Analysis i've got a high tolerance for essendon being s**t, but this game was appalling

[outersanctum]

Anyone still sugar coating is delusional. Club has been shite for years and will be shite until something major changes. Our list is woeful, like needs to be fully turned over with a new recruiting strategy. Our coaching list needs to be turned over.. hopefully find someone who actually understands modern footy and how it is played.

At this point there is so much work to be done, you will have more luck building a new team/club than trying to salvage this one. We will keep following them because we are rusted on supporters.. but not sure we will win a final in the next 10-15 years.

Again our best players on Friday were Merrett, McKay and probably gresham. Our best looking players for the past 5-6 seasons have been our new recruits or guys from other clubs. Then they get sucked into the EFC vortex and go backwards. Our club actively makes players worse. Then you throw in the woeful recruiting (hello wasting #1 of a soft, short HBF) and the inability to resolve our injury/fitness departments (we are looking at 'rebuild #3 of our fitness department in 16 years) and you just wonder why we are so bad at running a football club.

We will win some games this year.. and we will get belted a few more times too.. but the real disappointment is that our list, culture, game plan, fitness, injury management and recruiting are just not up to scratch. Until the membership actually starts demanding change in the right areas.. it will be more of the same.

 

[eth-dog]

In the past of course they did, but it eventually stopped a couple of years before they became good as I demonstrated above. 4-5 years of limiting 35 points+ losses is a decent sample size. We haven't stopped losing like that multiple times a year at all. Not even a single season since 2001. Not even shortened quarters in 2020! Every single year there are multiple 50+ point losses. Guaranteed. 2018 was the only season we didn't have multiple 50+ losses and even that the second biggest margin was 49 points which is basically 50.
Every single final played out like that too. Even the only close EF vs North in 2014 was a smashing in the second half. Nth 12.5 77 to Ess 6.2 38.

I remember Melbourne's last smashing by 51 points rd9 2020 vs Port. The president put out a statement voicing his disappointment. They've lost above 28 points once since (38 points vs Fremantle 2022) and nothing even close to 51 points.

We should realistically be like Adelaide who don't lose above margins in the 20s very often but the culture of mediocrity and accepting to give up in the middle of the game is still there. St Kilda who have been pretty mediocre have lost only twice above 50 points in two seasons (52 points vs Adelaide last year and 51 points vs Sydney in 2022). So why the heck do we always lose 10,11,12 goals+ multiple times a year when so many teams can manage to prevent it?

Until that stops and until we make those losses absolutely unacceptable, we won't do anything.

It's also a dumb comparison in this current rebuild. They started their current build at the end of 2015, compared to our end of 2020. So complaining that they don't lose by that amount at their stage of a rebuild to ours is stupid.

At their stage of the rebuild that we're at (2019) they had three 50+ point losses including a 93 point loss! They even had a 50 point loss last year. Next year is the important one for me.

I don't give a shit what happened in our previous build. That's a completely different playing profile in terms of age, experience, list balance and attitude.

We had a bad loss Friday. Let's see the response before we throw stones. Everyone has really bad days. The response is what matters.

 

[boncer34]

Just need the fans to stand firm/up/tough whatever the bullshit they said before the season and everything is fine.

 

[mike ross]

Just need the fans to stand firm/up/tough whatever the bullshit they said before the season and everything is fine.

Harder said than done. We've got 20 years of mediocrity fueling the fire.

 

[outersanctum]

It's also a dumb comparison in this current rebuild. They started their current build at the end of 2015, compared to our end of 2020. So complaining that they don't lose by that amount at their stage of a rebuild to ours is stupid.

At their stage of the rebuild that we're at (2019) they had three 50+ point losses including a 93 point loss! They even had a 50 point loss last year. Next year is the important one for me.

I don't give a s**t what happened in our previous build. That's a completely different playing profile in terms of age, experience, list balance and attitude.

We had a bad loss Friday. Let's see the response before we throw stones. Everyone has really bad days. The response is what matters.

I don't understand this thinking. We are in 'build' number 7-8 after our last premiership? Nothing about our list screams that we have a plan that will actually lead to success.

