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Player Watch Darcy Moore

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Sea fog said:
Wilkie is relatively short for a key defender.
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What happened to Taylor from GWS? Everyone was saying he was the best defender in the AFL.
 
jmac70 said:
Yeah, but Captain?
Should have been Moore.
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With how well GWS have done against all predictions I don't think it's that outrageous. Whilst I think Moore is a better captain, this is hardly a Tom Hawkins is captain scenario
 
Apex36 said:
Well done Darcy. Weird that they’d pick Greene as captain over a guy lauded as the most classy, composed captain in the comp, but this is AA so they’re always going to be some weird decisions.
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Captaincy is hard to judge from the outside, however it seems the form of sides towards the end season added some recency bias. While Moore was out injured Greene and Bont were leading sides pressing hard for finals and playing great footy. Moore was lauded for his ANZAC day and Robert Rose cup speeches, but they were made earlier in the year.

On Moore I’ve never seen a captain try and lead the fans too, whether that’s through public comment or reeving up the cheer squad. We’re fortunate that Moore and McRae are trying to take the fan base along for the journey.
 

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But wait, there’s Moore: Why the Collingwood captain is not a conventional footballer
ByGreg Baum


Recently, Collingwood captain and newly re-anointed All-Australian Darcy Moore found himself speaking Indonesian again.

Approached by a classmate in a subject called Indonesia Rising, part of a masters course in international relations he is doing at the University of Melbourne, Moore was pleasantly surprised to find that the difficult language he learned at school and furthered as an undergraduate held up in conversation. Luckily, there was no footy talk to be lost in translation.

As the son of a former Collingwood captain and dual Brownlow medallist, Moore calls footy his “oldest passion”, but only one of many.

His favourite, he says, is reading. He has just finished a biography of Alexander McQueen, the maverick British fashion designer who died by suicide at 40, and, aptly, a book called The Sporting Gene by David Epstein. Over many years, his reading list has been, to say the least, eclectic. He says he has three or four books on the go at any one time. “I’m always trying to learn more. I’m a bit of a sponge in that sense,” he said.

Juxtaposed with his football persona, it might be thought that Moore has an alter ego. He says it’s simply that he needs an identity outside the game to balance and develop his place in it. Footy is his providence, and a rich one, but not exclusively his raison d’etre. Besides, he says, he’s at his best when his hands are full. Within reason, he tries to say yes to everything.

When the Magpies were locked away in a hub on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast during COVID, Moore began to cut teammates’ hair, teaching himself from YouTube. Then an enterprising manufacturer sent him a set of clippers. “Before I knew it, I had seven or eight appointments back-to-back,” he said. “I really enjoyed it. It was actually a nice way to connect with the guys.” Moore says it was the pandemic that kindled his interest in geopolitics; he had to know how the world worked.



Collingwood might never have had a player like Moore. They’ve certainly never had a captain like him. Nearly 204 centimetres tall, athletic, with straggly blond hair, he would stand out anyway, but the figure he cuts is only part of it. He’s like the bustling multifarious side street where we meet for coffee, a Twiggy Dunne flat punt away from the site of John Wren’s legendary tote: distinctively Collingwood, historically Collingwood, but more than that, nouveau Collingwood. In that way, Moore personifies the club.



The wider footy world was alerted to this new stripe of Magpie at the MCG on Anzac Day when he somehow pulled his head out of what was a close, screamingly tense game in front of 95,000 to make an eloquent speech minutes later, moving beyond the standard thank-yous to include veterans and the families of serving soldiers. “Too often your stories go untold and on behalf of the Collingwood football club, we just want to acknowledge the pain of war that runs through so many families across the country,” he said, his words reverberating in the amphitheatre.

Moore said his mother’s father had fought in Papua New Guinea during World War II and she, Jane, still wore his medals on Anzac Day. He had read widely about its meaning in the week before the match and meditated on Collingwood’s visit to the Shrine of Remembrance, and then on match morning was struck by headlines from the royal commission on veteran suicides. “I just felt that in the position I had, I had something to say, to speak to those people and make them feel seen,” he said.



Grateful letters arrived from veterans all over. The common theme was they had feared Anzac Day had become no more than a big footy match. Moore had alleviated that.

More than most clubs, names recur at Collingwood. Their DNA is DNA. But Moore represents a particular strand. His paternal grandparents were both academics and his father, Peter, apart from winning Brownlow medals at Collingwood and Melbourne, was a commercial lawyer and now divides his time between Melbourne and the US, where he is executive chairman of a gold and copper mining company in Nevada. Darcy says his father is scrupulous about leaving him space for his own footy journey, but is only ever a phone call away. When he was named captain, they spoke 10 times over three days.



His sister, Grace, was a model and is now a filmmaker. One elder step-sister is studying occupational therapy, the other with her partner runs a business that makes and markets healthy soda water. The creative gene expresses itself in many ways.

Darcy wasn’t born until nearly 10 years after his father retired, so his shadow, though constant, wasn’t overbearing. Conferred fame in any case is not as overwhelming as it might seem when it is all you have ever known. Moore remembers the attention when young, but says such pressure as he feels is all from his own “headstrong” ambition. His childhood privilege was to play kick-to-kick with Mick Malthouse pre-game after the change-room doors were shut to everyone else, and his childhood idols were also his friends and some became teammates. He’s in-house, and yet he’s not.

At six and seven, he watched from the fence as Collingwood lost two grand finals (rite of Magpie passage, really; his father played in five and won none). “The vivid memory I have is of Scott Burns getting tackled or bumped over the boundary line, right in front of where I was sitting. I remember the intensity of that moment, the raw physicality of the game, the biggest game of the year,” he said. “It really left its mark on me. To think that I’m the one on the other side of the fence now is pretty crazy.”

