Magpies asst coach Neeld eyes to job
Highly-rated Collingwood assistant Mark Neeld has refused to rule himself out as a candidate for the two vacant AFL senior coaching jobs.
Caretaker Matthew Primus remains the frontrunner to get the fulltime gig at Port Adelaide, while Essendon are in the early stages of finding a replacement for Matthew Knights, who was sacked on Sunday.
With minor premiers Collingwood fully focused on the finals campaign beginning with Saturday night's clash against the Western Bulldogs, Neeld said he was not interested in either vacancy "at the moment".
But he admitted he had aspirations to one day coach at the highest level.
"I'm pretty happy here at Collingwood and a finals campaign is a finals campaign and we need every single person here concentrating on what we're about," he said on Wednesday.
"Everyone thinks about it. I think if you get a job as an assistant coach you want to be the best possible assistant you can be.
"We all have thoughts of where you want to go in the future.
"My theory would be if you're an assistant coach, be the very best assistant coach you can be and if you do a good job someone may notice."
Neeld said that the Magpies were working this week on their accuracy in front of goal after kicking 13.17 last weekend to lose by three points to Hawthorn.
The previous week they sneaked home by three points against Adelaide despite kicking a wasteful 6.18.
"We're aware that we'd love to kick more goals than behinds," said Neeld.
"As a coaching group we're not sitting on our hands, we're doing stuff about it.
"Our forward line coach (Nathan Buckley) is arguably one of the best kicks to have ever played - the boys have got great tuition with Bucks there and they're working on it.
"The positive is though if you're talking about us having 30 scoring shots, we'd take that - at least the ball's down there and they're having a go at it and they'll get it right."
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