Scott Burns

[Dale61]

Fire Burns for a down-to-earth footballer
By Martin Blake
May 24 2002

Lesson one for negotiating a contract is to hire a feisty, well-connected manager. Lesson two is not to let on that you actually want to stay where you are.

Just don't apply those rules to Scott Burns, Collingwood's Mr 100 per cent.

Burns' father will do the negotiations with Collingwood later this year when his son's contract runs out, just as he has for the previous eight years.

Nor will the negotiations be acrimonious, for Burns has some quaint ideas about football. He doesn't like seeing player managers grandstanding in the newspapers when a client's contract is up, and he doesn't know a player who left a club for money alone.

"I wouldn't go anywhere," he said this week. "One of my goals I had when I first came over was to play 100 games and play 10 years. Loyalty is still very good in footy."


Nothing fancy, just a premiership will do for Magpie Scott Burns.
Picture: SEBASTIAN COSTANZO

The story is worth telling because it illustrates that some of the old values remain in the slick world of modern football. It also partly explains the reverence in which Burns is held at Collingwood.

At 27, the extra two years to achieve his goal should not be a problem for the boy from the hills outside Adelaide. Yet you would not have bet on it this time last year.

The reality is that Burns is effectively a recruit to Collingwood after managing only eight senior games in a wretched 2001. Three times he twanged his left hamstring muscle, and after previous injury problems (a broken arm and the dreaded osteitis pubis), his career appeared to have stalled.

Yet to the phlegmatic Burns, it was never so serious. "It's disappointing to have a year like that, but I think everyone has a year like that sometime if they're going to play 10 years. Maybe even two years where things don't work out. It was my turn last year."

Burns has reversed the trend of chronic injuries with a change of emphasis from endurance training last pre-season to sprints this season. He pumped weights to strengthen his legs, and once the season started, he used the games to keep his fitness base.

He has adopted the modern ways, using the ice baths that have become commonplace in professional sport; even practising yoga with teammate Rupert Betheras. He talked to people such as Gavin Brown, the former Collingwood skipper who is now on the Magpies' coaching staff, allaying some of the personal doubts that crept in. "Gavin did his (hamstring) three times in one year, too, and I'll bet you no one can remember that."

A few weeks ago, Burns was isolated at full-back with an opponent and it occurred to him that he could truly say he was over the injuries. A lot of players, says Burns, don't like being dragged to full-back, where you can be exposed.

"It happened and I was actually looking forward to it," he says. "I thought, 'This is a good chance to really test things out, this is a good challenge'. You get over that mental hurdle and it's a good feeling to know you're over it."

Neil Balme, Collingwood's football operations manager, calls him "a bit of a barometer" for the Magpies. "Honesty" is another word that comes up often in any discussion about his football.

Burns is looking forward now. Collingwood is on the march under Mick Malthouse and as one of the few who has seen two distinct eras at McHale Stadium, Burns says the revolution was needed because the club was stagnant. "I think the first year he (Malthouse) was having a look at the place. I'm not too sure what he thinks about me saying that but I thought he was just seeing where players were at. Last year, you could feel it pick up."

Exactly how much things have picked up remains to be seen, although tonight's game against Port Adelaide will be another test. Burns understands the supporters becoming excited, but he has a word of caution. "We've been five-zip before with Mick. I remember we were 4-2 with 'Shawy' (Tony Shaw); and I reckon the next year we were 6-2 and top after eight rounds with 'Shawy' as well, and we still didn't make the finals."

Make no mistake, though, the embers within Burns have been stoked. Collingwood's failure to make the finals is foreign territory for someone who came from a winning culture at Norwood.

His passion then was the SANFL, and an hour each week of the ABC's The Winners was about the only television contact he had with the nation's premier competition. Until a posse of recruiters came from Collingwood to the family farm at Birdwood, 50 kilometres from Adelaide through the hills, he had no inkling he would go to Melbourne.

Burns did not even know the Collingwood legend Bob Rose when he got to Victoria Park in 1994, a fact he looks back upon as an "absolute disgrace".

Burns had wanted to go to Collingwood, Carlton, Essendon or Hawthorn as clubs he viewed as having a future. But the grand final appearance he made for Norwood in 1993, aged 18, remains his last trip to any sort of Big Dance.

"You're 18 and you think: 'There's heaps of time'. Ten years later and you've hardly played finals football . . . It's up to myself and 'Bucks' to pass that on to blokes. Just to understand that you can't take things for granted.

"You play to play finals football but if you don't win that premiership, what's the point? I remember Danny Frawley saying once he'd been captain for 10 years, played so many games, played finals football, played for Victoria, but he didn't win a premiership. He said it was just a huge hole.

"You don't understand that when you're 21 or 22. But I've just turned 27 and I know exactly what he's talking about."


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