Beautiful little write up in the Age today..
"If this season is the measure, the coach, in his second season at the Bombers, is right. If he wants to take a look at the past five years at the club (a period beyond the drugs saga), it’s not.

The more difficult – but more relevant – conversation club officials must continue to confront is: “How do we get the recruiting, development and injury management right?” There have been excuses. Those have run out.

Their string (pardon the pun) of soft-tissue injuries means Zach Reid, Matt Guelfi, Jordan Ridley and now Archie Perkins are missing when the club really needs to see them playing alongside each other. Scott was blunt when asked whether it was a concern: “You’d like to think the soft-tissue ones are the ones you can do something about. So we’ll need to go to work on that.”
The recently appointed new face in list management, Matt Rosa, is a calm operator with an enormous task ahead of him to rectify the mediocrity that has continued long after they moved through the debilitating drugs saga.

In 2018, Port Adelaide finished just 2.5 percentage points ahead of Essendon. At the end of that season, Adelaide, the Brisbane Lions, St Kilda, Fremantle, Gold Coast and Carlton were below the Bombers on the ladder.
It was at that year’s draft Port Adelaide added Connor Rozee and Zak Butters. They then found Miles Bergman and Mitch Georgiades the following season, while Bombers sat on their hands without a selection before pick 30 either season. They had instead invested precious first-round selections in Dylan Shiel.

The impact of the calls made during that time was most obvious on Friday night. But the delay such quick fixes caused to real growth at Essendon has been apparent for years."

Port won last Friday on the back of guys recruited in 2019 and beyond.. IE in the modern game.. a rebuild can happen in 2-3 years. So stop with the narrative. Yet again we rebuilt and yet again we came up short. Why? Because we trusted the SAME guy to do the rebuild every time and he can't pick talent. Our list is full of plodders.. seemingly a never ending stream of guys that can't understand a modern AFL game plan.. and all of them stick thin with the added bonus of no endurance runners..

I mean look at our list.. tell me what the strength is. Have we gone for the most skillful? The biggest? The fittest? Are we going for height? Are we recruiting for speed? There is just no identifiable strength in our list.

What do Melbourne and Carlton have in common? The moment they finally got serious about building a club and a culture. Roos turned Melbourne culture around in 2 years.. Carlton got serious in 2020 and went with Austin and Agresta. We still have a fan base that seemingly doesn't understand that recruitment is 70% of the battle. Instead we have just left Dodo running his own ship for 20+ years of mediocrity. I'd say most successful clubs it is 70% recruiting, 10% fitness/injury management, 10% coaching and 10% club management/list management/culture etc.

 

[Squeaky]

I’m a proud Cronulla sharks fan and find my self switching the channel to the nrl a lot more this season… I didn’t like league 5-6 years ago.. what’s happened?

I agree with you - I too have done the same recently and have turned off plenty of AFL to watch NRL.
I am a Storm fan and I look at them with envy - they are everything we are not:
Professionally run - everyone stays in their lanes and does their job to their best ability and the players get it done (mostly);
Developmental - the rest of the competition can't believe how Melbourne can turn others clubs' discards into dependable players & more importantly, better people; and
The are Hard arsed - Bellamy rules with an iron fist! Their pre season training regime is legendary and infamous.

I actually prefer to watch the Storm tbh. When I was a kid I could not imagine myself even thinking this - but 15 years of shit will change people.

 

[faible]

I don't understand this thinking. We are in 'build' number 7-8 after our last premiership?

No one has ever said this... the whole 'make things up and argue against that despite no one having said it' is a weird way to go about criticising the club.

 

[Squeaky]

Anyone still sugar coating is delusional. Club has been shite for years and will be shite until something major changes. Our list is woeful, like needs to be fully turned over with a new recruiting strategy. Our coaching list needs to be turned over.. hopefully find someone who actually understands modern footy and how it is played.

At this point there is so much work to be done, you will have more luck building a new team/club than trying to salvage this one. We will keep following them because we are rusted on supporters.. but not sure we will win a final in the next 10-15 years.

