#### **Watch out. The Bombers are coming**By Damian Barrett
Hand up if back in March you had the Bombers after five matches at 4-1, with the one loss by just one point.
Can’t see any. Mine certainly wasn’t up.
With a match up its sleeve due to the postponed game back in round three, Essendon is beautifully positioned. Its Saturday night win against North was a mere 14-point win on the scoreboard, but it was the victory of a very composed, little-fussed team.
Jordan Ridley’s development in the backline is emerging as a great storyline of 2020. Andrew McGrath is now crucial to this team, it’s great to see Devon Smith fit again, Will Snelling just runs all match, Darcy Parish has realised he belongs, and while he didn’t have major influence on the weekend, there’s something compelling about the way Brayden Ham plays.
Wait until they get back Jake Stringer and Dyson Heppell. And maybe even big Joe.
That’s all fine with us as we’re used to having an asterisk beside our name
Agreed. If Joe is 100% then Smack is sitting behind Townsend and Lav for mine.
Hohoh norf lolz
The truck rolls on next victim the dawgs
Fire up.
He’s back!!!
Meat Truck
Creak Mutt
R.ectum Kat
Lid freakin offffffffffffff
Is it too early for a road to the finals thread? I reckon the teams on 4 wins have one foot in the finals door in a compressed fixture. 3 win teams need to go 7-4 in the last 11 to get there IMO.
Please.
Can i please remind those waxing lyrical that we follow a club who hasn’t won a final in 15 years?
We are undoubtedly a weak club and until we put together months and months of good football, you cannot trust us and should respond to anything we dish up with extreme scepticism…
Other than the Pies, we have literally played the bottom 4 clubs and not won convincingly.
You could argue the Collingwood game would have been a massacre if it didn’t rain given how they cut us up in the first 20 min.
Hold fire, this team has achieved nothing and should be judged accordingly.
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Winning half your games with a good percentage must put you in the 8. Unfortunately 17 divided by two doesn’t break evenly. Fortunately one of the 17 games is pencilled in as a win against Adelaide. There are no automatic losses where you can see a team winning 15 or more games to balance this out as it is very even across the league. This means you need to win half of the sixteen games (8) plus the Adelaide game for a total of nine plus a good percentage to make the eight.
9 wins might play finals, but really, need 10 to be sure.
Looking back at previous years ladders after 17 games, (during the 18 team era) 9 wins would
be pretty borderline to play finals.
Over the 8 year period, 4 times having 9 wins wouldn’t have been enough to play finals, once it clearly was, and 3 times teams with 9 wins would have played or not played finals based on their percentage. So, based on that, 9 wins gives you just under 50% chance of playing finals.
What does 16 wins get you
I reckon 10 wins ensures it given the way Adelaide are playing. At 4-1 with a game in hand, we’re in a great place. If we beat the dogs this week, we have the crows the week after, there’s no reason why we can’t be 6-1. The game in hand against Melbourne might decide a few things.
Edit: it’s going to be hard to get a roll on given the stop/start nature if the season.
How many times we been through this? Blitz at the end of each year!
Reckon that second quarter was our most dominant for the year, we just didn’t put it on the board.