Season 2017 in the rearview mirror

Football Discussion Dustin Fletcher Hangar
81

I’ll play
There’s certainly scenarios where we could’ve finished much worse and still taken more positives out. Namely, player development.
I find it hard to believe Begley was that much more ready in round 20 than he was in round 10 or 5.

If I’d have seen 5-8 games of begley, a small handful of Ridley and even Mutch, and 5 more games into Redman and Langford, I’d be a damned sight more confident in the list going into 2018, and the overall vision of the coaching staff.
As it is we learned almost nothing about those guys, or the guys that held them out. We need to be making the transition from the Jobe Stanton era to the Hepp Joe era.

If that means finishing 10th instead of being shellacked, I could live with it.

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82

I would actually agree with you on all of that. However my only comment would be that McGrath is probably a 5% better player for having played with Pops. Is that the best use of the 23 games on the HBF given where our side is (nowhere)? Would he still have got that 5% fractionally later if someone else played there? Would the person who did play there be a LOT better? Might we have saved Jackson Merrett’s career or turned Redman into a ready made Rd 1 2018 player by letting them each battle it out for that spot?

83

Sydney in Sydney is very very tough but still doable.

Positives from the season:

Joe continued his rise
Parish standing up in the final
Bellchambers showing some really goof form for a section of our season
Our forward line (which accounts for most of my score of 4)
McGrath being soooo much better than i was expecting
Zac Merrett getting better
Beating Hawthorn in Round 1
Winning Anzac Day
Gleeson and Connor making HBF their own
Begley showing something
Had a great run injury wise
Ambrose proving when fit he is a best defender
Massive sea’s of Red n Black at our games
Seeing us outnumber the GC supporters when i travelled up for the game
Zaka becoming the player he was always capable of being

Negatives:
The midfield was a disgrace almost all season and very little seemed to be done to fix it. Mostly the same guys were played in there week after week for the same result. Setups seemed all wrong and very little structure

Travis Colyer- kicking was awful, fumbled his fumbles
Jobe- had a few good games, but i sense his heart was never truly in it. He seemed to come back for others sake (which i respect) but i dont think he was ever “all in” this season
Bird not getting more games when his form in the vfl deserved it, then coming in against Stkilda playing well, not getting dropped
Gifting games to Howlett, Myers
Mind boggling selections for a lot of the season
Picking Begley about 4 weeks too late
Having about 3 guys make their debut. Not giving enough kids games/experience
Hartley- forgetting how to defend
Hurley- see Hartley, Attacking wise was brilliant, but defensively just was good enough this season
Goal kicking- still a issue
Match day coaching- if you can call it coaching
Constantly copping 5-6 goals straight consistently and not being able to put a stop to it
Constantly leaking “red time” goals most weeks
Having one really good performance in our last 8ish weeks, when we were supposed to be “hitting out straps” in the second half of the season
The Brisbane loss- just everything about it was an absolute disgrace- and the subsequent dropping of Langford after the game and keeping in all of the under performing senior guys was just fkd
We had the easiest draw, very few injuries and only just scraped into the 8
Struggling against rubbish sides
Our game plan not standing up to a team clogging up the middle or applying any sort of pressure
Xavier apologising for his tweet after the Brisbane game because some of the players didnt like it
Having no mongrel or aggression in this team at all

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84

Overall…we done well

Scraped into the eight, which showed against sydney. I honestly believe we psyched ourselves out of that game before it started.

Need to get (gun) an inside mid. No1 priority for our list, throw the ■■■■■■■ kitchen sink at one if we have to. Nothing to lose.

Need to improve next year, theres a lot of teams around that will get even better unfortunately, maybe even go past us.

85

5-6/10

Six good wins
Haw
Coll #1
Geel
St Kilda
WCE
Port

Five woeful losses
Carl
Adelaide #1
Melb
Freo
Brisbane

And a heap of middling performances that won’t take you anywhere.

Of most concern, we folded terribly numerous times and I think we won one game that was in the balance in the last quarter the whole season (second game against Carlton).

We’re mentally poor, lack players with fight and a bit of mongrel, just a nice team and a nice club.

Going forward we need McGrath, Parish, Merett and Daniher to take ownership of the team. The thought of Daniher and Merrett going their career without a flag or even a proper tilt at it is maddening, we have two All Australians under 23 years old, not many teams have had that type of opportunity.

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86

6/10

Positives

Made finals. Got experience. Learnt what the level is and will take that into the preseason. It is what we had to do, and that was achieved. Well done.

Strong core group. We do have a bunch of elite players. Won, or were in the running, for a series of awards. Well done to those individuals.

Development Surprises. Conor McKenna, the Marty Party, Ambruise, Jimmy Stewart, McGrath all exceeded my expectations. Well done.

