down and have a rest when the ball was at the other end. Players from some clubs, including Collingwood, still wore hats or caps, and would sometimes stop to pick them up when chasing after the ball. Players looked for teammates when passing, of course, but often with high, floating kicks to the general vicinity of a colleague, rather than the precision kicking that became the Magpies’ trademark.

Collingwood’s system brought a faster, much more strategic, approach to football. In effect it became one of the first clubs to introduce a defined game plan – so much so that one newspaper reported how the players would sketch out imaginary moves “as if in a game of chess” in chalk on a blackboard in the Victoria Park dressing rooms. The club was years ahead of its time.

“No praise could exaggerate the merit of Collingwood’s triumph,” wrote Markwell in The Australasian after a late-season victory. “Their system was simply perfect. They carried half-distance passing to a point of excellence that has seldom, if ever, been equalled in the history of Victorian football, and the coolness and celerity with which they exchanged marks in all parts of the field … gave onlookers the impression that no team in the competition will have a chance against them for the premiership.”

Markwell was almost right. The Pies did not lose a home-and-away game after returning from Tasmania, and finished the 17-round season on top of the ladder. They tuned up for the finals by beating Fitzroy by nine goals, then Geelong by 89 points.

But Fitzroy produced a major upset in the semi-final, countering Collingwood's new system with a counter-plan of man-on-man football. The Pies were able to issue a challenge under the finals system then in place, so went into a grand final against Essendon a couple of weeks later, where 'the system' once more prevailed, securing the club's first VFL premiership. Even better, the system was strong enough – just – to outlast further challenges in 1903, delivering the club's first back-to-back flags.

Two premierships came from a 15-month stretch of brilliant, innovative and dominant football. And it all started from that humble exhibition game in Tasmania in the middle of the 1902 season.

Turning Points
Written by Glenn McFarlane and Michael Roberts

Turning Points: A game of belief.

Turning Points: The first game.

Turning Points: History's ugly repeat.

Turning Points: Honouring the greater good.

Turning Points: A turning point for football.

Turning Points: How we landed McHale.

Turning Points: Ending the Cat empire.

Turning Points: The practice match that led to a revolution.

Turning Points: Starting from the bottom.

Turning Points: Attacking the Cats.

Turning Points: The drama before the revival.

Turning Points: The loss that elevated Lethal.

Turning Points: The miracle of '58.

Turning Points: Whispers lead to coaching roars.

Turning Points: The break that felled Carman.

Turning Points: The Collier ban that cost dearly.