Again our best players on Friday were Merrett, McKay and probably gresham. Our best looking players for the past 5-6 seasons have been our new recruits or guys from other clubs. Then they get sucked into the EFC vortex and go backwards. Our club actively makes players worse. Then you throw in the woeful recruiting (hello wasting #1 of a soft, short HBF) and the inability to resolve our injury/fitness departments (we are looking at 'rebuild #3 of our fitness department in 16 years) and you just wonder why we are so bad at running a football club.

We will win some games this year.. and we will get belted a few more times too.. but the real disappointment is that our list, culture, game plan, fitness, injury management and recruiting are just not up to scratch. Until the membership actually starts demanding change in the right areas.. it will be more of the same.

Well said.
I think you have nailed it - there is just so much to do.
Injuries & Fitness, Culture, Development/VFL, the list goes on. We have no winners in any area.
Maybe membership are overperforming when you consider how shit the whole show is...
I hope that we are finally on a winner with this current club hierarchy but Scott, Vozzo and Rosa have the job in front of theml!!!

 

[boncer34]

No one has ever said this... the whole 'make things up and argue against that despite no one having said it' is a weird way to go about criticising the club.

It's a question. And I'd be interested in knowing what number rebuild we're supposedly up to as well.

 

[BomberManU]

No one has ever said this... the whole 'make things up and argue against that despite no one having said it' is a weird way to go about criticising the club.

Looks like a question and a perfectly valid one, I would have thought, given where we're at.

 

[Old Campaigner]

It's a question. And I'd be interested in knowing what number rebuild we're supposedly up to as well.

I’d say we’re still only on the second since 2000. Early-mid 2000s rebuild towards the side we had pre drug saga, topping up post drug saga, and then a more recent rebuild commencing when it became clear we weren’t anywhere near winning a final, that we a still undertaking.


I don’t think it really matters though, it’s really important I think that the club doesn’t stay focused on what’s behind us, and instead make decisions based on what we currently have and where we need to be.

 

[boncer34]

I’d say we’re still only on the second since 2000. Early-mid 2000s rebuild towards the side we had pre drug saga, topping up post drug saga, and then a more recent rebuild commencing when it became clear we weren’t anywhere near winning a final, that we a still undertaking.


I don’t think it really matters though, it’s really important I think that the club doesn’t stay focused on what’s behind us, and instead make decisions based on what we currently have and where we need to be.

Refusing to learn from past mistakes is part of our problem. "Forget about it, it's in the past" seems to be our clubs motto.

 

[JayJ20]

It's also a dumb comparison in this current rebuild. They started their current build at the end of 2015, compared to our end of 2020. So complaining that they don't lose by that amount at their stage of a rebuild to ours is stupid.

At their stage of the rebuild that we're at (2019) they had three 50+ point losses including a 93 point loss! They even had a 50 point loss last year. Next year is the important one for me.

I don't give a s**t what happened in our previous build. That's a completely different playing profile in terms of age, experience, list balance and attitude.

We had a bad loss Friday. Let's see the response before we throw stones. Everyone has really bad days. The response is what matters.

And we had worse losses than a bottom 4 Carlton that year while we made finals including a 104 point loss! That's my point. The bar is so low that we're comparing a mid-table team to a bottom 4 side.

You may not care about previous rebuilds, but we're losing bigger under Scott than we did under Rutten so it's actually becoming worse not better. Our team defence is worse than anything under Woosha so far. Sometimes teams have a bad day yes, but this is the 3rd 10-goal+ loss in 6 games (4 out of 8 if you include preseason). What response is there to wait for? Last year we lost to Geelong by 77 points. We thought "yeah that's a bad day". Lost to Bulldogs by 41 points the next week and suddenly we're scraping past North and West Coast before getting destroyed by GWS and Collingwood. Those same players played last week so it's a cultural issue.

If we're to believe the club's direction, this off-season is when the significant cuts and list turnover happens. 4 years into the rebuild. Meaning we're likely to get worse if we focus heavily on the draft.

This year should have been the year when we stop losing big. Last week proved that nothing changed. I'm not putting it on Scott by the way because this trend far precedes him, but I want a serious cutting of the list and trading out some players of value so that we can draft or trade in players that change the make up of our list. No more holding onto players because we think they are individually good.

 

[Vindicater]

The big losses are what I wanted to stop happening this season so I am fairly certain we going backwards.

