The administration under Barham were of the opinion the list was/is good enough and it just needed and experienced hand to get them to perform to the level they’re capable of. Which was incorrect.
Scott came onboard as the coach the administration were looking for, in a process led by Josh Mahoney (who’d get the chop) and Andrew Thorburn (who’d be CEO for about 24hours). So I’m not sure how much faith we can have in a process they ran.
Scott said he’d been clear with the club about where he thought the list was and how much work needed to be done by the club to be competitive. Which retrospectively sounds a bit like he thought the list was ■■■■ and so were many other parts of the footy department. I think it’s a fairly major indictment on his judgement if he walked into the same broken situation he was dealing with at the end at North.
The judgement call about having a board that didn’t want a rebuild and him seemingly to think we needed one is even worse through the lense of him bringing in so many ex-coworkers from North. It makes it look like they’ve all come on board because they have a chip on their shoulders that they’re trying to deal with by attempting to prove that they could have done the thing they weren’t allowed to do at North.
And it seems as though the board may have pivoted and become ok with the idea of a rebuild up until Merrett wanted out. And that change of plan that was never communicated to members and fans seems to have been a bit of a shock to Welsh as well.
haven’t even bothered watching the 3 games this year, my love and enjoyment of football is so far removed. I used to enjoy the footy shows, even when we were bad, I dont know if its eyes widened further but the industry as a whole is a joke from top to bottom.
AFL would have no desperation to help us, we will continue to fester at the bottom until we magically get our ■■■■ together on field by some lucky pick(s) and then challenge before regressing into mediocrity bordering irrelevance again
Im sure those soft tissue injuries will come back and bite when we are at our lowest. Wouldn’t worry too much on us not having open list spots by mid-May. We’ll have a third of the side ruled out for the season.
What did Eddie say about Essendon needing assistance?
Any media support for us receiving assistance is welcomed as god knows our club isnt competent enough to ask the question without it being shoved down their throats.
In no world does our inability to win a final for 22 years work within the AFLs mantra of everyone getting a lick of the AFLs ice cream of competing deep into finals with the draft system. They basically paved Melbourne’s premiership for them through help over many years.
Not specifically about getting ‘assistance’. More broadly about needing to build the Bombers up. Linked back to worries about future revenue related to the next TV deal and some worries related to the introduction of Tassie on the currently proposed timeline. Current world conflicts also get a mention.
Eddie is coming at this from a very BIG picture POV, but that’s the space he operates in. First 15-20 mins of this ep of FC is devoted to it.
Not a hope of a priority pick. They don’t give them out to teams who haven’t finished multiple years with a handful of wins.
That said, as I’ve posted above I would still apply. But I wouldn’t be expecting a priority pick, I’d be trying to get a discount on matching father-son and academy players.
If that does happen, we’re likely to get significant compo in return. Although, given we likely won’t use that until 2028 it won’t speed up any rebuild.
The AFL looked the other way when Brisbane clearly played shenanigans with Daniher to allow us a Band 1 compo. Everyone knew that it was dodgy, the AFL slipped us a freebie.
Um, that is only 2 picks in the first round. The other 2 are second rounders. Plus, they wouldn’t be back to back. If we finish last and have #19 and get the bonus pick, it will start out at #24 and then both picks would be pushed back (or forwards due to the new rules) by bids.
Actually, Gold Coast did. But they’d been in the bottom few for a lot of years, and were hemorrhaging players.
I could not believe we weren’t getting more media attention on this before it happened. Focussing on bottom 4 team losing best players to Premiers & Hawks, desperately need support, must get a Band 1 compo pick.
The other black mark in this on Scott is that after he was there a year, we topped up. Goldstein, Gresham, McKay and Duursma. That was the point where he had to either tell the club to rebuild, resign, or he owns the choice not to do so (or rather, is party to it).
The second thing is even when the club slightly pivoted to saying we needed to find quality in the draft under Vozzo & Rosa, at the AGM and elsewhere they were still saying we were aiming for finals. It is why I questioned whether we were really rebuilding. And then late 2025 happened and faced with Merrett asking out, Ridley offering to be traded, Langford & others reputedly having doubts, we closed the doors on everyone we could and traded in Fiorini.
Whatever the media says, this club has done its utmost to resist a rebuild.
I think its pretty obvious that should those conditions eventuate, the AFL will only have succeeded in creating yet another equalisation issue, the outcome of which will be to entrench bottom teams at the bottom, more or less indefinitely, while continuing the opposite trend at the other end of the ladder.
