News Collingwood News & Media
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JuniorB
Norm Smith Medallist
We better win the bloody thing now!
On a things are way better without Buckley tangent yes
- Mar 16, 2014
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The Galbally's have provided legal advice for the club for years and years. Which is not to say there aren't bullshit artists all the way through -- Eddie is a classic one.
Fat Jesus
Norm Smith Medallist
- Oct 22, 2021
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P Daicos.
He also praised president Jeff Browne, saying: “the thing with Jeff is that he loves the anonymity of it all, he is sitting in the background..
- Mar 28, 2023
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Fat Jesus
Norm Smith Medallist
- Oct 22, 2021
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Also BF experts telling us he's a hack. The wrong person for the job.Take that Ed
He has been exceptionally good to now.
- Jun 10, 2014
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Jack Galbally didn’t label himself the club’s honorary solicitor as far as I am aware. Francis labelling himself that whilst the club used an external legal firm is absolute bs.
Dunno what you are suggesting re: Eddie.
On iPhone using BigFooty.com mobile app
Dunno what you are suggesting re: Eddie.
On iPhone using BigFooty.com mobile app
- Mar 28, 2023
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It's so refreshing not having the top kahuna creating headlines every week just for the sake of it & to boost his own ego.
Fat Jesus
Norm Smith Medallist
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Galbally was the Magpies’ honorary solicitor from 1976-94 and is a prominent Melbourne businessman.
He was also the one in President Brownes corner helping to bring him in.
- Jun 10, 2014
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Can’t have been doing too much honorary work when the club was using and paying other lawyers. It’s a bullshizen term. Don’t get sucked in.
On iPhone using BigFooty.com mobile app
- Nov 13, 2008
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- Sydney Sweeney's Shaving Team...
Yeh there's a common theme to most malthouse communication about the pies...although there is the recent thing about the ginnivan incident which suggests that he might refocus on the fly....which probably comes under a similar theme of things were best under him
whiteside35
Debutant
i've never liked it when there's been too much Collingwood in the news before a big game,especially articles like this(i'm all for it if we win the flag),but we have not achieved anything yet,like some have said before,if we don't win the flag they will come from everywhere to belt us.
76woodenspooners
Brownlow Medallist
They’re not really articles about success.
They’re more like a retrospective. Us punters see how we got here through public events. I reckon it’s interesting reading the perspective of the protagonists who were involved - or at least how they want things to be portrayed.
Bit of revisionist history going on IMO.
I just don’t see how on any planet Kelly could be described as the “biggest fish” in our resurgence. He’s only been at the club barely six months, our men haven’t achieved yet what they did last year, he disbanded our Netball club, and he’s in all likelihood pissed off our AFLW players with his public comments. He may end up being great for Collingwood, but if he is it’s way way too soon.
- Nov 13, 2008
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i dont think there's much doubt that it's either of two things...a set up before a big clout that they're going to deliver when we lose..... or they're scared that the bubble will burst and they want to get all the feel-good stories out before the bubble bursts and pie fans come looking for blood. Either way, it's a hint that bad news is likely in the short term.
- Nov 13, 2008
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I agree with the last comment. Ned has acted as I would have expected him to. Not very subtle.... The bad vibe of his handling of the netball withdrawl probably couldnt have been worse.
And his private comments if you believe that article from Caro a couple of weeks ago.
Also will be interesting to see if there is any medium-term fallout from what he is doing to membership prices.
76woodenspooners
Brownlow Medallist
Harsh.
Ed’s job is in the media. If he wasn’t making headlines he wouldn’t be doing his job.
Given that Jeff doesn’t have a media job, you’d reasonably expect him to be more low key.
- Mar 28, 2023
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I don't think it's harsh at all. If his job in the media constantly put the club in the headlines unnecessarily, then he had a conflict of interest. Every time he opened his mouth about anything in his multiple media roles, whether that be Collingwood related or not, it reflected on the club. And most of the time, it was negative.
So yeah, I much prefer the President of our club to work quietly, behind the scenes, not creating controversy every time he opens his gob in his other job.
sr36
TheBrownDog
I'm just disappointed that we didn't have a board spill over the Franklin booing apology.
Vicky Park
Premium Platinum
Board spills are so 2021.
Anzacday
Moderator
- Moderator
- #7,097
Finally have a Collingwood supporter in a position of power, (Chrisso doesn’t count)…
Laura Kane: I was. I was born across the road from the MCG, at St Andrews, and I think I was about 20 minutes old when my dad held me up to the window and said: ‘Collingwood are going to win a premiership over there in a couple of months’ which they did’. It was 1990. I can’t remember what I was doing at five years-old, but I’ve been told what I was doing. I was in grade prep at Chirnside Park Primary School and I played Auskick at the Chirnside Park Panthers. I was one of two girls playing.
MR: Whose number did you have on your back?
