Come on down Leigh Tudor!
For our development coaches, there is as much a need to develop players during games as there is during training sessions.
That’s why under Scott, we’ve prioritised our development coaches to be runners on gameday.
This year we saw Hurley being the runner and Cloke was the runner as well.
And Stanton is usually on the bench too.
When Stanton was runner 5 or so years ago, I don’t think he was a development coach at the time. He was just a runner.
He then became VFL coach at the same time as Rutten. And they didn’t get along well.
Our main issue development wise isn’t as much coaching. It’s more around availability. Especially during their development years.
Losing years of development in Cox and Reid has hurt far more than the lack of development by Hobbs and Perkins.
The coaching carousel doesn’t help either. From the unimaginative balance of Sheedy’s last 3 years, to Knights all attack no defence, to Hird’s lean towards defensive footy, then the saga of nothingness shitshow, then the Worsfold ‘player led’ slingshot footy, then the Rutten ‘blue collar’ footy, to Scott’s defensive first footy (which every successful club plays nowadays) with a group of players that have very little defensive backbone.
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I thought something had happened. You got me excited for a moment
I posted this in 2022 about Hurley while he was still on the playing list.
No idea what he actually is like as a development coach, but he was at least showing enough aptitude to get the opportunity.
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Correct. Starting point for any successful development program is getting them training and playing.
Essendon lost a generation of optimising talent as a result of a broken S&C program and development coaching inadequacies.
Reid, Cox, Jones, Fantasia, Hurley, Daniher without thinking.
That’s why it was important to get the recent S&C appointments right. Two reasons… We can exclude the S&C people if they can’t fix it and look to facilities, surfaces etc (1). And if we have now addressed the issue, we should start seeing much better availability as time goes on (12-24 months per Eagles) which supports development (2).
Caution on immediate improvement though. Takes time for new methods to convert to measurable results. Eagles took until second season for the injury list to shrink. Darren Burgess used to say this too.
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You mean we need another 15 debutantes next year?? I hope we have a lot of list spots
Whilst we wouldn’t expect next year to be like this year, it invariably takes time for benefits to flow through.
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Yep we won’t see results straight away but there will be calls to “sack Matt Innes” next year because he hasn’t got any of the injured players up and running in his first year
I was hoping Brendon Goddard might’ve come back to the club in some capacity but it looks like he’ll be at St Kilda for a while.
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KEN
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We are going into R1 next year with a sizeable chunk of players unavailable. To put this in to context, if we had the same number of players unavailable even just to start pre-season I’d be uncomfortable with it. But the numbers that will be unavailable to start pre-season are going to be through the roof.
We will not have a “good” year with injury next year. It simply isn’t possible. If all things go really really well, we can have an average number of players unavailable to start 2027 pre-season.
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I agree. Issue is most fans won’t appreciate this and will under appreciate the impact of having so many players underdone or unavailable will have on the on field performance.
Unavailability holds back development. You can’t work on the gameplan with preferred players in key roles. Individual players likely have below peak level performance years, most players say their best football is played only when they’ve put 1-2 full pre seasons together. Not being able to train together means team chemistry is held back and even the little (but important) things like players understanding their teammates innate tendencies are not really developed.
It’s why 2026 promises to be a difficult year again and why I’ve got them at this stage around 15/16th. Abd that’s why I’m not going to judge 2026 team performance purely on how many wins we have.
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Yeh, we’ll struggle next year.
A win for me will just be to see plenty of kids given plenty of games, and to have Reid, Ridley and Langford get some consistent games, and the list as a whole finish the year healthy.
A high draft pick at the end of it all will be necessary, and hopefuly we are ready to turn things around in 2027.
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Agree. We want them to be competitive most weeks too. As with any young side with lots of inexperience, there will be several games where we’re ‘off’ (like every team does) and we will get flogged. In reality that’s part of being a young and inexperienced team.
As you say, exit with a short injury list that sets up 2027 a really important KPI.
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Oh yeh, good point, kids playing consistently AND being competitve for the majority of games.
As we will be playing a young list, they will fade out the year guaranteed, as all young players do, even if our new high performance team do an outstanding job. So I won’t be using that as a guide to whether our fitness has improved.
*** A semblance of a game plan would be nice too, but I can’t say I’m as optimistic on that front.
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Regarding game plan, going to be scratchy with lack of preseason for many.
How many players won’t get a full pre-season: Martin, Bryan, Hayes, Edwards, Setterfield (if not delisted) and probably Jones. Have I missed any?
If the club had a good idea Gia was leaving, surely they’ve been sounding some replacements out? I hope we hear soon. We need some good news.
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Gia has essentially left for a lesser role to move to a role at hawthorn that we were actively looking to fill at essendon.
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