WITH 22 straight wins at the MCG entering the preliminary final, Richmond’s Jolimontian dominance was spoken about with awe and reverence.

It was as if the 11th commandment handed down to Moses atop Mount Sinai was, "Richmond Shalt Not Lose At The MCG".

There was even a yellow-and-black '22-0' banner draped over a balcony behind the Punt Road goals. You couldn’t blame them if they had the ‘3’ ready to go the moment the preliminary final ended on Friday night. 

But at Collingwood, they weren’t buying it. Not for a moment. 

"We were certainties. F***** certainties!" one senior Collingwood official said to this column in the jubilant Magpie rooms.

"Our best backman missed the first game against them, and we were missing two of them the next time." 

He was referring to Tyson Goldsack who tore his ACL at the start of the season and missed both the home and away clashes with the Tigers but returned – miraculously – and took on Jack Riewoldt on Friday night. Stars Adam Treloar and Jordan De Goey missed the round 19 game against the Tigers.

Both times during the home and away season, Richmond beat Collingwood, but only after kicking away late and leaving enough questions should there be a finals clash between them, with the Pies having closer to their full arsenal.

All week, the Pies were brimming with confidence. There was little they had seen from Richmond all season that had them quaking in their boots. And indeed, the Tigers themselves were wary, with coach Damien Hardwick letting it slip afterwards that he believed Collingwood was the best team they had faced all year.

The Collingwood stories add another chapter

Liking Collingwood – the club – does not sit easily with many and cue the gags about their supporters that will fly thick and fast all week.

But credit the Magpies with this, the team that will run out the for the Grand Final, and at this stage we’re anticipating next to no changes, is eminently likeable 

There are so many great stories in this Collingwood line-up, and we’re including the coach here as well, that there might not be enough hours in the week, and even enough footy journalists, to give them justice. 

Where to start? Mason Cox put in the best athletic performance by an American at the MCG since Al Oerter won the discus at the 1956 Olympics. 

Jordan De Goey is playing a finals series to die for. His redemption story has echoes of Steve Johnson in 2007.

Steele Sidebottom is one of the best 10 players on the competition. Going back to his 10-goal haul in his TAC Cup days, he is clearly born to play in September.

Tyson Goldsack back in the same season as he did his knee, Adam Treloar back – and dominating - after injuring both his hamstrings two thirds of the way through the season. 

Josh Thomas was banned from footy for two years for taking an illicit drug. He spent much of his time out of the game driving an Uber. 

Brisbane wantaways Jack Crisp and James Aish rolled the dice, leaving the relatively obscurity of the Gabba for the bright lights at Collingwood. Both will play in a Grand Final. 

The same for Will Hoskin-Elliott and Taylor Adams, who did the hard early yards at Greater Western Sydney, as did Treloar. The bulk of the former Giants ended up playing for Carlton but the cream, it would seem, found their way to Collingwood.

And then of course the heartbreaking news that former Cat Travis Varcoe lost his sister in tragic circumstances last month while playing a game of footy. 

Coach Nathan Buckley survived a searching and torturous review to keep his job. He has changed and his club has changed, but don't discount the role played by former skipper Nick Maxwell as a leadership and cultural manager. 

The 2010 premiership skipper returned to a fractious club on tenterhooks at the end of last season and he has instilled a sense of harmony and purpose. The playing group at Collingwood has not been this close for years.

It is no coincidence that the Pies and the Melbourne Storm, with which he has also been closely associated, will both be contesting their respective Grand Finals this weekend. 

Eagles return for redemption

They’ll be writing MBA case studies about both Collingwood and West Coast after this Grand Final. Just as Buckley has discovered his inner chill, West Coast’s Adam Simpson has become renowned at his club for keeping a level head.

Simpson could have been excused for throwing the toys out of the cot after a year in which he lost Nic Naitanui to another knee injury, which was followed by the media circus at the airport, which was entirely the club’s fault. 

There was the Andrew Gaff suspension, which ordinarily might have derailed the season and even the mysterious Liam Ryan car accident, which in football-obsessed Perth became a very big deal. 

