Throughout the week, there was a murmur going round the footy world, whispered in hushed tones around the water cooler, spoken in vague platitudes on AFL talk shows and on the radio: that Essendon might, sneakily, be coming good at last.
With a 5-3 record and a game in hand, having broken into the top eight courtesy of a surprise win over Sydney, with a vastly improved defensive profile since Adelaide smashed them to smithereens at the MCG back in March, it was at least worth taking the Bombers seriously.
Fans, of course, didn’t buy into it for just one second – the scars of years of mediocrity, of false dawns, raised expectations and shattered dreams, are still far too fresh for this run of wins to mean anything just yet.
Personally, having been embarrassingly burned by my repeated claims at about this time 12 months ago that the Dons had arrived and were the real deal, I held my tongue, and headed to Marvel Stadium on Saturday night for what loomed as a litmus test of Essendon’s form against a Western Bulldogs outfit they beat resoundingly in their last clash in 2024.
The answer? We can all calm down and breathe a sigh of relief. Essendon still suck. They always did suck, no matter what the win-loss record said. And in all likelihood, for as long as Brad Scott brings out the same inordinately frustrating, lifeless, painfully inept gameplan against any team moderately good, they will continue to suck.
It was a performance so dire, so comically inept, such an utter pasting on the ground as well as in the coaches’ box, to serve a far more potent reminder that the Dons’ wins so far this year have been over 12th, 14th, 15th, 17th and 18th – four of them highly unconvincing, too – as any of those victories in themselves.
If that sounds harsh – and it is – then it’s at least worth being honest about.
Losing by 91 points to anyone, even a premiership contender like the Bulldogs, is not a defendable performance, especially not from a team with a coach in his third year at the helm that should have evolved past drubbings like this.
Making it even uglier was that the Dogs, a scintillating first quarter aside, honestly weren’t even all that good.
The Bulldogs saw a team utterly incapable of matching them for speed, skill, strength or hunger – and the latter at least is something that requires no actual talent whatsoever – and decided to play Harlem Globetrotters footy for much of the final two-thirds of the match.
Skill errors went unpunished, overly ambitious running plays meeting zero resistence even when mistakes happened, and inaccuracy in front of goal only further rewarded with more shots as the Bombers backs turned it over time and time again.
Case in point: Marcus Bontempelli’s second goal of the evening, for which the brilliance of the finish masks the ineptitude of the Bombers’ defending it.
For starters, a team serious about its pressure and intensity doesn’t let Bailey Dale behave as he does here: first, leaving the Bulldogs’ most dangerous kick free in the corridor 60 metres out from goal, then enabling him to first sidestep an ordinary Nic Martin tackle with embarrassing ease, and then cruise to 50 with no Bomber anywhere close.
No team serious about its defensive structure lets him off the hook for a horrendous shank inside 50, either; that the ball scythed through an open leading lane for Bontempelli to gather and do Bontempelli things was bewildering to witness for a side, let’s not forget, who were supposed to have mastered defending in the last two months.
It’s indicative of the Bombers’ biggest problem: far too often, and indeed on nearly all occasions against the Bulldogs, it’s left to one person to do the tackling, the pressuring, the harassing, while everyone else hangs off watching them either succeed or, mostly, fail.
Again in the third quarter, Rhylee West gets all the credit for this brutal, soul-destroying tackle break on young Archie Roberts …
… without questioning why he was the only Bomber who made any effort at all to go at him from the moment he gathered the ball to his successful snap off the right boot.
I lost count of how many times Bulldogs were able to literally stop in their tracks, assess their options for several seconds, and then pass to a teammate without even having a hand laid on them: countless more times a Dog was tackled, and could virtually ignore the man holding on to them and dish off anyway given neither of their arms were pinned and they could by and large still turn 360 degrees to see what options were on the table.
Without the ball, Scott’s Bombers are notoriously poor for their pressure; if the opposition can control the ball from the coalface (as the Dogs certainly did but Sydney, for example, couldn’t last week in their narrow loss), then short of a wayward kick inside 50 intercepted by a Zach Reid or a Ben McKay, or some other mistake made by them, the Dons are bereft of ideas on how to win the footy back.
It’s why you can have absurd stat line like Dale’s 49-disposal, 37-kick game against the Bombers – of which only six were kick-ins. At no point was any effort put in to not just deny him the ball, but to do so in either dangerous positions, acres of space or both.
