Dave Ryan was one of the most influential but underrated big men of his time. He only played six seasons at Victoria Park but had a significant impact in most of them.

Ryan first came to notice when he emerged as one of the best footballers in Yarrawonga. Geelong was the first club to take notice, and gave Dave, then aged 21, a couple of games during the 1906 season. Those games passed largely without notice, and Geelong did nothing to secure his services more permanently beyond that year. But the Pies had obviously seen something they liked, and they pounced. It proved to be a recruiting masterstroke.

Ryan broke into the Collingwood team for the Round 5 game against Essendon in 1907 and he immediately became a regular, playing every game for the rest of that year and only missing matches in the years ahead due to illness or injury, such as in 1909 when he suffered from a combination of neuralgia and "having his teeth attended to", at the end of a week when he had burnt himself severely while having a hot bath at training!

He was strongly built, a magnificent competitor, a courageous and solid mark and a booming kick. He spent most of his time in the ruck but was also dangerous forward, regularly getting into double-figure tallies. "Dave Ryan is a slugging good follower," wrote Punch in 1908.

"Ryan is a powerful footballer," wrote Sport in 1909. "He does a great amount of work and does it well. It is a pleasure to watch men of Ryan's build playing the game as he plays it."

Ryan was a consistent, high-level performer but he produced two outstanding seasons. In 1908, just his second season, he produced a string of performances so good that they were retrospectively acknowledged with him being named the winner of the Collingwood Best Player Award for that year. The Australasian nominated him among a handful of the best all-round performers of the season, competition-wide. In 1910, a Premiership season, he was again one of the stars of the Magpie line-up and was even given a trophy by one of the club's supporters in honour of his outstanding play.

His ability to shine in the big games was a defining characteristic of his play. And it was on show again when the Pies just fell short in the 1911 Grand Final, when Ryan starred.

His 1912 campaign was blighted by injury, however, and he managed just 11 games. He retired at the end of that year, made a brief return with Prahran and then hung up the boots for good. He was a policeman doing duty at the new Harbout Trust station at the time, and found it hard to get away from work. "Dave has travelled many a mile chasing the bounding ball, and the smuggler or wharf pillager will have to be a fleet-footed fellow if he hopes to outrun this constable," noted the Football Record in 1913.

But even after his retirement from the game, Dave Ryan never lost his soft spot for Collingwood. In 1935, when Collingwood and South Melbourne played an exhibition match in Sydney, Ryan made sure that his then employers, Mark Foy's (where he was a store detective), put up a prize of 18 hats for the winning team, so that the two sides would treat the game as more than a picnic contest.

Elsewhere within his family though, loyalties were more divided. His brother Mick had played one game for the Pies in 1908, and two of Mick's sons, Bill and Joe, ended up playing with Footscray, the latter becoming a Hall of Famer with the Bulldogs.

But at Collingwood it's Dave Ryan who left a major mark, playing a significant role in a Premiership year and providing outstanding service across 99 games in the black and white.

- Michael Roberts