Off-field. Made big profit. Great crowd numbers. Great membership numbers. I also feel that fan engagement went up again this year. Saga settlements done. Further TVSC improvements planned. Started the “Move back to the G” process. Excellent application for a Women’s team. Well done to the off-field team at EFC, and the fans who make the club strong.

Xavier. Got a world of time for this guy. Leading beautifully, excluding the twitter incident where he should have told the players to HTFU.

Crow. Extraordinary year from an injury perspective. We may not ever see that again.

Dodoro and Keane. Felt the recruits from last year all showed promise. I like what his team are doing.

Negatives

Finals slaughter. In general, just really really poor.

Kick-ins. How farkin hard is it to have some sort of plan for kick-ins? The scenario is the same every time. Stand in box with ball… bring it back into the field of play. Surely surely surely we can come up with something better than kicking it to the same spot 90% of the time.

Selfish. I think we have a lot of selfish players. We have some very good individual talents, but few good team players. In particular, we really do need to learn to block / shepherd for each other. The number of times player x has the ball streaming down the field and player y just trots along beside them hoping for the ball while player x gets chased from behind is infuriating. In addition, the whole pointing and blaming others thing is ridiculous. You’re a team, you succeed or fail as a team.

Physically soft. We have no presence on the field. You don’t have to be big to have presence. You do have to have the right mindset. We have so very few players that play with aggression. We could learn something from rugby league here regarding taking the opportunity to hit to hurt when it arises, and learning to stick tackles.

Mentally soft. Honestly lads, as a group you are a basketcase. You do not have the footy smarts nor confidence to ice the clock. You do not have the ability to get yourselves up for games against sides you think are beneath you. You have not worked out how to put your foot on the throat of the opposition when in front. You have a habit of getting on a role and playing good footy when coming from behind after pretty much having to throw caution to the wind because whatever you tried so far hasn’t worked and you have nothing to lose. And stop playing for free kicks, instead learn to win the contest anyway.

Fair. Having just said stop playing for free kicks, what we need to do is learn to play within the rules as they are being umpired, as opposed to how they are written in the rule book. I swear we get pinged for incorrect disposal because we are trying to get a handball away, where if we just dropped the ball it would be play on. We need to learn how to scrag players without giving away frees. We need to learn how to reduce the impact of the opposition, and to hell with whether it is fair or not.

Midfield defence. Play a tagger. Defend as a team. I don’t know, but it’d be great if we could be within 10m or our opponents through the midfield while they happily chip their way from the D50 to the F50. And it’d be great if the bloke we knew was going to get 30 touches and 3 brownlow votes could have some chance of not getting those 30 touches and 3 votes.

Development. Felt we missed opportunities to put games into kids, and gave to many games to the senior statesmen.

The returning players. All of them were below par.

VFL. I think we undervalued the VFL finals series. Primarily by choosing to rest 3 players just in case they were needed for the AFL final. That is a dreadful error in judgement in my view.

Summary - I really enjoyed the year. It was an emotional roller-coaster of a ride, but for all the right footy related reasons. Looking forward to the trade / draft period and into pre-season next year. We need some freshening up in the coaches box, a bit of age demographic changes to the list, and some luck at the trade / draft table. But we’ll be in it in a big way next year.

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87

We finished exactly where I thought we would (7th or 8th) - it’s just that the path we took to get there was unexpected. I didn’t anticipate a few wins, and there were some losses that should not have happened.

The school Report Card would probably say C - Essendon needs to apply itself more in game, and learn how to extend upon its substantial potential. However, it must be noted that Essendon’s behaviour is excellent, and a huge improvement has been noted in off-field governance.

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88

I am so glad you brought up the kick ins. They were an abomination all season, we consistently did the same thing every game- it didnt work so we kept doing it. Whoever was in charge of that shouldnt be employed at the club next season

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89

How about if our default is to kick long to the right, we make sure we have all our numbers there, including a ruckman, so that when the ball is brought to ground, that the opposition don’t just sweep it to the back of the pack and set up again for another inside 50?
I’m still having nightmares remembering that last qtr against Geelong that we tried our best to lose

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90

I have heard that a member of our coaching panel said preseason that we didn’t practice our kick ins. Amazing oversight if true. However from observing its makes complete sense.

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To be fair, when our list included the mighty and often under-rated Dustin Fletcher… then practicing our kick-ins would’ve been a complete waste of time.

Move on people, times have changed. You have 3 or 4 senior coaches on the panel. Surely one of them has had to work with their team on that part of the game before.

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92

I would have thought that learning to defend kick ins was also a worthwhile exercise. Fingers crossed the 2018 preseason program gives some attention to this aspect of the game.

