After Collingwood won the premiership in 2010, the next year they only lost three games. All of them were to Geelong, the last one on grand final day.Collingwood don’t want to talk about back to back. Craig McRae prefers back to work.
“There’s a few layers to it. The most important one is you have proven you are capable, so you have a belief that you didn’t have previously,” he said. “Beforehand you think you are good enough, but there is still a hope around it. With us, we got smashed in the prelim the year before and the teams from the grand final St Kilda and Geelong were still strong in 2010. After 2010, we knew we were good enough, we had confidence we could do it again because we had done it.
“It’s harder to break into a premiership team than a rebuilding team, and you are hoping they are the factors that push the team on, but then you are coming back to that ‘hope’ word again.”“The fans, the media, everyone expects you to be there again and do it again. But you have to remind yourself – and this is a hard bit – that everyone starts on zero again and doing it last year doesn’t mean anything for this year.
“And that was a good thing, they did that, but then pre-season starts, and you can’t be thinking about celebrating.