SO ALAN Toovey wants out of Collingwood.

Not happy with the terms of the new agreement offered by the Magpies, Toovey is reportedly ready to walk to whichever other club offers him the $350,000 or so he is reportedly seeking.

Toovey is managed by Jim Marinis, who took the unusual step of emailing every club to let them know of his client’s availability. According to an interview on Tradeweek Radio on Tuesday, as many as eight clubs expressed some sort of interest.

Marinis is foolish if he believes that by going to the media, the Magpies are going to improve their offer.

And if we could bet on such things (and we probably can somewhere), we’d be putting our hard-earned on Toovey playing in the black and white stripes next year and having the Magpie fans continue to say “Tooov” rather than “boooo” whenever he gets the ball next year.

That’s because footy history tells us that many of those who come out hard and say they want to leave, invariably don’t.

Over the years, lots of big names have come out and declared that they want to change clubs. Some even nominated their new club of choice. And how footy history may have changed had they gone ahead.

Kevin Bartlett’s 20-goal haul in the 1980 finals series, including his record-equalling seven goals in the Grand Final, brought even Collingwood supporters to their feet with excitement. It’s true. Look at the tape and you’ll see Magpie fans applauding his brilliant individual effort.

Yet if Bartlett had his druthers at the start of that season, he would have been playing for the Pies that day, or perhaps watching from the stand as an Essendon player.

Feeling unloved at the Tigers and having been moved from rover to the half-forward flank the previous season, Bartlett looked at moving on from the Tigers.

As recounted in KB: A Life in Football, the biography released earlier this year, Bartlett started looking around and even signed a letter of agreement to join the Bombers.

His preference was actually to reunite with coach and great mate Tom Hafey at Victoria Park. But Hafey was aghast at the thought of a Richmond icon leaving the club and brokered a truce between Bartlett and the powerbrokers at the club who were were angling to move him on.

Within a year, Bartlett played in his fifth premiership team with the Tigers.

“He was right when he told me, ‘It would be fantastic for you to finish your career at the one club,’” wrote Bartlett of Hafey in the book.

Geoff Southby is one of the all-time greats of the Carlton Football Club. Until Steve Silvagni came along, he was the club’s greatest full-back, but today he sits comfortably alongside ‘SOS’ in a back-pocket in the Carlton Team of the Century.

Yet in the summer of 1976, Southby was off to South Melbourne. He campaigned long and hard to get there, trained with the club and played intra-club practice matches at the Lake Oval. Swearing black and blue that he would never return to Carlton, he was to be the great recruiting coup for new coach Ian Stewart.

Except that he never got there. The Blues dug their heels in and Southby relented, playing for another eight seasons at Princes Park including the 1979 Grand Final.

Before he became a TV star, Sam Newman was a Geelong icon. The boy from the “Grammar” was a champion ruckman.

Yet in the late 1970s, Newman, who lived and worked in Melbourne, got tired of the traveling and mounted a bid to be cleared to Richmond. It made all the papers and Newman mounted a reasonable case, but commonsense prevailed and he remained with the Cats.

And he remains indelibly linked to that club.

How might the great 1989 Grand Final have played out if Gary Ablett snr was playing for the Hawks and not the Cats? Ablett started his career with Hawthorn before moving to Geelong, but at the end of 1988 he wanted out of Kardinia Park and the Hawks won his signature.

But the deal was never executed, New Cats coach Malcolm Blight talked Ablett into remaining at Geelong and the signed contract remained as a keepsake in the top draw of Hawk chief executive John Lauritz’s desk for the next seven years until his retirement.

By staying with the Cats, Ablett ensured he would become one of the club’s all-time greats. And his son proved to be fairly handy as well.

More recently, Sydney Swan Ryan O’Keefe flagged a return to Melbourne at the end of 2008 and went public with his hopes to finish his career in the city where he grew up.

Hawthorn and Carlton went hard at getting his signature, but in the end, the Swans were able to convince him to stay, and O’Keefe happily swallowed his pride and remained in Sydney.

We’re not sure what fate awaits Toovey over the next few days or even weeks, because this saga might last through until the NAB AFL National Draft, or even the pre-season draft.

But there are plenty of great people in footy who would be willing to tell Toovey to wait it out and return to the Pies, who no doubt would be delighted to have him back.

In footy and in life, sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.
No trades are official until paperwork has been accepted by the AFL and formally recognised after 2pm on Monday, October 17.

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