COLLINGWOOD coach Mick Malthouse admits he faces a selection dilemma over the make-up of his best team to play St Kilda in Sunday's first qualifying final.

Malthouse will be sweating on the fitness of star midfielder Scott Pendlebury, while Anthony Rocca heads a long list of players pushing their case at VFL level to earn a call-up.

Pendlebury was a late withdrawal with back spasms from the Magpies' side that lost by four goals to the Western Bulldogs on Sunday, with Malthouse “not 100 per cent sure” if the 21-year-old would be fit to tackle the Saints at the MCG.

As he awaits a medical report on the smooth-running Pendlebury, the coach said his mind was furiously ticking over in search of a winning combination.

“We’ve got to make some pretty tough decisions, but we’re in a position to do that,” Malthouse said on Monday.

“Do we go with two ruckmen? Does Chris Dawes play? Does Anthony Rocca play? Does Ben Reid play?”

Others thrusting their names forward include Steele Sidebottom, Marty Clarke, Danny Stanley and Ryan Cook.

A decision on Rocca, the veteran forward with 219 games and 402 goals beside his name, looms as perhaps the most intriguing.

“He’s going to be in the mix,” Malthouse said.

“I know I’ve said that a lot in the last month or so, but he performed on a wet track at the weekend on a big ground down at Geelong.

“[He] got the football, he’s had five or six shots on goal.”

The Magpies suffered just their second loss in three months on Sunday, with Malthouse admitting he had a lot on his mind following the result.

But he will stick to his “horses for courses” policy when searching for a team to beat St Kilda.

“If it means someone being plucked who may not have played senior football for the past five, six, 10 games, [well if] we think that they’re going to perform better and be more crucial to us in our opportunity for success, we’ll pick that player,” he said.

“We now can dissect it and have 30-plus players to pick from, and that will take place.

“It may be the same 22 that run down the race [this weekend], but it won’t be because we are locked into 22 players.”

While some might consider some of his squad – such as Reid, who has played just eight senior matches and just two this season – are light-on for experience, Malthouse says his team is better equipped to reap September success in 2009.

“We’re 12 months older,” he said.

“I think we’ve trailed three or four of the finals sides … in the last month or so, we’ve trailed them and been able to come back.

“I don’t know whether we had the capacity to do that last year.

“We have a fairly strong list to choose from. Our twos are in the finals … so there is a lot of difference from last year.”