Half way through?
Interesting.
Who do you think are the best four senior players we’ll have leading the team in 2028?
Or did you want to push that out to ‘29?
Which current 100 game players will be really solid for us coming into the peak of their careers?
Kind of the wrong part of my post to seize and get technical on.
The point is something’s happening. During Hird we didn’t even know we were 200kg overweight. Like we actually didn’t own a mirror.
It’s the entire point of your post.
“THE MESSENGER!”
No it’s not, I just told you the point:
Make no mistake I can’t stand Brad, reckon he’s hopeless, and don’t think he’ll experience the fruits at the end of this (he may not even finish his current contract), but at least we’re on the diet, to continue with my metaphor above.
You know what?
I don’t even have to argue this.
Our captain and best player has given THIS coach, not any other, the strongest vote of no confidence possible.
That’s it.
Turn him over, he’s done.
Not true.
He’s saying what you’re doing is going to take too long for Merrett’s timeline.
They’re different issues.
And I would agree.
Even if Merrett has six years left.
They’re…kinda similar issues.
I think we all think Merrett has longer than he thinks himself
He’ll certainly extend his career elsewhere.
i think he’s just looking at teams like the pies, cats and hawks and seeing many lesser players enjoying winning finals basically every year and also getting a real chance at a flag almost every year.
Thats what he wants for the next however many years he has left.
It basically boils down to he’s regretting his decision to commit to the club previously.
I read it was Carlton a few years ago as well.
He’s basically been shopping himself around for a while.
I agree , this is all about Essendon culture, for years I heard different ones saying dont employ Essendon people we need outside eyes. Really , we use to be a powerhouse equal most premierships, God knows how we are still equal after the last tow decades. I dont think that philosophy has worked so I am proposing going back to all Essendon people, remove all things Kangaroos, no disrespect to Brad and those that are trying, but we need to get back to what made us great and I think that means we need our greats back at the club. The rebuilding starts with culture and we have plenty if we take advantage of it.
Among other things, arguably what made us great (looking to our most recent successes) was a non-Essendon person though?
we also tried bringing in richmond ppl
Our best player yes.
I think people are now questioning the wisdom of the being captain part.
The problem with ‘Essendon people’ is for whatever reason, many have absolutely NFI.
I don’t think Brad lasts, but I don’t think any coach could deal with our problems and get them on the improve. Not without a return back to reality or a false economy of where we were.
Every coach since Hird has been one year in finals with a terrible finals result and then straight back out.
Our strength and conditioning has been poor. We have been undersized compared to the rest of the comp since the saga. In every part of the ground. And since covid, that’s pretty much turned into struggling to keep them on the field.
Our development has been poor. The biggest part of development is being able to play in a semi decent VFL environment. Ours has been rubbish since covid. I’d say in the last few years, it looks far better, but it’s still bottom half of the VFL ladder level so it has a long way to go.
Our gameday strategy has been poor. Coming off the back of Bomber Thompson, we seemed to lean more towards the offensive style of footy with some slingshot ball movement off the back flank. This was during the time that the forward press was getting more and more prevalent across the comp and we didn’t even go towards that style at any time between Richmonds first premiership and their last one during that 2010s. That is totally mind blowing. The best semblance of forward press we’ve achieved is in 2024 and unfortunately, since then, teams have found a way to combat the forward press so again, we were doing exactly what the opposition wanted us to do. We’ve been on the wrong side of whatever ‘modern footy’ was for a particular 5 year period.
