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CTV > Mick Malthouse's Friday press conferenceCOLLINGWOOD coach Mick Malthouse has poured cold water on media speculation suggesting his club will make a bold bid to secure Brisbane's Jonathan Brown at the end of the season.
Brown, 26, will be out of contract at the end of the year, but Malthouse denied the Magpies had already set in motion a plan to capture the power forward's highly-coveted signature.
“Since I've come to Collingwood one of the things that's been very evident is that when a player is coming out of contract he's linked to Collingwood,” Malthouse said on Friday.
“There's little, if any truth in it, whatsoever.”
Ben Cousins is another player more than a few Pies fans wouldn’t mind seeing in black and white next year.
Malthouse revealed that he would be catching up with his former player while he was in Melbourne, but he took the opportunity to nip any 'Cousins to Collingwood' speculation in the bud.
“Ben’s here at the moment and I’ll be seeing Ben today just to have a chat, but that’s as far as that goes. It is no indicator whatsoever that Collingwood will be recruiting Ben Cousins,” he said of the former Eagle.
“He’s got his year [suspension] to serve and what Ben does after that, I hope he does get back into football.”
Collingwood faces a stern test against North Melbourne at the MCG on Saturday night.
Malthouse said he would demand a more even contribution from a playing group well beaten last week by Carlton.
“We came to the conclusion that nine players from Carlton would have been ahead of our first player,” he said.
“It's very difficult to win a game of football when you just can't get key players playing good footy.
“Quite frankly we just didn’t have enough good players to win on the day and that’s something that we just have to get better at; just having a flatter [form] line and don’t get underneath the line which we did.
“I think we’ve played reasonable football in a couple of games this year and a couple of times we’ve just slipped below the standard and last week they never let us back up to the standard.”
The pressure on the ball carrier that the Magpies have become renowned for in recent times was sorely lacking against the Blues and Malthouse admitted he had put plenty of thought into getting to the root of the problem.
“How do you address that? Is it attitude? I wouldn’t have thought it was attitude or it shouldn’t be attitude,” he said.
“Is it pace? I wouldn’t have thought we are necessarily slower than our opponents. Was it productivity? Yep, because we got the ball inside 50 more and we didn’t capitalise so there’s a little bit of work to be done there. Is it ease of which the opposition scored? Yep, and there’s a little bit of work to be done there.”
Despite the two teams sharing a 2-2 win-loss record, Collingwood is clearly favoured in the betting market, but Malthouse wasn’t concerning himself with any perceived lack of respect for North Melbourne in the football community.
“The Collingwood Football Club, and I’ll [speak for] the other 14 clubs, from my observation they have a massive amount of respect for North Melbourne; the coaching staff, the playing personnel and the club itself,” he said.
“Anyone can harp on wanting to be underdogs or ‘we’ve got no respect’, let me assure you that we have the utmost respect [for them] given the fact that I’ve coached Dean, he’s been here as a coach, we’ve seen North Melbourne stand up and want to be counted and stay here in Melbourne … they are a highly-respected side in our eyes.”
