Jeremy Howe cleared of major injury, as Craig McRae says Collingwood players refused to fight in Hawthorn thumping

McRae admitted his team was “rocked” by Jeremy Howe’s sickening concussion in the opening minutes, and while concerned at how disorganised the backline looked without Howe, he refused to use the star defender’s absence as an excuse.

Scans cleared Howe, who was taken to hospital, of any further damage and the club confirmed he was home and “recovering well” but would enter concussion protocols with a return to play unclear.

Howe’s loss came as the Magpies suffered a fourth loss from the past five matches and, concerningly, all of those defeats have been against top-eight teams.

After sitting 10 points clear on top of the ladder a mere five weeks ago, and being in first place for 11 straight rounds, they could drop to fourth by Saturday.

All of a sudden they’re no guarantee of a double chance after being premiership favourites for the bulk of the season.

The usually upbeat McRae couldn’t hide his devastation after what he agreed was Collingwood’s worst performance of the year.

“I apologise to our Magpie Army,” he said.

“That’s a disappointing performance. You can’t sugarcoat that.

“We’re hurting. That one really hurt. Just a lack of system and then a lack of fight, lack of effort – sometimes at the same time, which leaves us really vulnerable.

“When we get behind, we want to chase. Six goals is not enough for me for our fans to watch at home. I don’t know how many kept watching right through the end.

“Your 114,000 members expect a certain amount of effort and we didn’t have it.”

McRae said he needed to quickly “glue” his team back together with just two games left before finals.

“We just had some really poor efforts at times,” he said.

“This is the reality of what we’ve got right now. Like I’ve always said to our players, nothing’s permanent.

“For a long time I don’t recall us having that poor of connection … we got hurt really bad.

“We’ve got … 19 or 20 100-game players. They know how to play their role.

“We’ve got to back our system in. It’s served us well and under pressure, under adversity, go back to what you know and go do your job and it’s up to me to glue them together … and we take responsibility for what we did tonight.”

McRae was in “no doubt” that his players had started thinking about outcomes rather than staying in the moment and focusing on the process.

“You can see it and I call it out when I see it,” he said.

“We come back to minutes and seconds. So we lost a few minutes and seconds tonight, but we’ve got to stay present to that. When you start to think outcome and expectation, then you’re not doing, you’re thinking.

“So you come to a stoppage and you’re out of the position, we go, ‘Hey, come on. What are you doing in that position?’ So you start to think more than do.”

The Collingwood coach also suspected his players had started going into their shells during games, and he had a simple solution for that.

“If you’re quiet, talk,” he said.

“What do you do when you have confidence and have form? Just do that. ‘Oh, I’m quiet when I’ve got no confidence’ – well, then, be loud. ‘I don’t go for my marks’ – well, go for your marks. ‘I tackle when I’ve got confidence’ – well, tackle. So they’re actions, not thoughts. It’s right in front of us.”

McRae said the early loss of Howe couldn’t be used as an excuse for defensive disorganisation.

“Three guys flying at the one ball, spoiling at the same time, is not system, and we’ve worked on that all pre-season,” McRae said.

“Those things we can fix. The effort stuff I’d like to think is an anomaly.”

Despite the worrying trajectory his team is on, McRae remains supremely confident about what Collingwood can achieve this year.

“There’s still lots of minutes as far as I’m aware, and we’ll make the most of those,” he said.

Originally published as Jeremy Howe cleared of major injury, as Craig McRae says Collingwood players refused to fight in Hawthorn thumping