Having said that, sometimes going backwards is the right way to go forwards and if it weeds out our flotsom then I am all for it.

I said Brad needed at least three years before even an ounce of pressure comes on him so happy to stick fat at the moment.

 

[JayJ20]

It's a question. And I'd be interested in knowing what number rebuild we're supposedly up to as well.

It's murky because we're never really rebuilding and never contending. We don't finish low enough for a rebuild and don't finish high enough to contend. We don't trade out players to fix list imbalances to hit the draft and don't use draft picks to trade in elite players for list needs. So we're stuck in the middle. Similar to North in the 2010s.

 

[faible]

And we had worse losses than a bottom 4 Carlton that year while we made finals including a 104 point loss! That's my point. The bar is so low that we're comparing a mid-table team to a bottom 4 side.

You may not care about previous rebuilds, but we're losing bigger under Scott than we did under Rutten so it's actually becoming worse not better. Our team defence is worse than anything under Woosha so far. Sometimes teams have a bad day yes, but this is the 3rd 10-goal+ loss in 6 games (4 out of 8 if you include preseason). What response is there to wait for? Last year we lost to Geelong by 77 points. We thought "yeah that's a bad day". Lost to Bulldogs by 41 points the next week and suddenly we're scraping past North and West Coast before getting destroyed by GWS and Collingwood. Those same players played last week so it's a cultural issue.

If we're to believe the club's direction, this off-season is when the significant cuts and list turnover happens. 4 years into the rebuild. Meaning we're likely to get worse if we focus heavily on the draft.

This year should have been the year when we stop losing big. Last week proved that nothing changed. I'm not putting it on Scott by the way because this trend far precedes him, but I want a serious cutting of the list and trading out some players of value so that we can draft or trade in players that change the make up of our list. No more holding onto players because we think they are individually good.

Rutten had a first season where it was a basic, pressure focused gameplan. That kept the blowouts down but also doesn't win Premerships. In his second year he spoke about increasing the complexity of the defensive structure to build towards being a Premiership side, and we saw more blowout losses as when the structure fails, it really fails.

Richmond had a pretty good period between 2017 & 2020 with quite a few blowout losses. When their defensive structure failed, it really failed.

Improvement isn't linear, learning a new defensive structure isn't a linear thing where it gets progressively better. It doesn't work, until it does. And even when it does, it doesn't always work all the time, even for a Premiership side.

One week in a season is just one week, one month is just one month, and even one season is just one season. We saw against St Kilda just one week ago that we were able to limit their ability to score, the defensive structure worked. Against Port it fell apart (letting Rozee and JHF run straight forward out of stoppages is pretty bad for a defensive structure) and it really fell apart. We actually did pretty well in the first quarter at limiting Ports scoring, they just kicked incredibly accurately. When they went man-on-man we just couldn't handle it.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, we really won't know if we're at the Richmond 2016 period where it's the right structure and we just need to execute it better, for longer, and then it'll 'work', Changing coaches every couple of seasons definitely doesn't help this because they're taking 1 step forward and 2 steps back towards the end-goal, whilst trying to find out along the way who can even execute the requirements of a modern game-plan.

If you're expecting linear improvement you're almost certainly going to be disappointed.

Richmond 2016

• R3 Adelaide: 36 point loss
• R4 Eagles: 68 point loss
• R5 Demons: 33 point loss
• R6 Port: 35 point loss
• R7 Hawks: 46 point loss
• R11 North: 70 point loss
• R15 Port: 38 point loss
• R18 Hawks: 70 point loss
• R19 GWS: 88 point loss
• R23 Swans: 113 point loss

Finished 13th

Richmond 2017

• R6 Adelaide: 76 point loss
• R16 Saints: 67 point loss

Premiership

Richmond 2018

• R2 Adelaide: 36 point loss
• R9 Eagles: 47 point loss
• Prelim Magpies: 39 point loss

Finished 1st H&A

Richmond 2019

R2 Magpies: 44 point loss
R3 Giants: 49 point loss
R7 Bulldogs: 47 point loss
R11 North: 37 point loss
R12 Cats: 67 point loss
R13 Adelaide: 33 point loss

Premiership

Richmond 2020

R3 Hawks: 32 point loss
* Also had 26, and 21 point losses in shortened games.

