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For the last 20 years, it’s been pretty easy to work out how Essendon fans will react to a loss.
Barring the closest, most controversial defeats, pessimism swiftly swells among the ranks of the Bomber faithful, longing for a time when they were the biggest, baddest club in the land, with a fury masked only by melancholy at the current lot’s inability to live up to the standards set by their forebears.
But this latest loss, by 30 points to a red-hot Sydney, is a far harder one to gauge. For the first time in a long time, the Dons did everything their most fervent supporters would have wanted from them.
They crashed packs – in Peter Wright’s case, controversially so. They tackled ferociously. They scragged the Swans off the ball and outhunted them for it, sparking spotfires almost too quickly for the packed SCG crowd to boo them when they happened.
They got under their skin, winning free kicks on the occasions when they retaliated, and needed the runner to step in and stop things escalating further once or twice.
In short, they played ruthless, take-no-prisoners, thuggish football – they were 23 arseholes in red and black.
And they were still beaten – pretty comfortably, in the end, given the recent trend of these two sides to feature in thrillers galore – by a side that, for all their bluster and bravado, the Bombers are in a comfortably lower weight class than.
The Dons made them work for it, both physically and mentally, but this Sydney team is a serious football outfit. Have been for three decades.
Lewis Melican and Sam Draper tussle. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/AFL Photos/via Getty Images )
The Bombers, well, just aren’t at the moment – but if their last quarter in particular shows anything, it’s that they’re not as far away from being one as you might think.
Of the long list of things to fix, top of the agenda is to find a way to defend in transition – it was a problem under John Worsfold and Ben Rutten, and continues to be a debilitating flaw under Scott.
The Swans, to be fair, are not an opponent against whom you want to have a weakness of this nature, and they naturally capitalised all evening long.
It’s an issue made all the more obvious by their inability to do the same: at most teams, the obvious ones North Melbourne, Adelaide and the Western Bulldogs, defensive limitations are due to an attack-first gameplan that gives them chances going the other way.
Yet by halfway through the third term, the Swans’ defensive 50 launches were resulting in an inside 50 a whopping 39 per cent of the time. The Bombers? Stuck down at 14 per cent.
Part of it is an issue of conservatism: the Swans make no secret of their willingness to attack the corridor and spread from there when going inside 50, while the Bombers by and large do their attacking around the boundary line, with their final kicks inside 50 largely going back into the central corridor from there.
(In one case, a Kyle Langford mark on the wing that helped set up a Jade Gresham goal was comfortably outside said boundary line, but I digress.)
No doubt it makes the turnovers less costly and easier to defend, but I’d argue it’s more an aesthetic improvement: the Bombers look sounder and safer playing this way, but given how easily the Swans were able to score – 36 scoring shots is an awful lot even for them – it’s not working all that well, at least from a defensive perspective.
Another consistent problem for the Bombers is running out quarters. Against the Swans, the effort and intensity they brought to the table, both in football acts and off the ball, meant they were effectively on fumes for stoppage time.
It’s no coincidence that the Swans banged on 12 of their 19 goals in this part of the term, compared to the Bombers’ four – halve that, and they go a long way towards a famous victory.
But the biggest issue of all, in my view, is cohesion between midfielders and forwards. It’s actually a credit to the Dons that they kicked 15 goals for the night, with a 50 per cent rate of shots per inside 50, because some of their ball use moving forward was simply ghastly – as it has been for many a year.
Barring the nearly always accurate Zach Merrett, there are few Bombers you’d actually trust with the ball heading inside 50: Will Setterfield, who had seven for the night, is an honest toiler who gives them a power at stoppages they’ve lacked for a while now, but is far from flawless with ball in hand. Ditto, for obvious reasons, Sam Draper, whose five inside 50s basically consisted of ‘whack the ball in there and hope for the best’.
The best teams, like the Swans, are careful to give their best ball-users the opportunity to deliver that ultra-important kick: Errol Gulden had a team-high six inside 50s for the night, while Tom Papley finished with five and Chad Warner four. James Rowbottom, the Swans’ Setterfield equivalent, only had three.
It’s factors like that that explain why the Swans took 19 inside 50 marks to nine, and why, up to half time, they’d had one unforced forward half turnover to the Bombers’ seven.
It’s why, despite dominating clearances all night, the Dons scored five points fewer from that source than Sydney, with the damage done by five goals from centre bounces – where direct, accurate kicking is at its most lethal against a defence all but isolated.
Scott is slowly but surely building the Dons into a team to respect, if not fear quite yet.
From a stoppage perspective, Essendon can now more than hold their weight – to dominate a star-studded Swans team minus their most effective clearance winner, Darcy Parish, is a real feather in Scott’s cap.
By half time, they had a staggering 24-10 clearance advantage, and 16-4 outside centre bounces. With a little bit more polish, those numbers are the profile of a seriously strong, finals-worthy midfield.
In fact, that can sum up a lot of what the Bombers do, and why the ‘Essendon Edge’ got referred to so much this week: the Dons don’t have the natural talent, especially when it comes to foot skills, that the Swans do.
Sydney don’t need to rough up opponents, to play a bit dirty, to skirt the line to get results: right now, the Bombers need that bit of mongrel to give them a chance. And for the majority of the night at the SCG, that’s exactly what it did.
That style can’t fix the Bombers’ long list of flaws – but it’s a start.
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