Our list management has been deplorable. Firstly we don’t have players who have ‘sound skills’ to be able to kick the footy. We also have had players unable to adapt to game styles between seasons. It’s usually fallen in a heap early and then we get through winter and play more ‘basic footy’ the rest of the year and recover from the poor start. We also somehow don’t have ‘blue collar’ style footballers even though that was our ethos in 2022 that was gone 5 minutes into the round 1 game. The list is so far away from blue collar, it’s a farking joke how we trawled out that rubbish. From a list perspective, we’ve also had poor strategies. As far as list need we’ve been poor. We haven’t been able to find a high half forward in the 5 years that that position became important. A small defensive back pocket was ignored as a need. Yeah, we got Kelly, but we’ve only had McGrath and Kelly since covid. And lucky (unlucky depending on how you view it) they’ve been durable because we had no one behind them. We’ve had no wing players since Stanton / Zaharakis until Duursma came to us. We grumbled about both those players and they are bang average and Duursmas puts them both to shame. A wing was needed to be able to do a full ground zone that Melbourne were able to achieve, but we had nothing during that time.
The other strategy issue was the ‘when to go all in on FAs vs when to go to the draft’ strategy. We farked up by spending a few years on Stringer, Smith and Shiel. And we’re paying for that now. We farked up by holding Daniher to his contract then watching Saad leave and McKenna prefer to be in Ireland away from footy all together than be anywhere near Essendon. Again, that period should have gotten us players to build on that you see blossoming now, but we got Reid (couldn’t get him on the park), Cox (can’t get him on the park) and Perkins (rarely injured but can’t get the best out of himself).
Drafting wise, we’ve been better the last few years, but 2020, 21 and 22 have been farking diabolical and that’s off the back of trading away picks in the 2017, 18 and 19 drafts. Six years of players who didn’t make it and have barely made it onto a VFL team (Lavender, Houlihan, Mosquito, Gown, Ham, Jones, Cahill, Lachie Johnson, Eyre, Brand, Lord, McDonagh, Davey Jnr, Davey) vs injury riddled (Cox, Reid) vs one who look average at best (BZT, Guelfi, Bryan, Perkins, Hobbs, Tsatas, Hayes). That’s a farking ■■■■ result from draft day across 6 years of picks. And then you wonder why a coach can’t ‘get more out of that list’. They may as well have traded all those picks out for a different result.
You cannot keep farking up year after year and assume that 1 person is going to come in and fix it up. Whoever we got back when we made the coaching change, would have found us at this point too. Simply because we couldn’t ‘rebuild’ from the get go. Your first role as coach is to ‘get the most out of the list’. And we didn’t get rid of the list manager at the time, nor did we get rid of the S&C at the time. It wasn’t a clean slate (for whatever reason) and was going to be done over multiple years. Whether the coaches knew that during the interview period is anyone’s guess.
We’ll sack Scott next season. Pretty certain it’ll happen especially if there’s no improvement. And there will be pressure from both media, the club and even some fans to get some improvement. And I get it. This season has been terrible, it’s an incredibly low base. If we do improve (which I assume the target will be challenging for the 8), it’s another false economy of where we’re at. The better way is to take the pain of what comes in the next few years until Tasmania come back in, keep gathering more prospects through the draft, do not farking trade all of our draft collateral unless it’s players we’re sure will be 10 year players (like JHF or Harley Reid) and clear out the list.
Yes, we might find one coach who can piece it all together and deliver us a premiership. That’s unlikely for where we’re at. Whoever we have as our next coach (Hird or other) will be sacked as soon as we get halfway to where we’re going and then ‘self correct’. I’ve mentioned a few times, the Richmond board challenge which was to wipe out everyone happened the year before they won their premiership. It came after 3 years of finals failures and after a year where they dropped back to 13th after being smacked by 100+ points against Sydney. Richmond had a strong enough board to withstand it and the rest was history. I don’t think we go through the same thing and back in the coach. We’ll either sack to coach to preserve the board or clear the board and start again.
Apologies for the long post.
That’ll fill my quota for next week.
Enjoyed the read, well said.
Great post.
Agree with all of it including the concerns around what the club may likely do when placed under real pressure again.
Everyone has to be on the same page and understand that the absolute worst thing we can do is fail to realise where we are at and what is actually required for the umpteenth time.
As we can see from these boards though, there are enough fools out there agitiating for meaningless quick wins, and bringing back the old boys type nonsense, and it will be the same in the more influential circles around the club as well.
At this point surely the laws of probability have to give us something…