Premiership

 

[joey_jo_jo]

havent seen stats and was sitting in one of the pockets so didnt have full view of the ground. Was it really us getting killed on transition again? Felt more like we were getting killed in the clearance work this game and specifically the centre bounce set up.
that was really disappointing as I think centre clearance work has always been a strength of ours especially when parish/draper are playing but it felt like rozee and JHF just waltzed it out of the centre at will.
If i was to look at a silver lining, Im hoping thats a one off with our clearance work compounded by parish/draper/hobbs all having really poor and out of sort games (never seen hobbs fall of so many tackles, hope its not a lingering issue with shoulder).

Other than individual games of merrett/martin/caldwell/Mckay I thought the one positive was that the aggressive press worked really well in first quarter with lot of repeat entries into the forward line, unfortunately we didnt capitalise unlike the 2nd half v saints.

 

[JayJ20]

Rutten had a first season where it was a basic, pressure focused gameplan. That kept the blowouts down but also doesn't win Premerships. In his second year he spoke about increasing the complexity of the defensive structure to build towards being a Premiership side, and we saw more blowout losses as when the structure fails, it really fails.

Richmond had a pretty good period between 2017 & 2020 with quite a few blowout losses. When their defensive structure failed, it really failed.

Improvement isn't linear, learning a new defensive structure isn't a linear thing where it gets progressively better. It doesn't work, until it does. And even when it does, it doesn't always work all the time, even for a Premiership side.

One week in a season is just one week, one month is just one month, and even one season is just one season. We saw against St Kilda just one week ago that we were able to limit their ability to score, the defensive structure worked. Against Port it fell apart (letting Rozee and JHF run straight forward out of stoppages is pretty bad for a defensive structure) and it really fell apart. We actually did pretty well in the first quarter at limiting Ports scoring, they just kicked incredibly accurately. When they went man-on-man we just couldn't handle it.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, we really won't know if we're at the Richmond 2016 period where it's the right structure and we just need to execute it better, for longer, and then it'll 'work', Changing coaches every couple of seasons definitely doesn't help this because they're taking 1 step forward and 2 steps back towards the end-goal, whilst trying to find out along the way who can even execute the requirements of a modern game-plan.

If you're expecting linear improvement you're almost certainly going to be disappointed.

Richmond 2016

• R3 Adelaide: 36 point loss
• R4 Eagles: 68 point loss
• R5 Demons: 33 point loss
• R6 Port: 35 point loss
• R7 Hawks: 46 point loss
• R11 North: 70 point loss
• R15 Port: 38 point loss
• R18 Hawks: 70 point loss
• R19 GWS: 88 point loss
• R23 Swans: 113 point loss

Finished 13th

Richmond 2017

• R6 Adelaide: 76 point loss
• R16 Saints: 67 point loss

Premiership

Richmond 2018

• R2 Adelaide: 36 point loss
• R9 Eagles: 47 point loss
• Prelim Magpies: 39 point loss

Finished 1st H&A

Richmond 2019

R2 Magpies: 44 point loss
R3 Giants: 49 point loss
R7 Bulldogs: 47 point loss
R11 North: 37 point loss
R12 Cats: 67 point loss
R13 Adelaide: 33 point loss

Premiership

Richmond 2020

R3 Hawks: 32 point loss
* Also had 26, and 21 point losses in shortened games.

Premiership

I actually included Richmond in the original post as an exception because their gameplan was physically taxing and built around hard running and superior fitness, so they aimed to peak in the second half of the year and built a successful and reliable system that all players bought into. They are the exception in many ways. They were generally last or close to last for stoppage clearances, average around clearances in general except for perhaps centre clearances, lost contested possessions etc. From a statistical point of view, they were average in many ways. They were also an average skilled-side and weren't a consistently elite pressure side after 2017 (though they could turn it on when needed). But their fitness, defensive system to force turnovers (and punish the turnover) and team synergy was unlike any team we've seen in the modern era. No one could go with them when they turned it on helped by the best player in the modern era in Dusty who could single-handedly win games. They could basically sit back and let teams dominate the middle, then run them down to the ground in the last quarter and later parts of the season/finals simply because of how fit and defensively sound they were.

