Source : ABC NEWS
Sit long enough in the outer of a footy game and the hot takes will start flying fast. Sometimes they start out innocuous, like about how much they should just kick the bloody thing.
But usually things get interesting as the game gets deeper. Opinions on the state of the world — both footy and real — usually proliferate conversation in the lulls of the action.
Differing views of one player tend to come up perhaps more than any other footy-based topic — the player in Collingwood’s number 35 guernsey.
“I am on record as saying that Daicos is the best player in the comp,” Geelong coach Chris Scott told the media ahead of their game against Collingwood last month.
At just 23 years old, Nick Daicos has achieved more than most players do across an entire career. Daicos is already a premiership-winning four-time All Australian. This year Daicos has already won the Coaches Association and Players’ Association MVPs (his second of each), and is a heavy favourite for Collingwood’s Copeland Trophy.
Despite starting this year off slowly, he has already been deemed by many to be the presumptive Brownlow Medallist and a chance to break the all-time record for votes under the current system.
Both Collingwood and Daicos have kicked into another gear after the bye, entrenching themselves in the finals race for yet another season.
“He’s that diligent and professional in his game, and his desire to win,” Collingwood coach Craig McRae told the media last week.
“His game’s gone to another level. He takes us to places that we want to get to.”
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More importantly, Nick Daicos may be the single most exciting player to watch in football. If you had to recommend the highlights of one current player to watch for anyone new to the sport, Daicos is probably the choice.
Yet Daicos has not been above criticism from some corners of footy fandom. Some armchair critics deride the “soft” ball that he wins. Others poke at other parts of his game, or compare him to greats of eras past. At the same time, those in black and white are already calling for Daicos to be considered on track to be one of the greatest ever.
This weekend sees Daicos come head-to-head with another player often tabbed as the best player in the game; the Bulldogs’ Marcus Bontempelli. For each player and their sides, they could be playing the last game of 2026 unless they can demonstrate something special.
Form and function
The famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright said that form and function are in union, not separate concepts.
Most football players follow this conceptual framework. If Errol Gulden is like the Opera House, Sam Collins is more like Scrivener Dam. Both fit their form to the function required.
There are few more aesthetically striking players from a footballing perspective than Nick Daicos across the history of the game. Some may opt for a Gary Ablett or Andrew McLeod. Generations earlier would have named Haydn Bunton and John Coleman. A select few might even nominate the elder Daicos, Peter. In style if not impact, Daicos is already in illustrious company.
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Daicos glides over the turf, with his feet seemingly barely touching the surface. Defenders often fall by the wayside, not through contact but instead from movement, endurance and pure speed. If Daicos gets a centimetre of spare grass ahead of him, he’ll take a kilometre.
To co-opt the language of the young, his bag is deep.
Daicos’s visual appeal — the form — matches his function on the field. Daicos’s job is to attack at all costs and to drive the ball forward.
Collingwood looks to get Daicos the ball at ground level at every opportunity they can. In open play, they look to feed him via hand, whether it’s peeling around the man on the mark or as a floating target around the ground. Daicos’s running ability means that he is usually able to create separation from any trailing opponent. Every Pie looks to handball it to Daicos more than any other teammate.
No player in the league is involved in a larger share of his team’s scores. Daicos is involved in nearly two-fifths of his team’s scores, part of the build-up on almost 30 per cent of scores and finishing the job another 8 per cent of the time.
When Daicos gets the ball, his use, as mentioned above, is utterly spellbinding at times. He is able to consistently hit kicks few others in the league can dream of, often drilling kicks off balance or with little space. It’s this ability that forces opponents into hives.
But it’s also something that has gotten him into trouble in the past.
Dialling down the risk
Daicos’s purple patch coincided with the star doing something that ran slightly counter to his modus operandi. For about a month or so in the middle of the season, Daicos dialled down the risk when using the ball via foot, focusing on finding the percentage target instead of hitting home runs with every kick.
Early in the year, Daicos was often attempting the nearly impossible, often with poor results. Collingwood’s attack suffered as a result.
Daicos shifted his approach to be a little less expansive. With about the same volume of touches, he’s clearing the ball more but gaining fewer metres and kicking inside 50 less often.
In the first half of the year, Daicos turned the ball over more than he has historically, and more than expected given the difficulty of his kicks. After the break, Daicos has been able to keep the ball in black and white hands more often.
This change is most noticeable when Daicos has gone inside 50. As the number of entries has dropped, the production has increased. In the first half of the year, Daicos’s kicks inside 50 resulted in 1.1 points per kick on average — below the league-wide average. Between rounds 13 and 18, this number more than doubled, setting the league-wide pace.
In the past month, Daicos has dialled the risk back up, harming his ability to retain the ball in the process. But the results are much more successful than earlier in the season, and Collingwood have kept their heads above water in the process.
Stopping Nick
One of the key questions for teams facing Collingwood is how to stop Daicos, or at least quell his influence.
The first tactic that often comes up is that of tagging. According to the man himself, tagging isn’t something that concerns either Collingwood or himself.
“I think there’s so many ways you can get around a tag,” Daicos explained to the media last year.
