Saints coach an outlier as most marvel at Magpie great

Ross Lyon might be the only person who didn't notice Collingwood legend Scott Pendlebury on Sunday night.

"He didn't have a heap, did he?" the St Kilda coach mused about the Magpie marvel.

"He might have. I don't know. What did he have?

"His touches were quality - 400 games, he's composed, he looked composed ... but what did he have, 26 (disposals)?

"He had nine (kicks). He had one kick in the first half. We didn't talk about him a halftime, with respect to everybody."

Yet the 38-year-old Pendlebury has earned fresh rave reviews from everyone else after his game-breaking display in his 426th AFL game - Collingwood's 11.12 (78) to 9.12 (66) win over Lyon's Saints at the MCG.

Never before had Pendlebury logged as many goal assists - five - in a game. He had 10 score involvements all up.

The great Pie's 26 touches, amassed with 81 per cent efficiency, included 11 contested possessions, featured four intercepts. He also took eight marks and laid four tackles.

All from spending only 55 per cent of the game on the field in a tactic hatched by Collingwood's high performance manager Jarrod Wade.

With the AFL this season moving to five players on the interchange bench and scrapping the substitute, Wade championed deploying the Magpie champion sparingly from the bench.

"Jarrod Wade, I repeat myself year after year, but he's the best I've ever worked with; he had a deliberate plan to do that," Pies coach Craig McRae said.

"He's been studying the prior games and just doing algorithms around the new rotations with five on the bench.

"And we just thought Pendles was the guy - he'd come on late in the first quarter, late in the second, and then be fresh for the second half.

"He had his career-high score involvements for a game, it was really pleasing.

"Pendles is brilliant around those things - whatever the team needs."

And there was an added bonus to Pendlebury spending so much time near his coach on the bench.

"He's just so calm on the bench; it's like having an extra coach on the bench," McRae said.