New captain, new hope for next generation Baby Bombers?

With the first pre-season match to kick off mid-February, now is the time to review expectations for 2017, and hopefully explore some unknown unknowns before the season begins. Surely, one of the more confounding questions for 2017 is how will Essendon perform?

To answer this, there really is no precedent. The team Essendon puts on the park in 2017 will have a new captain (the very accomplished) Dyson Heppell, ten players who have not played AFL for 12 months, and potentially one or two draft picks (number one draft Andrew McGrath looms large here) who are yet to play AFL.

Over half of the team will step onto the MCG in Round 1 having not played an AFL game in recent memory to face one of the most successful and experienced teams in the modern era in Hawthorn.

While expectations are not high, there are a number of reasons to think Essendon will be fiercely competitive with the Hawks in Round 1, will improve on the three wins recorded in 2016, and could indeed challenge for finals.

Starting with Round 1, how will Essendon be competitive? Ignoring a subjective analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the respective player lists for the moment, one significant positive for the Bombers will be the effect of sports psychology and visualisation.

Can you imagine being one of those Essendon players who have been unable to play for the last 18 months? Much like an Olympic athlete (who competes at the highest level every four years), each of those Essendon players would have been thinking about returning to play AFL every day since the ban.

Visual rehearsal actually triggers neural firings in the muscles and creates a mental blueprint that can ultimately facilitate future performance. Each player would be thinking about his foot hitting the ball, the smell of the grass under his foot and the sound of the crowd, and so on.

In other words, Essendon players will be primed for Round 1. For them, this will be like a grand final. In a competition where all teams are more or less equal over time, visualisation and mental state can prove the difference between teams (how often do we hear coaches say the team ‘didn’t turn up until half time’).

For the longer run, rest of season analysis, Essendon appears to have a balanced team in terms of experience, a high-quality coach and a favourable draw.

Typically, a team’s experience is defined by the total number of games, or by the average number of games per player. I have always thought this as being too simplistic as it ignores the need for balance between experience and inexperience.

Rule of thumb, a balanced team will have one-third of players being very experienced (200 to 300+ games), one-third as the next leaders of the team (100 to 200 games) and one third young players (up to 100 games).

Teams on the rise (pre-success) will have a distribution leaning toward fewer games (eg the Western Bulldogs) and teams on the slide (post success) will have a distribution leaning toward more games (eg Hawthorn). Here, Essendon has a list befitting a team on the rise, with the majority of players having played 50-150 games (Heppell, Michael Hurley, David Zaharakis, etc) bookended by veterans (Jobe Watson, Brendon Goddard, James Kelly, etc) and young guns (Zach Merret, Joe Daniher, McGrath, etc).

Unlike any other club, Essendon has a culture of competitive and successful younger teams, characterised by the first and second generation ‘Baby Bombers’ which won premierships in the 1980s and 1990s.

The naysayers will point to lack playing together as a team inferring that Essendon’s team ‘experience curve’ will be considerably lower than the rest of the competition. The experience curve is an idea developed by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in the mid-1960s with the basic premise, there more you do something, the more effective you will be.

This is not an earth-shattering idea, but establishes the notion (in the context of the AFL) that teams will get better with time playing together. There is another inference, however, that coaching is important to leapfrog the experience curve by either accelerating the learning and integration of a team, or through a new innovation (for example Alastair Clarkson’s cluster, the Western Bulldogs’ handball etc).

On this measure, again Essendon appear to be well positioned. Achieving three wins in 2016 was by any measure a considerable achievement. John Worsfold is a premiership coach with a high-quality team of assistants underneath him. No other AFL team has three ex-AFL coaches as assistants.

Early indications imply Worsfold is looking to add flexibility to the team training backs as forwards and forwards as backs. This sounds eerily like the strategy of the West Coast Eagles’ premiership teams of 1992 and 1994, which basically were a team of ruck rovers with no formal positions apart from backman Glen Jakovich and forward Peter Sumich.

From a structural point of view, Essendon could adopt a very similar approach relying on proven elite backman Michael Hurley and a nascent elite forward Joe Daniher.

Lastly, one should not discount the draw. The teams Essendon will play twice include Carlton, Collingwood, Brisbane, Fremantle, and Adelaide. Arguably, only the latter two would be considered finals contenders.

Of their 21 games, only six will be interstate and importantly, games which Essendon will be expected to lose (for example, against Adelaide, Fremantle, Sydney, Greater Western Sydney) are all away, thereby increasing the probability of finals just by winning in Melbourne.

This cursory analysis is also borne out by quantitative methods; looking at Ryan Buckland’s analysis, Essendon has the fourth-easiest draw.

In synopsis, the red and black army could be in a for a good season, which given what they have endured over the last few years would be just desserts for their members.

Watch out Hawthorn, Round 1 might herald the third generation of the Baby Bombers.