LK: I can remember at five, I can remember being in the Buckley’s Brigade and I did don the No. 5 for a while there. I don’t know Nathan all that well but I’m a fellow All Australian selector which is quite funny now that we’ve fast forwarded.
AGE 5
Mark Robinson: Any recollection at such a young age? Wearing a Collingwood jumper?Laura Kane: I was. I was born across the road from the MCG, at St Andrews, and I think I was about 20 minutes old when my dad held me up to the window and said: ‘Collingwood are going to win a premiership over there in a couple of months’ which they did’. It was 1990. I can’t remember what I was doing at five years-old, but I’ve been told what I was doing. I was in grade prep at Chirnside Park Primary School and I played Auskick at the Chirnside Park Panthers. I was one of two girls playing.
MR: Whose number did you have on your back?
LK: I can remember at five, I can remember being in the Buckley’s Brigade and I did don the No. 5 for a while there. I don’t know Nathan all that well but I’m a fellow All Australian selector which is quite funny now that we’ve fast forwarded.
An article in the Age by Greg Baum for those who are interested...
But wait, there’s Moore: Why the Collingwood captain is not a conventional footballer
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.”
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.
On the night, Winmar asked Moore to speak. 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 racism leaves.”
Though unorthodox in his own character, Moore’s seeming strength and his underpinning as captain is that he can meet other people on their terms. He maintains a friendship with the now departed Brodie Grundy, another seeker. He relates to Winmar and Leon Davis, and before them hit it off with the enigmatic Heritier Lumumba. He’s supported the scampish Jack Ginnivan through his ups and downs. When a slight hamstring injury forced Moore out of a game against Geelong late in the season, he put aside his personal irritation for a moment to hug Ginnivan, who replaced him. Ginnivan has not looked back.
The captaincy might have been Moore’s destiny, but not presumptuously. After all, he was succeeding Scott Pendlebury, who he regards as the club’s greatest player. He was gratified to get the players’ vote.
Moore says the job has surprised him in one way. “Honestly, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s reminded me again of the scale of Collingwood,” he said. “As a lifelong supporter with a famous surname, I should have as good an understanding as anyone how far-reaching it is. But still after the appointment, I found myself being surprised again about how far it does reach.”
Hundreds reached out to him, from all walks, and still do. “At Collingwood, it always feels like things are of consequence,” he said. “When things go well, it feels like it matters. When things aren’t going well, it feels like it matters. And I’ve been reminded of that.”
It amps up now, which both stimulates and confronts Moore. “Our fans seem to be connecting with the way we’re going about it, and that’s exciting,” he said. “The flipside is the fanfare, especially at this time in Melbourne. It’s pretty crazy. I’ve found that at times in my role it can be hard to be everything to everybody. So that’s certainly a challenge.”
At 27, Moore’s football stature is still growing and his horizons are ever-widening. He does not hesitate to launch, Peter Knights-like, into packs off once twangy hamstrings – he says this latest two-week break was ultra-conservative – and he revels in his role as the marshall of Collingwood’s defensive phalanx.
Moore watched Collingwood’s round 24 win over Essendon with former president Eddie McGuire, but will be back to lead the Magpies in Thursday’s qualifying final against Melbourne, prospectively an epic clash that has already sold out the MCG and would not surprise if it broke the non-grand final attendance record. That’s the Collingwood effect.
Moore laughs when it is noted that his father still has him covered for Brownlow Medals. “I don’t think a key back is going to win the Brownlow any time soon,” he said. But it won’t be for want of aspiration. “I know I’m never satisfied. Being a footballer, an athlete in general, you never arrive,” he said. “That’s sometimes a really frustrating condition, but it’s what we love about it really. It’s almost a bit of a sick mentality. You’re always chasing something you’ll never arrive at.”
Study both offsets and tempers footy’s ups and downs. His father encouraged him to think of himself as on an “athletic scholarship”, and Moore says his course and his other extra-curriculars are “an important part of my preparation”.
Most of his University of Melbourne class are from Indonesia, and many work in government, the military or media. Moore says they’ve broadened his perspective, challenged his views and taught him how to argue cogently. “As you can imagine in that context, football is not really the focus,” he said. “Sometimes, that’s kind of nice, to walk into a room and not be the subject.”
Moore is also on the AFL Players Association board. Wearing that cap, he says he would like to see the current protracted CBA negotiations become a turning point for women’s footy. “I think it’s an amazing opportunity for the game to really signal its investment and vision for the women’s game,” he said.
He and Jamie Elliott were at the Matildas’ seminal World Cup win over France in Brisbane as guests of adidas, and he went to other World Cup games in Melbourne, taking his nine-year-old niece to one. “Sitting there with her and seeing her watching women play sport in front of tens of thousands of people; when I was her age, you couldn’t do that,” he said. “The generational part of it was probably the most powerful thing for me to see. Beyond the pure excitement of the World Cup, I think we can all take that experience as the start of something for women’s sport in this country.”