But not to Simpson.

"His strength is that he’s extremely calm in a crisis. I think he analyses things well, he’s extremely prepared to take on advice and listen to people and that’s always a good trait in coaching because if you just become very narrow and focused and think there’s only one way to go you get trapped in a bubble," Eagles chief executive Trevor Nisbett told the AFL Record last week.

And while the Eagles would love to have Gaff, Naitanui and injured defender Brad Sheppard at his disposal on Saturday, Simpson must surely appreciate that he enters this Grand Final with his team in excellent shape. 

Twelve of them return to the scene of the 46-point loss to Hawthorn in the 2015 decider, but the Eagles seem to be a mentally tougher and more resourceful unit. Kennedy had a nightmare that afternoon, failing to register a score, while Darling infamously dropped a simple chest mark near goal in the third term when the Eagles were mounting something of a rally. 

This year, the Eagles are 12-0 when they both play. And in Mark LeCras, Jamie Cripps, Liam Ryan and Willie Rioli, they have a host of other scoring options. Ryan gracing the MCG on Grand Final might be worth the price of admission alone, while it should be mandatory that every flag decider features a Rioli.

Equal footing

We have written before in this column about how the AFL, with its various equalization measures, seeks to emulate the NFL with its ‘Any Given Sunday’ mantra.

Folks, we’re getting closer. 

West Coast and Collingwood were virtually nobody’s tip to meet in the Grand Final. The Eagles were an unconvincing sixth last year, the Pies 13th and in all sorts.

But the last three years have thrown up six different grand finalists. It is a marketer’s dream and a great outcome for the League.

And at the start of a long and arduous pre-season, when a coach throws out the "Why not us?" argument for his players to chew on, he can throw the Western Bulldogs and Sydney, Richmond and Adelaide and now, West Coast and Collingwood at them.

And their players will believe.

Did the Dees choke?

Some quick takeaways from the beaten preliminary finalists.

The lingering question over Richmond was always "what if?", as in what if one of the big four was injured enough in a big game to be rendered ineffective, and what if Alex Rance was made to be, you know, accountable. 

We got the answer on Friday night. A great team becomes, well, good. The Tigers had no choice but to play Dustin Martin, even if only to establish whether the competition’s Superman has his limitations. Now we know.

As for Rance, the Pies played him beautifully by keeping him isolated in his defensive 50 and limiting his opportunities to peel off his man and follow the ball. Such a strategy is easy in theory, tougher in practice, so well done to Buckley for getting it right. 

When looking at Melbourne, it is hard to believe the team that stared down Geelong and Hawthorn in successive weeks at the MCG and having beaten the Eagles in Perth barely a month ago, could be reduced to such a bumbling, fumbling mess.

And when the chief culprit was Jordan Lewis, brought to the club specifically for that big game, hostile territory experience, you just knew it was going to be a long afternoon for the Demons.

The dreaded ‘c’ word, as in ‘choke’ is being freely thrown around to describe Melbourne’s effort. You’d like to not to go there, but having seen how poor the Demons were, it is hard to come up with a better description.

THE MOMENT Jordy's handball from hell

It's time for change

The raucous atmosphere at the MCG on Friday night was as good as advertised. It was a Richmond home game, yet the jungle drums as the Tigers ran out were drowned out by the "Collingwood" chant emanating from the Ponsford Stand end goals.

But there’s no getting away from the disappointment that there were about 5000 empty seats in the MCC Members Reserve, when the rest of the ground sold out in just hours and members of both clubs, as well as the AFL, didn't come close to getting a ticket.

It wasn't a great look and it is incumbent on MCC chief executive Stuart Fox, a great footy person, to have the discussion with his committee about finding a way to ensure that if their own members don't turn up then the seats be made available to AFL club members and the public who didn't get a seat.

It has been a point of contention between the AFL and the MCC for years, but surely there is an answer to the problem somewhere. A sold-out game should mean that every seat in the house is occupied and perhaps the time has come for no more MCC walk-ups for the handful of games each year in which massive crowds have become the norm. They should pre-book their seat like everyone else.