It may appear that Richmond's defensive system failed often, but it's far more intentional than it first appears. Compare their blowout losses in the first half of the year to the second half of the year and its quite evident they didn't care for the beginning because of how reliable their system was. When they ran out of steam in 2018, they pretty much conceded the first half of 2019 before turning it up in the second half to avoid the same fadeout. They then won the premiership emphatically. What they had demonstrated even dating back to 2014 is the ability to win a massive run of games in second halves of seasons, which is another issue I have with Essendon but that's for another conversation.

We don't have close to the fitness levels of Richmond nor the ability to turn it on when necessary so they aren't the right team to compare us to.

 

[crackers65]

Just need the fans to stand firm/up/tough whatever the bullshit they said before the season and everything is fine.

Everything is not fine. When we see another insipid performance like Friday nights you know that we are a shithouse club. Good clubs do not perform at that level as often as Essendon does. It is simply unacceptable.

 

[eth-dog]

I don't understand this thinking. We are in 'build' number 7-8 after our last premiership? Nothing about our list screams that we have a plan that will actually lead to success.

Beautiful little write up in the Age today..
"If this season is the measure, the coach, in his second season at the Bombers, is right. If he wants to take a look at the past five years at the club (a period beyond the drugs saga), it’s not.

The more difficult – but more relevant – conversation club officials must continue to confront is: “How do we get the recruiting, development and injury management right?” There have been excuses. Those have run out.

Their string (pardon the pun) of soft-tissue injuries means Zach Reid, Matt Guelfi, Jordan Ridley and now Archie Perkins are missing when the club really needs to see them playing alongside each other. Scott was blunt when asked whether it was a concern: “You’d like to think the soft-tissue ones are the ones you can do something about. So we’ll need to go to work on that.”
The recently appointed new face in list management, Matt Rosa, is a calm operator with an enormous task ahead of him to rectify the mediocrity that has continued long after they moved through the debilitating drugs saga.

In 2018, Port Adelaide finished just 2.5 percentage points ahead of Essendon. At the end of that season, Adelaide, the Brisbane Lions, St Kilda, Fremantle, Gold Coast and Carlton were below the Bombers on the ladder.
It was at that year’s draft Port Adelaide added Connor Rozee and Zak Butters. They then found Miles Bergman and Mitch Georgiades the following season, while Bombers sat on their hands without a selection before pick 30 either season. They had instead invested precious first-round selections in Dylan Shiel.

The impact of the calls made during that time was most obvious on Friday night. But the delay such quick fixes caused to real growth at Essendon has been apparent for years."

Port won last Friday on the back of guys recruited in 2019 and beyond.. IE in the modern game.. a rebuild can happen in 2-3 years. So stop with the narrative. Yet again we rebuilt and yet again we came up short. Why? Because we trusted the SAME guy to do the rebuild every time and he can't pick talent. Our list is full of plodders.. seemingly a never ending stream of guys that can't understand a modern AFL game plan.. and all of them stick thin with the added bonus of no endurance runners..

I mean look at our list.. tell me what the strength is. Have we gone for the most skillful? The biggest? The fittest? Are we going for height? Are we recruiting for speed? There is just no identifiable strength in our list.

What do Melbourne and Carlton have in common? The moment they finally got serious about building a club and a culture. Roos turned Melbourne culture around in 2 years.. Carlton got serious in 2020 and went with Austin and Agresta. We still have a fan base that seemingly doesn't understand that recruitment is 70% of the battle. Instead we have just left Dodo running his own ship for 20+ years of mediocrity. I'd say most successful clubs it is 70% recruiting, 10% fitness/injury management, 10% coaching and 10% club management/list management/culture etc.

We're in build 2 since our last premiership. Up until 2006 we kept trying to top up and stay relevant. Once Knights was appointed that changed. We built around the likes of Jobe, Ryder, Gumbleton, Hurley and Hooker, then added Daniher and that was our big push in the early 2010's whilst topping up with Goddard, Cooney and Chappy. Unfortunately the drug saga was also at the time and that derailed that.