Dale finished with six inside 50s and 11 score involvements to go with his mountain of footy – and a lazy, season-best 1016 metres gained. These weren’t simple cheapies in the back pocket; he’d pass to a teammate, dash past, get a handball receive and bolt up the wing, taking the Dogs from defence to attack in an instant. All without a sliver of defensive pressure, or a single Bombers player deciding to not let the opposition’s most damaging player do as he pleased.
That’s only one half of the battle, too – the Bombers are just as poor with footy in hand as without it.
The greatest example of stats lying comes with the Dons’ 76.6 per cent disposal efficiency on Saturday night. A better indication of how poor their ball use was is the 12 goals the Dogs piled on from turnovers.
Remember the Bombers of the much-maligned final year of the Ben Rutten era in 2022, a team with no gameplan beyond retaining possession with short chip passes, inevitably turning it over, and watching the ball sail over their heads for a goal? Saturday night was this on an even more comically inept scale.
The mistakes came from everyone: Andrew McGrath, a former No.1 pick, it must be said, can barely go five minutes without a wayward pass that, even if it does find its intended target, makes their job a whole lot harder.
Zach Reid has come along in leaps and bounds this year as an exceptional intercept mark, but for one of the most prolific key defenders in the AFL he sends a lot of kicks straight to the opposition, and frankly should never be allowed to take a kick-in for the rest of his career.
Ben McKay was the only Bomber I’d give a pass mark on Saturday for his stoic defensive job on Aaron Naughton, but even he was culpable of the biggest howler of the night: an attempted pass to Reid in between about five Dogs in the central corridor that missed the mark by five metres, caused an instant turnover, and let in his opponent for a free mark inside 50 and simple chip over the top to Matt Kennedy running into an open goal.
The Dogs’ pressure, to be sure, was leaps and bounds ahead of the Dons’, but in general, the more glaring turnovers occurred off the half-back line, with the Bulldogs set up to deny the Bombers easy outlet kicks forward of the footy, and then receiving bonus gifts when simple cross-goal kicks found red, white and blue hands, or five-metre handpasses missed, or woeful kicks inside 50 to three-on-ones lobbed on Nate Caddy’s head for Rory Lobb to rack up intercept marks.
Mason Redman spills a mark. (Photo by Morgan Hancock/Getty Images)
Some teams aren’t good enough to punish the Dons on turnover like this: North Melbourne and West Coast, for example, spurned countless chances moving forward, as did Sydney last week, allowing the Bomber defence look far more cohesive and structured than Saturday night’s drubbing proved it to be.
Even when the turnover doesn’t immediately come, the Dons are still painfully safe with ball in hand. Supporters were literally screaming in frustration during five agonising minutes in the second quarter, with the match already shot to ribbons, when Bomber players would gather in space in midfield, not see anything immediately promising ahead, and without even attempting anything different retreat, or go sideways, for uncontested marks.
Scott’s Bombers have always been a high-disposal team, and indeed their abject flaws in team defence makes this one of the few ways they can avoid being hurt – to simply have way more of the footy than whoever they’re playing.
But against good, well-drilled teams like the Bulldogs that make every pass risky and force you to think differently to move the ball forward, there’s no creative spark, no drive, precious little brilliant skill, especially when Zach Merrett has a rare stinker like he did against the Dogs.
It’s such an about-face from the exciting way the Bombers were playing for much of the first half of 2024: with a more dynamic, aggressive midfield giving leading forwards plenty of opportunities – Kyle Langford was for a long time the most successful lead-up player in the AFL – this was a team capable of putting on goals aplenty in a withering burst of brilliance, and sensible enough to repeatedly hold on when things get tight.
The team that took to the field against the Bulldogs has regressed from that. Regressed to the point that Scott, in his third year at the helm, arguably has the side worse off than they were when he first took the helm.
All this leads to one, indisputable fact: Scott overachieved in his first season at Essendon in 2023, taking a squad with holes a plenty and precious little top-line talent to quite reasonable mid-table heights.
2024 briefly promised better, but collapsed to the point of being virtually identical: 11th spot on the ladder again, a percentage again well below 100, and just two extra premiership points to show for it.
And where are the Bombers right now? Well, they’re 5-4 and still, for now, on the winning side of the ledger, but with a percentage of 81.2 and, if St Kilda beat West Coast on Sunday, they’ll be 11th once again, and look a team capable of dropping even further.
Essendon still sucking means at least, for Victorian footy lovers, there’s one fewer big Melbourne team to worry about taking over the joint when September rolls around.
But for Bombers supporters, it’s Groundhog Day all over again. And they’re having about as much fine a time of it as Bill Murray was.
