‘Their best senior player doesn’t want to be there’: Dons great sums up their woes
Updated ,first published
Essendon coach Brad Scott has been left with few options for hard calls at selection after the VFL side was also belted, while former champion Matthew Lloyd says Scott is coaching for his future.
Lloyd, who said he was tired of being a media critic of the club he loves, said the Bombers would need to improve quickly or Scott’s job would be on the line before the end of the season.
But the coach’s ability to make a strong statement at selection about culture and defensive standards to back up his blunt post-match assessment of the 63-point loss to Port Adelaide was compromised by the VFL side losing by 12 goals to Geelong at the weekend.
Like the senior team, the VFL team was unable to defend the ground and was easy to score against. The Cats’ VFL team booted 24 goals.
“I hoped he would have been,” Lloyd told 3AW when he was asked whether Scott was the right person to lead the Bombers’ rebuild. “He is coaching for his future right now.
“You would have to say he is up against it to be still in the chair as time goes by. I think he will have this whole season but he would want to improve a lot to be coaching this time next year,” Lloyd added.
“[Essendon president] Andrew Welsh is massive on stability and it would take a lot for them to move on from Brad Scott within the season, but if they keep playing the way they have played the first two rounds the pressure is going to be extreme for him to see out the rest of this season.”
The Bombers have lost 15 matches in a row stretching back to May last year, and are closing in on the club’s record losing streak of 17 matches in 2016, when the team was decimated by suspensions from the supplements scandal.
They play North Melbourne next, followed by the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne, in Gather Round.
Lloyd said Scott should hold an honesty session with senior players and ask them what was behind their poor performances; they have conceded 278 points in two matches, against Hawthorn and Port.
“It looked like no effort but is it the lack of confidence, belief, confusion? They’re not a leader in anything. I am not sure what they stand for. In terms of their football it’s hard to describe what they’re trying to do,” Lloyd said.
Essendon have senior players who are undeserving of keeping their spots, but who might remain by default because they have as many players in the VFL who should be dropped.
Peter Wright, for example, has had a maddening career of always managing to look disinterested and playing with sporadic intensity. He should not play this week but probably will. Kyle Langford should sit uneasily in leadership meetings when the issue of pressure and setting the example is raised. Were it not for the fact it was his second game back from injury and his fifth in nearly two years, Darcy Parish would have a tenuous hold on a place in the team.
Selection integrity demands the coach jettison players he knows are continuing to commit the same sins and fall into the same selfish behaviours. Selection integrity also however demands that a coach only promote deserving players.
Jacob Farrow and Archer Day-Wicks will be in the conversation for selection. A question will be around whether bringing them in out of necessity is setting them up to succeed or fail.
There were moments early in Sunday’s game, and bear in mind that is when Essendon were playing just their fifth quarter of their new season, when players were jogging and spectating as Port ran away from them.
Another moment emblematic of Essendon’s problems was when Mitch Georgiades kicked a goal after somehow ending up with Zach Merrett on him.
The defence was too disorganised to cover the likely eventuality that a teammate would turn the ball over up the field. Key defender Ben McKay was trailing a small opponent, Merrett was stuck on a tall, and young Bomber Max Kondogiannis was looking to older teammates for direction and finding none.
If there is one thing Essendon’s back line and their team defence should be able to anticipate presently, it is a turnover. They can set their clock to it – if the AFL’s clocks worked – and know they are only one missed handball away from another turnover. All the more reason to stick close to the forwards.
“[Scott] has got a major problem in the way his players in the first few rounds cannot stop ball movement, and cannot stop the way Hawthorn and now a lesser side in Port Adelaide have opened them up,” Lloyd said.
The damning thing is these issues are not new. Hence, Lloyd’s comments about Scott coaching for his future.
It is a small sample size of two games this year, but it is also a sample size that stretches back to last year’s Dreamtime match. Essendon by multiple measures this year are performing even worse than in 2016, the year of suspensions and top-up players.
They are giving up more scores – 139 points a game so far this year to 107 a game then. They are conceding more than nine goals a game more from their turnovers than the turnovers they forced on their opposition, which is the worst in the AFL. They are getting smashed around the ball – ranked last this year for clearance differential.
Port Adelaide had Zak Butters, Connor Rozee, Jason Horne-Francis and Jack Lukosius in Sunday’s team. Merrett is the only Essendon player capable of displacing any of them.
Port Adelaide had more talented players than Essendon, but less talented teams have long been able to compete and beat better talented teams. But only if they are well drilled, well set up defensively and play with a manic intensity.
Essendon had none. Not the talent, not the defensive set up and not the desire. Their pressure rating against Port was their second-worst on record. That speaks directly to effort, not talent.
Scott was doubtless deliberate in raising the mentality of his players as selfish post-match because he has seen it too often and tried other ways to force change and only to get the same results.
But singling out in the same press conference Nate Caddy was deeply unwise. He didn’t call Caddy selfish, and his comment about the demoralising effect of missing a gimme goal at a critical time was accurate. But it wasn’t fair on Caddy.
Caddy was the only good player for Essendon on Sunday and the only Bomber to get a coaches’ vote. He is the standout young player in a team of hopefuls.
Words like Scott’s need to be followed by actions, from his players, but also by Scott at selection. But where do you go when your reserves play worse than the seniors?
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Michael Gleeson is an award-winning senior sports writer specialising in AFL and athletics.Connect via X or email.