Our core into 2017-2020 was slightly different but it was clear we were still working towards winning a flag with it. For various reasons that failed.

Then Saad, Daniher and Fantasia left and we embraced the rebuild for the most part by maintaining first round draft picks whilst getting former first round talents at a fraction of the price with the likes of Wright (F4), Caldwell (Fantasia and a F2), Duursma (BZT and F4), Goldstein (FA), Gresham (FA), McKay (FA), Setterfield (late pick swap) and Weid (Francis and a late pick swap for points) whilst also getting role players cheaply like Hind (4th) and Kelly (FA). All this whilst taking Cox, Perkins, Reid, Hobbs, Tsatas and Caddy early in the draft.

I get that some haven't worked out (Weid) and the jury is still out on pretty much all the kids but it's clear that we're building around the draft.

Port are irrelevant because they've maintained the same core for so long. And honestly not sure they're a great comparison. Their past decade they haven't looked close to winning the flag.

The Shiel trade hasn't worked out but also irrelevant to this build. We brought him in to be the key to fix the midfield puzzle and within 24 months of him joining, the guy we built around was injured for most of it then left, same with 2/3 of our excellent half back line, with the third basically out of commission for the rest of it in Hurley and we were forced to rebuild.

In 2018 they fleeced North for a first round pick for Polec and Pittard, upgraded it with Freo and then fleeced Hawthorne for a cooked and divisive Wingard. They let three player who weren't critical to their build go and brought in some top line talent. They didn't rebuild from 2018, they still had a core of Wines, Dixon, Ryder, Jonas, Boak, Amon and Grey there and managed to bring in some gun players on top of that.

Their current build started all the way back in 2013 when they drafted Wines, Clurey, Jonas, then a year later they got Impey, DBJ.and Amon. They've been able to maintain top level talent since then.

And we had worse losses than a bottom 4 Carlton that year while we made finals including a 104 point loss! That's my point. The bar is so low that we're comparing a mid-table team to a bottom 4 side.

You may not care about previous rebuilds, but we're losing bigger under Scott than we did under Rutten so it's actually becoming worse not better. Our team defence is worse than anything under Woosha so far. Sometimes teams have a bad day yes, but this is the 3rd 10-goal+ loss in 6 games (4 out of 8 if you include preseason). What response is there to wait for? Last year we lost to Geelong by 77 points. We thought "yeah that's a bad day". Lost to Bulldogs by 41 points the next week and suddenly we're scraping past North and West Coast before getting destroyed by GWS and Collingwood. Those same players played last week so it's a cultural issue.

If we're to believe the club's direction, this off-season is when the significant cuts and list turnover happens. 4 years into the rebuild. Meaning we're likely to get worse if we focus heavily on the draft.

This year should have been the year when we stop losing big. Last week proved that nothing changed. I'm not putting it on Scott by the way because this trend far precedes him, but I want a serious cutting of the list and trading out some players of value so that we can draft or trade in players that change the make up of our list. No more holding onto players because we think they are individually good.

Yes, and as I told you, that's irrelevant to the current build.

I don't. Because they're irrelevant to the current one. The profile, the build, hell, the players are completely different. We've turned over 2/3 of the list since we started this rebuild. That's just a fact. 28/42 players on our list weren't in 2020.

You so eloquently compared this build to Carlton's. You think this is the year that we should stop getting smashed? Your own timeline disagrees with you. You're comparing our year 4 to their year 5. On your timeline of their rebuild it's the equivalent of 2019. Where they got smashed repeatedly.

Essendon fans are the worst because we're so ****ing impatient. Any time someone new comes in and says "we have to be patient" we provide lip service in year 1 then lose our shit in year 2 when it isn't fixed.

 

[boncer34]

Everything is not fine. When we see another insipid performance like Friday nights you know that we are a shithouse club. Good clubs do not perform at that level as often as Essendon does. It is simply unacceptable.

I might have been taking the piss

 

[boncer34]

We're in build 2 since our last premiership. Up until 2006 we kept trying to top up and stay relevant. Once Knights was appointed that changed. We built around the likes of Jobe, Ryder, Gumbleton, Hurley and Hooker, then added Daniher and that was our big push in the early 2010's whilst topping up with Goddard, Cooney and Chappy. Unfortunately the drug saga was also at the time and that derailed that.

