AFL powerhouse Collingwood Football Club has officially confirmed that veteran club champion Scott Pendlebury will be rested for this week’s high-stakes Thursday blockbuster against Hawthorn, leaving the exact date of his historic league games record breaking still up in the air.
At 38 years old, Pendlebury is currently just one game short of matching Brent Harvey’s long-standing all-time AFL record of 432 senior matches. Following a standout performance in the Anzac Day clash against Essendon that earned him a fourth Anzac Day medal, the club faced questions over whether the veteran would line up just five days later against Hawthorn, a turnaround coach Craig McRae says was always likely to be too much for the aging star.
McRae revealed that the call to rest Pendlebury ultimately came from the player himself, after pre-planned conversations about managing his workload through the demanding season. “Pendles, funnily enough, I had a conversation with him yesterday and he was pretty keen to miss this game,” McRae told reporters. “So he’ll be managed, 38 years old, five-day breaks, all those things, but it’s not like it’s a reaction to this game – it was planned to some degree. It was never completely ruling him out until, like I said, we talked to the athlete and the athlete says, ‘I think I would enjoy the break’.”
The current timeline will see Pendlebury equal Harvey’s record when Collingwood faces Geelong at the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground the following week. But the club is still yet to lock in when he will officially break the record, facing a tricky balancing act between on-field performance and off-field celebration after that clash.
After the Geelong match, Collingwood is scheduled to travel to Sydney to face the ladder-leading Sydney Swans, before returning to the MCG for a match against West Coast the week after that. The club must now choose between fielding one of their most valuable players for the tough away clash against the competition leaders, or resting him to let him break the record in front of a home crowd against West Coast – a moment that would draw major fan and media attention.
McRae declined to reveal the club’s future plans for Pendlebury, noting the decision would depend on how the veteran’s body holds up after the Geelong game, and that competitive performance will always be a core factor in the call. “It’s a delicate balance,” McRae said. “Potentially, yeah, but do you have the Powerball numbers for me this Thursday? It’s hard to predict the future. We’re living in the moment of what is, so he won’t play this week, then he’ll play Geelong and we’ll see where that goes. We’ll have a conversation about how his body is and we all weigh up performance too.”
While Collingwood will be without their veteran playmaker against Hawthorn, they will welcome back star defender and captain Darcy Moore, who has been sidelined through the pre-season and early rounds with recurring soft tissue issues. Moore had indicated he was ready to play last week, but the club opted for a cautious approach to avoid further injury setbacks. McRae confirmed this week that Moore would definitely line up against the Hawks: “Darcy will play, yeah, like we said this time last week, we were ambitious he would play but he’s available.”