Collingwood ruckman Peter Moore soars for a mark in 1979.


It’s why he makes a point of engaging with fans during and after matches now (and sometimes, he discloses, asking one or two to tone it down, just a bit). At full-back, they literally have his back. To him, they are all Collingwood, a snowball. “It’s pretty special when they jump on our backs and bring us home,” he said. “I’ve had lots of opposition players and opposition captains say to me that they’re really envious of the supporters once we get up and going.” He almost shivers with excitement when he thinks about the month to come.

On his pre-ordained Collingwood path, Moore began in the Peter Daicos Academy and learned his early craft from Craig McRae, then a development coach at the club; he chuckles to think that they are now senior captain and coach.

The leadership chromosome had long before asserted itself. Moore was school captain at Carey Grammar and captain of the Oakleigh Chargers in the elite under-18 competition. At Collingwood, he was a leader well before he was given the portfolio.



In 2021, he fronted the Collingwood players’ earnest response to the confronting Do Better report into systemic racism at the club. He’d been especially shaken by erstwhile crowd favourite Leon Davis’ account. “Reading his story of his experiences for me was particularly difficult. I grew up idolising him,” Moore said. “So to hear him explain his experiences and speak about how he felt at Collingwood really was quite jarring to me.

“To have him back now and helping us work towards a better future is really quite exciting for the club.”

This year, Moore as captain attended an Indigenous healing ceremony at Victoria Park, marking 30 years since the crowd infamously fell on St Kilda’s Nicky Winmar there and Winmar’s immortal jumper-lifting response.

Moore said he had hesitated to go; Collingwood were not the good guys in that episode and had nothing to commemorate. But he had had contact with Winmar in the preceding week, and knew that leadership sometimes entailed going to uncomfortable places, and besides, Victoria Park was home now to magpies but not Magpies.

The ceremony at Victoria Park.
The ceremony at Victoria Park.CREDIT:WAYNE LUDBEY

On the night, Winmar asked Moore to speak rather than club president Jeff Browne. As on Anzac Day, his words resonated widely. “Seeing the young ones here today just really inspires me to keep working towards a shared future where we can all walk together in strength and solidarity,” he said. “It’s an honour to be here.” Looking back now, Moore said: “To be part of that and to see the emotion and how raw it is for them still was a reminder about the deep scar ra
 

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If you haven't been exposed to much of Greg Baum's work before, you really should find an afternoon to read all of his historical pieces. Sure, he might be a bit pompous for some, but Baum makes you see the footy world (both on and off-field) in a different light.

"distinctively Collingwood, historically Collingwood, but more than that, nouveau Collingwood" - such an exquisite line.
 
beez said:
If you haven't been exposed to much of Greg Baum's work before, you really should find an afternoon to read all of his historical pieces. Sure, he might be a bit pompous for some, but Baum makes you see the footy world (both on and off-field) in a different light.

"distinctively Collingwood, historically Collingwood, but more than that, nouveau Collingwood" - such an exquisite line.
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Baum is a Pies man.
 
If you can, try to catch the Foxtel interview of last night, where Gary Lyon interviewed Darcy Moore.

Probably didn’t tell us much more than we already know about our very impressive captain, but two things stood out for me:
  • Lyon looked nervous, as though he wasn’t all that comfortable with interviewing Darcy. Perhaps a bit overawed by him? And Lyon is no slouch.
  • Darcy came up with a memorable way to describe Collingwood, and said it several times: we are a ‘club of consequence’. I like it, although Mr Park didn’t fully understand what he meant. I said think about it…
 
Vicky Park said:
If you can, try to catch the Foxtel interview of last night, where Gary Lyon interviewed Darcy Moore.

Probably didn’t tell us much more than we already know about our very impressive captain, but two things stood out for me:
  • Lyon looked nervous, as though he wasn’t all that comfortable with interviewing Darcy. Perhaps a bit overawed by him? And Lyon is no slouch.
  • Darcy came up with a memorable way to describe Collingwood, and said it several times: we are a ‘club of consequence’. I like it, although Mr Park didn’t fully understand what he meant. I said think about it…
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Haven't seen it yet, but unfortunate that it was Lyon interviewing him. Would have been interested to see someone a bit better have a chat with Darce
 
Face-To-Face with Darcy Moore
 
Licking his lips at the thought of playing on Tom McDonald
 

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Vicky Park said:
If you can, try to catch the Foxtel interview of last night, where Gary Lyon interviewed Darcy Moore.

Probably didn’t tell us much more than we already know about our very impressive captain, but two things stood out for me:
  • Lyon looked nervous, as though he wasn’t all that comfortable with interviewing Darcy. Perhaps a bit overawed by him? And Lyon is no slouch.
  • Darcy came up with a memorable way to describe Collingwood, and said it several times: we are a ‘club of consequence’. I like it, although Mr Park didn’t fully understand what he meant. I said think about it…
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Mr Park has a wife of consequence.
 
YouBeauty said:
Licking his lips at the thought of playing on Tom McDonald
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T-Mac might drag him up the ground a bit…
 
I reckon many of the questions could have been more probing. Lyon did look a bit nervy. Darcy seemed to be a bit amused at some of the questions. I saw this on Foxy.
 
Sea fog said:
I reckon many of the questions could have been more probing. Lyon did look a bit nervy. Darcy seemed to be a bit amused at some of the questions. I saw this on Foxy.
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Agree, it was a bit… surface-skimming? Always great to hear Darc talk, but it seemed like 30 minutes of filler.
 
bow down harry potter GIF
 
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