EDDIE MCGUIRE admits even he has trouble recognising the angry forty-something Collingwood president he has been reading about in the newspapers lately.

Perhaps, at the moment, being unrecognisable might not be such a bad thing, even for one of Australia's most in-your-face personalities. McGuire might have been conned on Monday by Alan Didak but his street smarts have not left him to the extent he does not realise he has had a bad week.

Because as much as Didak and the Shaw brothers' weekend drinking binge and Heath Shaw's subsequent car accident have hurt Collingwood it has been McGuire — fairly or not — who appears to have emerged equally damaged in a PR sense.

After all footballers get drunk and transgress relatively often but it's not every day Nathan Buckley targets Eddie McGuire, that Victoria's Premier — a Magpie — pillories the club's culture and details of a personally embarrassing spray of his players are leaked to media.

Consider the week so far. The president's beloved long-time captain and friend, Buckley, committed the unthinkable on Monday night on 3AW and criticised McGuire's handling of Collingwood political dramas.

Buckley sent McGuire a text message soon afterwards and the pair have arranged to meet but the Magpies' boss was clearly disappointed and hurt by Buckley's comments.

"I'm not going to get into that," an upbeat McGuire told The Age yesterday. "He (Buckley) is going to say things in the media that annoy us and we've texted each other but I'm not going to have a public blue with Nathan Buckley just in the same way I won't with Tony Shaw.

"I had one blue with Tony and it's not good for Collingwood. Guys like him and Bucks are too important to our football club."

McGuire also spoke with John Brumby on Tuesday night and, like his Magpie hierarchy, vehemently denied his club had a poor culture.

Channel Nine's long-time star performer is, by his own admission, attempting to relaunch his career after a short-lived and largely miserable — in media terms — period as the network's chief executive. Which probably made the fact he told the playing group on Monday he had sacrificed "four or five gold logies" for Collingwood all the more embarrassing.

Not so said McGuire yesterday. "Yeah, I said it and it was a jokey thing that I've said before. I did it in the context (that) I was ripping into them and trying to explain to them the sacrifices other people make and they should make.

"Grant Hackett hasn't kissed his wife for a month just in case he picks up some small illness. It's all about perfecting his performance at the Olympics. The athletes in Beijing are hardly likely to hit the town before they compete.

"Then you see Mick Malthouse who has worked his guts out for this football club and he's been slaughtered in the media by blokes like Robert Walls and he doesn't have to put himself through it but he does.

"I had the highest Q-scores in Australian television the week before I became Collingwood president and a year later I had the lowest. I became the Collingwood bloke."

It sounded like some speech that the players were subjected to. Not only did McGuire accuse Ben Johnson of being fat, he said that after nine years at the club the president could kick better with his wrong foot than Johnson. Not all players took such comments particularly well. McGuire said he reminded the players of the world economic downturn, their rich contracts and the club's financial problems linked to failed hotel investments that could see the club announce a loss of up to $2 million this season.

Added to all of this is the likelihood that another year will pass without a premiership for the club, which, by the start of 2009, will have won one flag in half-a-century. It is that statistic that will sting the members more than anything else.

"I am colourful, I am theatrical," said McGuire yesterday, "that's what I am and I'll celebrate my 10th anniversary in the job on my 44th birthday this year and then it's for others to decide.

"I read the paper in the third person sometimes because I don't know the person I'm reading about. I don't recognise that person."