I’ve been optimistic about this club since I was a young fella, and to a certain extent I reckon that supporting Essendon has given me an optimistic outlook on life.
But… there comes a time when you need to temper your optimism and confront the reality of things head on.
Let’s throw off our Aussie gear, our red and black colored glasses, look globally, and compare our club with the best sporting clubs in the world… the clubs that are considered the best in their respective sports… and think about where we are in the harsh light of what high performance actually looks like.
Compare the club to the best in the world… what are we doing right? What are we doing well? What are we doing wrong? What aren’t we doing?
I’ll start: I reckon one place we are miles off is in data science. The best clubs on the planet continually refine their games based on data - players are drilled to the letter on how to behave situationally based on what the data tells them.
I reckon one place we are doing well is talent acquisition - we seem to be selling the club extremely well and attracting top talent at below market value.
We have got back to recognizing and attracting indigenous talent once more. We led the pack for a long time, then fell completely off the radar. Every year benfti specials tantalized but were never picked up. Tippa is a bona fide cult figure, more will follow.
Yeah I reckon we’ve definitely improved there… I’d love us to put some real money into our recruiting zone and provide educational and health outcomes and a steady stream of talent. I think richmond do indigenous recruitment better at this point though
The path to winning is so different across different sports (talent pathways, crafts, salary caps, feeder teams etc) that the comparison becomes difficult.
Our facilities are good, although located in a wasteland. Our heart not collocated with our facilities, v although that probably doesn’t matter. We’re historically conservative, and are probably even more conservative now, after our attempts to move away from that conservatism ended badly, so we need to address that and become leaders, rather than following.
Well we clearly haven’t been at the cutting edge of game strategy for 20 years. Significantly though I don’t think we’ve even been able to copy it.
Now this obviously has a lot to do with coaching but I suspect we’re a long way behind the Hawks in the way we teach and imbed strategy. Bolton was a teacher and I suspect he was very important in designing a curriculum to teach players.
I suspect our inability to hit the ground running with a ‘new’ game plan in recent years is symptematic of a haphazard approach to teaching it.
Just watching gws v lions. Something that we’re miles behind in (and were once a leader of) is controlled and targeted aggression. The lions have stood up to it and given as good as they’ve got. It’s been impressive. We would have been completely bullied out of a game like this.