93

I can’t ever recall being so excited leading up to footy season.

The positives from last year combined with the boys returning had me literally intoxicated with anticipation. We walked to the 'G with thousands of other passionate Bomber fans reveling in the euphoric atmosphere. I shed my first tear of the night watching the big screen as Dys led the boys out. The roar was spine tingling. It’s odd. I knew from that moment we would win. And what a win it was! The 'G shook. We floated around Melbourne for hours on a pleasure cloud. It was the best of times.

Belief was back. It was shy and elusive but it was there. As the year progressed it teased and taunted us. Deserted us in the lead up to Anzac Day then reappeared with a cheeky lopsided grin.This roller coaster of a year delivered losses against the Dees and Fremantle, resounding wins against the Cats and Eagles. The despair of Dreamtime only enhanced the joy of demolishing Port. The desolation of the Swans loss turned to delight after a second win over the Pies and a spanking of St Kilda.

The F word was starting to form on the lips of many. Tentatively whispered at first, behind closed doors, and on footy forums. Could we? Should we? Our form wasn’t great. I sat again at The 'G and watched our finals chances slip away until James Stewart did the impossible and Tippa did the rest. We were down that end, between the 50m line and the goals. That sound, as despair became euphoria, is the loudest I’ve ever heard. It wasn’t a great game. It wasn’t even a good game. But it was one perfect moment that will stay with me forever.

I was never confident we would make finals this year. I hoped, but thought it was just beyond us. The thrill of making it was tempered with a heavy dose of reality that the Swans were our opponent. Knowing we’d have to be better that our best to beat them kept my expectations in check. That fickle belief though, wheedled its way back into my heart and was still strong, until one diabolical quarter of footy banished it, until at least the start of trade week.

Our best football was mesmerizing, our worst, misery making. I’m neither qualified or confident enough in my knowledge of all things footy to know how to reduce the gap between the two, I am confident that those who are, do and will.

So, grading the year on my personal football experience. I adored it! I thank everyone who made it possible.

Our Club is back and it feels amazing.

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94

The coaching debate in a nutshell.

  • You can’t know they’re not!
  • Uh, yeah. I can. Cause they’re not. See? See how they’re not?
  • But you can’t know.
  • ffs…
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… i dont even know what to say about this if its true. Talk about not doing your job properly!

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I doubt it is true. More than likely at a particular point they were not practising because they were focused elsewhere and then they focused on it when it was the time to.

97

How do I see this year?
Inconsistent. It’s like we have two different teams. One is good. The other is woeful
Consistent. Consistently bad in kicking in, kicking for goal, kicking in general.
Disappointing. So disappointing when we hit those lows, disappointing when that other team, the woeful one, comes out to play when we were expecting that good team.
Frustrating. Frustrating when we can’t kick straight in perfect conditions under a roof. Under a roof! No howling gale, no rain, no sleet, no fog, no excuses.
Complacent. We will be better next week, next month, next year. Better when the players get back, get fit, get something. Always going to be better in the future.
Boring. Making the same mistakes over and over again in the same game. In the same quarter. It’s like someone bashing their head against a brick wall.
Exhilarating. When it clicks it clicks.
Hopeful. We are always a chance next week – problem is… see complacent.
Tired. It’s the same old same old. All of the above could be written about any year in the past 15.
And that is the problem.
It’s another year just like all the others. And if we continue to keep doing what we have been doing nothing is ever going to change.

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98

Seriously, they could not get through a review of most week’s games without going, “■■■■, I think we need to address our kicking in”. It would have to be one of the first things on the list.

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99

Great summary Darli.

If anyone said at the start of the season that we would beat the Hawks in round 1, Pies twice and the Cats, plus slap WC, PA and the Saints into next season and finish in 7th spot I would say the season was a resounding success.

Our final effort did detract from that a bit plus some of the other lows were pretty ■■■■■■ low.

All in all it was a pretty good season that still has myself concerned about some substantial holes in the side. How we fill them, time will tell.

The best part is I won more slabs than I lost for a change so I’m happy with that.

I give us a 7/10.

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100

Finishing 7th and losing a semi final is exactly what I expected.

What I didn’t expect was to learn so little about our list. The biggest list positives were Stewart and Conor. Not knowing any more at all about Francis, Morgan and Redman is very dissapointing.

Not getting a look at Mutch and Clarke also dissapointing, and to an extent Ridley but there is exception there due to injury.

Knowing less about Langford and Laverde is very concerning.

The fact we were mid table all year, with the softest draw and very few injuries and the vibe from the coaches was ‘this is fine’ and giving games to Howlett types was mind boggling.

Nothibg to indicate a jump to top 6 or winning a final next year.

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