Collingwood coach Craig McRae spoke to the media post game.

First of all, crazy finish. What were your thoughts on the match in general?

I just said to the players, you know, anyone watching at home, Collingwood supporters, would be extremely proud of the effort from our players. We’ve got some young players playing first games, two of them. Six under 10 games. Yeah, they just didn’t look out of sorts. There’s a lot of things to goin’ to the end result, but I think for most of the night, we’ve had enormous effort. To walk away with two points is better than zero. We come over here a long way. They’re a very good team, clearances were enormous coming in. We were worried about that stuff. There’s a lot to take in, but right now I’ve just got this enormous pride of our effort.

The last couple of weeks in the last quarter the opposition has been able to kick on and nearly lost games in both weeks. Is that because of the inexperience and youth?

No, no. If you look at the detail of it, there’s two weeks in a row where we’ve had our key forwards out of the game. Mason got concussed and Brody Mihocek’s got another injury. Might have done his hamstring again. He’s off in the last quarter, so we don’t have any key forwards. If you look at the details of that and go the same thing happened last week, we have makeshift forward lines with key forwards, we’ve got Edward Allan in his first game playing as a key forward for us against Pearce. We’re fighting, scrapping. I’m really proud of that. There’s circumstances around that. Yeah, we’d like to walk away with a couple more points, but, jeez, it’s not through lack of effort.

The talking point is going to be free kick against Lachie Sullivan. What was your interpretation of what happened?

I’m looking forward to what the AFL tell us about that. I wasn’t aware that’s a free kick, but, clearly it is, because they don’t play things that aren’t in there. Looking forward to seeing what they say.

Will you will seek out an answer?

I want to assume that you guys have reported it enough, then it will be spoken of. It will be what it will be. It doesn’t help us, does it?

What was the emotion in that moment?

I was confused. I was told that he touched the umpire. That’s what I got told. I said, “Oh, OK. That’s a bit much in the moment.” But again I was unaware of what happened until afterwards.

Do you think that moment flustered them at all? They’re looking at, “What just happened there? Of go they might not have realised?

I hope not. We made way more mistakes than the umpires did tonight. He’s just, I assume, umpiring to the level of the law. I’d like to think so. Let’s move on, let’s go. What’s next? That’s all you can control. If the umpire comes out, AFL, “That was a mistake.” That doesn’t help. We just move on. Reality is, probably a free kick and we move on.

Do you talk to Lachie post game about this?

Not particularly, no, no. We phrased effort. What about the handball, creating a goal in the third quarter that Lachy did, in his fourth game? I’m living in the space of we drew Anzac Day and felt like that was a pretty even tussle, hard to walk away with a win. Tonight, you know, there’s a little bit in you going, “We’re 25 points up, 7 minutes to go, can we hold on?” This would have been our best victory for the year, if not the last couple. We knew that, it was going to be a really tough challenge for us today. Did we exceed expectations? Maybe not. We just show that we’ve got players that come in, wear a Collingwood jumper, doesn’t matter what number they’re wearing, they do their job. Adversity to it, we’re proud of that. Proud of it.