“But to be honest, it’s probably something that the media talks about more than us. I think everyone out there … has an opponent. So it’s something that we don’t really focus on.”
Even if the tagger is over-hyped by the media, it’s undeniable that some sides have tried throwing a negating option at the Pies star. The variety of options has varied from a purely defensive run-with option to a stoppage-only match-up, with different levels in between.
The traditional wisdom for tagging an outside player (even one that goes in at stoppages) is pretty simple — apply physical pressure early, keep in direct contact, act as a “caravan” trailing the player.
In years past the most important objective would be to push a player like Daicos away from goal and not let them get goal side under any circumstance.
For Daicos, that guidance is flawed from the outset. His speed and agility make tracking him from behind a fool’s errand, turning opponents into spectators.
Instead, opposition sides have increasingly been trying to prevent him from getting goal side. Teams have tried to send multiple players in to pressure and limit his ability to use the ball. Daicos struggles more — as all players do — when he is denied options ahead or sees pressure. Despite Collingwood being adept at getting Daicos free from his direct opponent, being willing to defend with multiple players has had some success.
The other, more radical tactic has been to attack his weaknesses.
Flawed excellence
It goes without saying that no football player is perfect.
It makes sense that the weaknesses for the most aesthetically appealing player are the more invisible parts of football. Beyond his propensity to perhaps bite off too much with his ball use, the least impressive parts of Daicos’s game are also the hardest to measure and evaluate.
Despite Daicos’s speed and endurance, the defensive side of his game can often be exploited. Sometimes Daicos can be caught out looking to win the ball at contests, without providing appropriate defensive protection on lost hit-outs. This can be a risky move, but early success can shift his focus on ball-winning.
This is the most common tactic of the Bulldogs when opposing Daicos and the Pies, as demonstrated in round 12 this year. In that hard-fought Dogs win, Daicos racked up the ball but the likes of Ed Richards and Bontempelli did huge amounts of damage on their own. The Dogs won the clearance battle, but did damage on the scoreboard via intercept scoring, attacking the weak Pies transition defence.
Blessed with a deep midfield group, the Dogs have usually decided to play their natural game when coming up against the Pies, including falling into broader team structures. That game at stoppage includes a pretty disciplined defensive set-up that can turn on a dime into attack when required.
Away from the contest, Daicos often acts as a free radical, looking to generate time and space to counter-attack on his own. He appears to have licence to anticipate turnovers and move before a clear ball is won. This requires a high level of understanding of how footy is played and the cues behind the game. This often results in some of his (and Collingwood’s) most stunning highlights.
But when it backfires, it can leave Collingwood exposed. There aren’t numbers or indicators that track off-ball positioning, but it often shows up in team-wide trends. This year Collingwood has struggled at defending the whole field, conceding at high rates from defensive 50 and the defensive half.
The Pies have slowly declined in their ability to defend transition as they have increasingly reworked their midfield around Daicos. While their strong, all-ground defence helped carry them to the 2023 flag, it has often been left wanting this year. This may be hurt by the absence of Darcy Moore and a rotating cast down back, but has not been helped by an overly attacking perspective on their own counter-attack.
Instead of prioritising winning through stopping other sides from scoring more than them, the Magpies appear to instead be focusing on scoring more than their opposition.
While individual defensive numbers such as tackles should be taken with a grain of salt, it’s rare for a player to be around the ball as much as Daicos without laying physical pressure on the ball.
It’s hard to unpick how much of these perceived defensive issues are from his own ability, and how many are dictated by the role he has to play for Collingwood to keep their attack above water. Daicos is far from the only attacking weapon to spend less energy on defence. Regardless, it’s a side of his game often ignored when looking at disposal counts, metres gained, score involvements and goals kicked.
For some, it’s what stops him being considered in the same tier as players such as Marcus Bontempelli.
Daicos’s other flaws are significantly smaller, and mostly relate to where he lacks relative to other dynamic top midfielders.
Most obviously, Daicos has been notably non-competitive in the air. Unlike many taller midfielders, he does not win one-out marking battles and took until his 82nd game to take his first contested mark.
Perhaps this is part of why he also hasn’t been a regularly damaging target inside 50, taking opponents deep to exploit defensive mismatches.
These skills may develop with greater maturity, and make him even harder to stop.
Can Daicos drag the Pies deep?
Friday night’s game shapes as the first test on whether Daicos can drag Collingwood to further September glory. The fate of Collingwood this year likely relies on how much they can get out of the rest of their side, rather than anything more they can extract from their best player. That task will be far harder without Scott Pendlebury to call on.
Perhaps the biggest wish for Pies fans is that there could be more than one Nick Daicos, and more than one ball for him to use. Despite leading the league in disposals, Daicos still only gets about 10 per cent of the Magpies’ touches. Despite leading the league in score involvement percentage, most Collingwood scores still happen without him.
As good as he is, the path to further success may paradoxically involve using him less often — developing other paths to goal, other threats to draw attention away.
The answer to the puzzle, despite his individual brilliance, might be infuriatingly out of his hands.