Moore’s own heroes when he was young were all Collingwood footballers. As an adult, he has exemplars rather than heroes. In recent years, he has been drawn to Formula 1 and especially British great Lewis Hamilton. “I really admire his ability to stay calm under pressure,” Moore said. “The way he handled the situation in 2021 when he (controversially) lost the world championship in the last lap; I found that really interesting.”
But wait, there’s Moore: Why the Collingwood captain is not a conventional footballer
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.”
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.
On the night, Winmar asked Moore to speak. 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 racism leaves.”
Though unorthodox in his own character, Moore’s seeming strength and his underpinning as captain is that he can meet other people on their terms. He maintains a friendship with the now departed Brodie Grundy, another seeker. He relates to Winmar and Leon Davis, and before them hit it off with the enigmatic Heritier Lumumba. He’s supported the scampish Jack Ginnivan through his ups and downs. When a slight hamstring injury forced Moore out of a game against Geelong late in the season, he put aside his personal irritation for a moment to hug Ginnivan, who replaced him. Ginnivan has not looked back.
The captaincy might have been Moore’s destiny, but not presumptuously. After all, he was succeeding Scott Pendlebury, who he regards as the club’s greatest player. He was gratified to get the players’ vote.
Moore says the job has surprised him in one way. “Honestly, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s reminded me again of the scale of Collingwood,” he said. “As a lifelong supporter with a famous surname, I should have as good an understanding as anyone how far-reaching it is. But still after the appointment, I found myself being surprised again about how far it does reach.”
Hundreds reached out to him, from all walks, and still do. “At Collingwood, it always feels like things are of consequence,” he said. “When things go well, it feels like it matters. When things aren’t going well, it feels like it matters. And I’ve been reminded of that.”
It amps up now, which both stimulates and confronts Moore. “Our fans seem to be connecting with the way we’re going about it, and that’s exciting,” he said. “The flipside is the fanfare, especially at this time in Melbourne. It’s pretty crazy. I’ve found that at times in my role it can be hard to be everything to everybody. So that’s certainly a challenge.”
At 27, Moore’s football stature is still growing and his horizons are ever-widening. He does not hesitate to launch, Peter Knights-like, into packs off once twangy hamstrings – he says this latest two-week break was ultra-conservative – and he revels in his role as the marshall of Collingwood’s defensive phalanx.
Moore watched Collingwood’s round 24 win over Essendon with former president Eddie McGuire, but will be back to lead the Magpies in Thursday’s qualifying final against Melbourne, prospectively an epic clash that has already sold out the MCG and would not surprise if it broke the non-grand final attendance record. That’s the Collingwood effect.
Moore laughs when it is noted that his father still has him covered for Brownlow Medals. “I don’t think a key back is going to win the Brownlow any time soon,” he said. But it won’t be for want of aspiration. “I know I’m never satisfied. Being a footballer, an athlete in general, you never arrive,” he said. “That’s sometimes a really frustrating condition, but it’s what we love about it really. It’s almost a bit of a sick mentality. You’re always chasing something you’ll never arrive at.”
Study both offsets and tempers footy’s ups and downs. His father encouraged him to think of himself as on an “athletic scholarship”, and Moore says his course and his other extra-curriculars are “an important part of my preparation”.
Most of his University of Melbourne class are from Indonesia, and many work in government, the military or media. Moore says they’ve broadened his perspective, challenged his views and taught him how to argue cogently. “As you can imagine in that context, football is not really the focus,” he said. “Sometimes, that’s kind of nice, to walk into a room and not be the subject.”
Moore is also on the AFL Players Association board. Wearing that cap, he says he would like to see the current protracted CBA negotiations become a turning point for women’s footy. “I think it’s an amazing opportunity for the game to really signal its investment and vision for the women’s game,” he said.
He and Jamie Elliott were at the Matildas’ seminal World Cup win over France in Brisbane as guests of adidas, and he went to other World Cup games in Melbourne, taking his nine-year-old niece to one. “Sitting there with her and seeing her watching women play sport in front of tens of thousands of people; when I was her age, you couldn’t do that,” he said. “The generational part of it was probably the most powerful thing for me to see. Beyond the pure excitement of the World Cup, I think we can all take that experience as the start of something for women’s sport in this country.”
Moore’s own heroes when he was young were all Collingwood footballers. As an adult, he has exemplars rather than heroes. In recent years, he has been drawn to Formula 1 and especially British great Lewis Hamilton. “I really admire his ability to stay calm under pressure,” Moore said. “The way he handled the situation in 2021 when he (controversially) lost the world championship in the last lap; I found that really interesting.”
Naicos missing last 3 game of the season or so has really cost him some serious awards
Think he cares more about a premiership medallion