Our core into 2017-2020 was slightly different but it was clear we were still working towards winning a flag with it. For various reasons that failed.

Then Saad, Daniher and Fantasia left and we embraced the rebuild for the most part by maintaining first round draft picks whilst getting former first round talents at a fraction of the price with the likes of Wright (F4), Caldwell (Fantasia and a F2), Duursma (BZT and F4), Goldstein (FA), Gresham (FA), McKay (FA), Setterfield (late pick swap) and Weid (Francis and a late pick swap for points) whilst also getting role players cheaply like Hind (4th) and Kelly (FA). All this whilst taking Cox, Perkins, Reid, Hobbs, Tsatas and Caddy early in the draft.

I get that some haven't worked out (Weid) and the jury is still out on pretty much all the kids but it's clear that we're building around the draft.

Port are irrelevant because they've maintained the same core for so long. And honestly not sure they're a great comparison. Their past decade they haven't looked close to winning the flag.

The Shiel trade hasn't worked out but also irrelevant to this build. We brought him in to be the key to fix the midfield puzzle and within 24 months of him joining, the guy we built around was injured for most of it then left, same with 2/3 of our excellent half back line, with the third basically out of commission for the rest of it in Hurley and we were forced to rebuild.

In 2018 they fleeced North for a first round pick for Polec and Pittard, upgraded it with Freo and then fleeced Hawthorne for a cooked and divisive Wingard. They let three player who weren't critical to their build go and brought in some top line talent. They didn't rebuild from 2018, they still had a core of Wines, Dixon, Ryder, Jonas, Boak, Amon and Grey there and managed to bring in some gun players on top of that.

Their current build started all the way back in 2013 when they drafted Wines, Clurey, Jonas, then a year later they got Impey, DBJ.and Amon. They've been able to maintain top level talent since then.

Yes, and as I told you, that's irrelevant to the current build.

I don't. Because they're irrelevant to the current one. The profile, the build, hell, the players are completely different. We've turned over 2/3 of the list since we started this rebuild. That's just a fact. 28/42 players on our list weren't in 2020.

You so eloquently compared this build to Carlton's. You think this is the year that we should stop getting smashed? Your own timeline disagrees with you. You're comparing our year 4 to their year 5. On your timeline of their rebuild it's the equivalent of 2019. Where they got smashed repeatedly.

Essendon fans are the worst because we're so ******* impatient. Any time someone new comes in and says "we have to be patient" we provide lip service in year 1 then lose our s**t in year 2 when it isn't fixed.

If we've only had 2 builds in 24 years when other clubs have had 4/5+ I'm not sure you can argue the fan base is impatient.

Edit: Which tbh eth it's probably our definition of rebuild where we differ. I don't really care if you call it a rebuild, refresh, reset, top up etc. To me a rebuild is acknowledging the list isn't good enough so you go for wholesale changes. Slap whatever lipstick on it you want, it's still a pig.

 

[eth-dog]

If we've only had 2 builds in 24 years when other clubs have had 4/5+ I'm not sure you can argue the fan base is impatient.

Have the fans been patient in the current build? Mate, be serious. Tell me I'm wrong in that regard. We unequivocally haven't been.

 

[boncer34]

Have the fans been patient in the current build? Mate, be serious. Tell me I'm wrong in that regard. We unequivocally have been.

Have we? Also I edited my post fwiw.

 

[eth-dog]

Have we? Also I edited my post fwiw.

I meant haven't.

The idea of a rebuild is saying the core isn't there to me. Our core has been tweaked a couple of times (from Watson/Hurley/Hooker/Ryder/Stanton to Watson/Hurley/Hooker/Daniher/Goddard/Merrett/Heppell to Daniher/Merrett/Goddard/Hurley/Hooker/Parish/Heppell) but it was largely maintained throughout that time so it wasn't really a rebuild for me. The core changed at the end of 2020 to be the younger group. That's a clearly defined difference.

Port's core from 2013 til now has been tweaked but it hasn't really changed heaps.