Swan was the red-hot favourite to take out the award, but finished a distant third to Carlton‘s Chris Judd.
The Pies had a light touch session at St Kilda on Tuesday morning followed by a beach recovery where Maxwell scoffed at suggestions the events of Monday night could have a detrimental effect on the prolific onballer or the team.
“Swanny’s a pretty carefree character ... I just said ‘How are you feeling this morning?’ and he said, ‘Mate, I just want to win a flag’. Nothing has changed,” Maxwell said.
“It doesn’t bother us at all. The one thing we don’t want to do is for anyone to take anything away from Chris Judd because he’s won a second Brownlow Medal; everyone knows he’s a champion and I’d be really disappointed if people took that away from him because he’s well deserving of it.
“Swanny went there and there was a lot of expectations on him, probably unfairly ... but you go there and everyone’s talking about you and you’re a $1.60 favourite and all that; it’s a pretty hard thing.”
Maxwell reported there had been no change with Luke Ball’s fitness situation, with a major hamstring cramp still blamed for his early departure from the preliminary final.
He did, however, admit that a good showing at Wednesday’s main training session would be crucial to the former Saint’s chances of playing.
“You’ll all be there tomorrow, you’ll watch him train and you’ll make your own judgements then. Nothing’s changed - we expect him to be fine,” he said.
“It scared the hell out of me when I actually saw the footage of it 24 hours later when he had the straight leg, but we’re not exactly sure [what happened]. Tomorrow we’ll know a lot more. We’ll see if he can train and if he can train then it puts it all to bed.
“I think if he’s hurt his hamstring he won’t play, but all the indicators are that it’s fine at this stage.”
The Pies will train at Gosch’s Paddock, as they have done all season, and not the MCG as had been mooted despite an expected crowd of about 20,000 of the black-and-white faithful who will turn out to watch.
“This week’s pretty special for our fans particularly with the fact a lot of them won’t be able to get to go to the game,” Maxwell said.
“We want to make sure they all get along. That’s why we’ve had three open training sessions out of three this week. We haven’t closed it off to anyone and we want our fans to come along and enjoy it and be part of it.”
With players of the calibre of Leon Davis, Paul Medhurst and Simon Prestigiacomo missing out on selection last week, Maxwell would not be drawn on the possible make-up of the grand final side other than to say that he was glad he wasn’t involved in making the difficult decisions.
Whoever lines up on the big day, Maxwell is confident Collingwood’s big game experience through the home-and-away season will hold his players in good stead when the heat is on early.
“It’s just important to get off to a good start in a grand final because I think it calms the nerves,” he said.
“The thing that I’ve heard over the last few years is the team that settles the quickest is the one that usually goes on and gets that advantage.”
