Even what the CEO did Xavier was a pretty watered down tweet.
Essendon donât do the following games:
Line In The Sand
Bury Bottom Of The Ladder For A Big Percentage Boost
Milestone
Add 4 qtr effort required games.
You forgot:
Finals.
itâs a long list
This is Worsfolds and the coaches line in the sand moment.
If anything,we will see how much the players are responding to their coaching.
Malthouse thinks our players are still scarred by the saga. He obviously hasnât seen the #comebackstory hashtag. Everything is ok. Buy a membership. Everything ok. Donate to the flight plan.
I donât buy it needing to be a line in the sand game. You roll those out when you are in a massive hole or you have to win a really really really critical game (i.e. to make the finals or whatever).
That branding was classic Sheedy, and after the 50th time their impact wore off.
What it needs to be is a âplay the way we want to play for the whole match because we are fully switched on and know what to do and want to do it â game.
Thatâs what this week and the week after that and the week after that should be.
We wont win another game this year. There isnât a side in the comp that I look at and think âYeh weâll roll themâ.
Everyone would beat us.
Apologies for making a sweeping generalisation, but all this talk about us being too nice, the players are too nice, etc, you have to say that the vast majority of them are straight laced, private school educated kids whoâve probably been pampered most of their lives. Thereâs no Dean Solomon, Dean Wallis, Paul Barnard or Mark Johnson amongst that lot is there? Probably the closest we have is Walla, who is from the Tiwi Islands and had to do it the hard way to make it. Sunday was the most meek, wishy-washy, pea-hearted performance Iâve seen in a long time by an Essendon team. Even during the Saga years and in the last half dozen matches under Hird there were some fearful beatings, but extenuating circumstances were at play. This time there are no excuses, and we serve up that against a winless, bottom of the ladder team. If this doesnât kick them into action Iâm afraid we wonât be going anywhere with this groupâŚ
In fairness to Malthouse he is a dinosaur. He uses Heppell as an example of a player that has stagnated after the saga yet ignores the fact that all of Hurley, Hibberd and Ryder went on to become All Australian the following year. Thatâs 25% of the suspended players who became All Australian in 2017 with Ryder and Hibberd being first timers. We have been soft for 15 years, the saga has nothing to do with it.
The only good thing about this situation is that we finally have a list full of talent and our issues are all mental. We can turn it around, it may not be this year but we can turn it around.
In fairness, off the top of my head the only players who havenât yet debuted for us are Mutch, Houlihan, Lavender, Draper, Guelfi and Mynott. They may have made other selection mistakes but not debuting the above players yet this season is perfectly reasonable given the stage of their development and preparation.
I think we need to see Mutch and Draper play this year to see what theyâve got to offer, injury and form permitting.
Edit: forgot Ridley and Zerk-Thatcher. Iâd like to get them in the seniors to see what theyâve got sooner rather than later.
Second edit: forgot Clarke too. Get him in this week.
Regards Connor McKenna
Thereâs only one place you can draw a line in the sand and thatâs at the beach.
I reckon we might beat St Kilda.
mini finals
We will never have a line in the sand moment.
We will beat port this week then lose to some â â â â team the week after.
Because thatâs what we do.
The good days
#makeEssingtonEssendonagain
Great vision, and gee we had some hard tough players.
But it was a different game back then. Still, we could really do with some genuine hard mongrel attitude amongst the playing group. Make the opposition feel we are there.