Stop that supporter culture that we are superior. Almost two decades without finals success. My kids don’t care that we have won 16 cups. Its about the now.
Indifferent to Windy Hill or Tullamarine base. If they free up land in Essendon airfields, it would be a different story.
Bottom our definitively. Look who we got when we got the wooden spoon. Imagine a couple of those years while we quietly built up our young talent.
Focus on drafting midfield talent and build the team out from that. Quality delivery to the front, less pressure for the back.
And this is also a good point to demonstrate that we didn’t plan for a post Sheedy era. We have been governed terribly from ad hoc mistake to reactionary ■■■■ up for potentially as much as 40 years. A cultural problem doesn’t occur because of one or two mistakes, it’s generally dozens of small bad decisions that get missed or ignored. If anyone thinks these are easy things to fix look at the banks.
Those points are clear as general principles, but to achieve anything they need to be made specific to our particular situation. The basic problem with our team has been for years that the players are not fit enough and they don’t put in hard enough. I watched the Richmond-St Kilda game last night and two things stood out.
One was that our current team is simply not capable of playing the way Richmond played. Our players are nowhere near as fit as every one of those Richmond players, and they never go in as hard as Richmond did.
The other was that St Kilda, although beaten, never dropped their heads and never stopped putting in 100%. They were fit and they went hard. If they had kicked a bit straighter they would probably still have lost, but it would have been very close. I would genuinely class the game for St Kilda as an honourable loss. I can’t remember when Essendon last had an honourable loss – and I don’t mean narrow, I mean honourable.
If you don’t have specific goals and a process for achieving them, then the points you’ve identified don’t really do anything. They are adopted by the Board, everyone solemnly agrees that yes, that is our way forward; but nothing further happens, and nothing changes.
I would start by setting a specific set of fitness goals for every player on the list to achieve over the break. For some, like Ambrose and McGrath, they wouldn’t be much different from where they are now. For others they would be a quantum leap above where they are now.
And there should also be specific skills goals to work towards.
e.g if you currently can get 5/10 accuracy kicking for goal at the end of training, then by March, you should aim to have increased that by 25% before the season starts.
Get rid of everyone that was involved during the saga years- from board members,CEO’s to players
Put every single bit of silverware that we have ever won into storage.
Stop focusing on the past and focus on the future
Become ruthless by not accepting anything less than 100% effort in what they are doing, that goes from admin people taking calls in the membership department ,to players to execs.
Nobody expects all players to be superstars, but they should be expected and demanded to have their bodies in the best condition possible in order to get the best out of themselves on the field.
Make fans feel part of the club again. Stop the continuous asking for money from the fans and actually go out of your way to make fans feel a part of the club. Cut down on membership prices for all of the members that have stuck by the club through the saga years.
Realise that the club is built to compete and win games of football. Not to be used to make lots of money to be used to boost executives ego ( looking at you Xavier)
We need an independent, external review, without the involvement ex players or “Essendon people”. Essendon is like a failed state when a dictator dies, a power vacuum occurs and it gets mired in civil war! Sheedy some how managed a factional, feudal club with half the board at any given time wanting to sack him. No head coach since has been savvy enough to work under those conditions.
Also, at the time, rampant cheating of the salary cap. “Big clubs” won premierships in the pre-professional era with bags of cash in brown paper bags. The AFL cracked down in the 2000s, equalised the competition, fined/penalised us and Carlton, brought in the draft and now free agency, and clubs like Essendon and Carlton have struggled. We can’t operate like we used to in “the good old days” anymore.
I’m sure the players hate going out every day to Tullamarine too. Didn’t the Seaford training base almost destroy stkilda because everyone hated driving out there?
It’s just an indication of the arrogance of the club, or it was just a thoughtless adhoc decision to move there. But it feels like, “why would we need to make our training base attractive to the people working there? we’re essendon! We’re a big club, they’ll work where we tell them to work!” Stupid.