Pendlebury slams Magpies' midfield Collingwood prime mover Scott Pendlebury is laying the blame for the heavy Anzac Day AFL loss to Essendon on the vaunted Magpies' midfield, saying they cheated by running ahead of the ball when the game was in the balance. For the second time in a couple of weeks, Collingwood were blown away late in a match against a fellow premiership contender, with the 46-point hammering by the Bombers following a 55-point drubbing to Hawthorn in round three. Collingwood slotted the first two goals of the last term on Thursday to get the margin back to a manageable 12 points, only for Essendon to kick six of the last seven goals of the match. "That last 13 minutes, I can't explain it," said Pendlebury, who was again one of the Magpies' best players with 29 possessions. Especially when at three-quarter time, we were four or five goals behind and you get back into a game and put the pressure on them. And then you fall away from the things that got us back into the game. We started running forward of the footy. It was like we thought we were just going to run over the top of them. They burned us pretty badly by playing honest football and we started cheating. For Pendlebury and the Collingwood coaching staff, the return of Luke Ball can't come quickly enough. The rugged midfielder will play his first competitive match in more than 12 months in the VFL on Friday night after undergoing a knee reconstruction. "What I spoke about happening in the last 15 minutes of the game is what Bally does naturally," said Pendlebury. He hunts the footy, he hunts the body and we need that. Coach Nathan Buckley echoed his stand-in skipper's concerns about how Collingwood's lack of workrate was central to their first loss to arch-rivals Essendon in four years. "Our backline were really good in the first half, they were able to hold up really well but, in the end, the weight of opportunity told," said Buckley. It's not what's happening to us - it's what we're doing about it. In another body blow for the Magpies, highly rated defender Alan Toovey suffered what is almost certain to be a season-ending knee injury in the final few minutes. "Toovs is a fantastic competitor," said Buckley. With our values, he would nearly stand No.1 amongst his peers as the guy who is most dependable. Any way you cut it, it's going to be a loss for us. We hope for the best but the docs are saying it's a likely ACL rupture.