A warning to Essendon fans, you’ll like this one about as much as I like your team.
LIONS IN THE RUINS OF A COLOSSEUM
If it bleeds, we can kill it.
The famous words of Leigh Matthews before his Lions tamed the near-invincible early-2000s Bombers. It’s over 20 years later and the Bombers have spent most, if not all of that time bleeding. Whether the source has been their ineptitude in ending an ever-lengthening finals drought, self-imposed damage at boardroom level, or physically from needles, the outcome has been the same – a jersey with more red than black with each passing day.
A playing list whose standout by far is a bloke who tried with all his might to leave last year, but in typical Essendon fashion, failed embarrassingly. A coach who ruined his previous side so badly, all David King’s horses and men still can’t put the damn thing back together again. A boardroom so incompetent that despite making every conceivable wrong decision that a board can, still gives themselves the big green tick. A club culture so rooted in past glories that they still see themselves as a big club, despite their flag drought being almost as old as yours truly. And a fanbase so starved of the remotest successes that they’ve had children grow up to adulthood since their last finals victory.
Any notion that Essendon are a Victorian giant, a power club, has dissolved into delusion. And the journey to irrelevance started against the very team they played today.
Oh, yeah, the game which I’m supposed to be writing about. Essendon, to be fair, put up staunch resistance in almost going a full minute before conceding the first goal of the match. This was thanks to a fumbled mark and general disorganisation among the Essendon defence that would become a theme of the first term, and indeed has become a theme in the backroom for the Bombers for far too long.
One goal became two, became four, became six. The Bombers were slow, plodding, fumbling, so much so that Darcy Fort scored one of three Lions holding-the-ball frees. The Essendon backs had no answer in the air, while the Rising Star-eligible Ty Gallup showed them how it was done down back. The new power was showing the older forces how it was done.
A familiar story in clashes between these two. 2001. The Bombers were imperious, having lost a handful of games across the last two seasons. The Lions were a giant question mark, a team having absorbed two identities but without one of its own. Their win that day, a turning point. It would launch the sport in Queensland, paving the way for the Logan Morrises and Will Ashcrofts of today’s game. It would also mark the end of the Bombers as a force, perennial competitors since the very first days of their existence, and yet in a national game they found themselves quickly becoming relics of a bygone era. Sure, they would fight, make the eight occasionally, find Caddy with marks inside 50, but they’d very rarely amount to anything tangible.
Brisbane, themselves, would find themselves at sea, bankrupt, bottom, even letting the Bombers actually score, but they’d strike right back. They’ve never been out of it with Fagan in charge and today was no different. Whenever the intensity fell, the Lions would be back soon enough with a devastating flurry of goals.
AT OUR LOWEST, AT OUR HIGHEST
Both of these sides were at their lowest ebbs in 2016. Brisbane was in their last moments of being under the helm of Premiership hero but coaching zero Justin Leppitsch, and had finished a mere 0.6 percent off of last place. That’s five goals’ worth of percent across a whole season. The side that shared a record of 3-19 was, of course, the 2016 Essendon loose amalgam of spare parts and bit players that were the fallout of the supplements ban. Essendon’s immediate future was rosier, rebounding to adhere to their triennial tradition of losing an Elimination Final, while the Lions fell down to the very bottom.
Two years later, Essendon were stuck in purgatory, again having about half their side show up to an away Elimination Final. Brisbane were second.
Much as it was then, so it is now.
Brisbane took their game to a new level after half-time, while Essendon meandered with the same intent that had got them this far with no results. The Lions scored early, and then swept through the next two centre clearances like the Bombers were still in the rooms. Three minutes, 20 points scored. Meanwhile, Essendon players were spoiling each other in marking contests, and trodding on each other whilst chasing down much, much faster Lions. The telling moment was a Lions rebound, where Hugh McCluggage realised he was on Peter Wright. He easily gapped him. Wright noticed this, and seemed to call out to surrounding players to pick him up – players who were all engaged with offering various levels of coverage on other Lions. After this, Wright then jogged to nowhere in particular, off on the flank where no Lion, Bomber or any other sentient life called home. This gave McCluggage an amount of space so embarrassing he genuinely seemed to have trouble processing it. His mark was met with Wright indignantly scolding his defence, again. Of course, Hugh scored from this. It was archetypical of the defensive prowess Essendon displayed.
During the week, the parent of an Auskicker somehow got access to the Lions’ planning board listing the strengths and weaknesses of every likely Bombers starter. Firstly, it’s really great to see Essendon react to that by basically doing all the things listed on the ‘weaknesses’ side, well done. Secondly, it’s a really funny read.
The most common weakness seemed to be ‘low confidence’, hello Ben McKay and Archie Perkins. Nice five touches at 60%, Ben. Decision making was definitely up there, next to Caddy, Duursma and Blakiston (definitely proved by the latter at least), and Prior and Durham had their tempers listed. Actually, I lie – the most noted point was a weakness under pressure, listed next to McGrath, Caldwell, Parish, Roberts and Farrow. This might as well have been next to all names as the entire Bombers side folded like a faulty lawn chair. It also said Langford was selfish. His three behinds when he really shouldn’t have missed… yeah, it tracks.
Around halfway through the third, pretty much every Bomber bar El-Hawli and Durham looked like they were moving turgidly in sand, while the Lions were almost literally running rings around them at times. The game was over, and a good thing, too. The umpiring had been of a solid standard at the time, at least for a fixture of this ‘importance’, but then a mark was taken deep in the Essendon backline. Connor McKenna stood the mark, as any diligent player does. He is then told to move back to the nine-metre mark. He does so immediately, first quickly looking down to gain a point of reference, however, the umpire has already decided he wants to give a 50 metre penalty. He does. It was baffling, but then the Lions received a reprieve in their own D50 – Peter Wright loses a marking contest and jogs down the field, no other Bomber showing remote interest in even being remotely around the protected area. The umpire, some thirty metres away, then calls for him to stand. This umpire is Eleni Tee, who I’m only naming because her voice is higher than most and is noticeably harder to hear even on the broadcast mics. Peter obviously doesn’t hear her, and it’s a 50 because there’s no one on the mark.
It’s a rule that shouldn’t even exist.
Can I go on a tangent? Well, let’s face it, this article’s been about 85% tangent by volume as this match was about as interesting as competitive paint drying.
Brad Scott’s had some weird moments this year, not least the one where he lamented his own mortality in a diatribe that really demonstrates what coaching Essendon can do to a man. Today might have been one of the weirdest. For my North Melbourne documentary (just plugging The GAZ-man YouTube channel casually) I did a deep dive on Brad Scott’s Clearance House Fire Sale he held at North in 2016. Four stars, 275 games or more, all delisted. Launching back into old habits like a binge drinker falling off the wagon, he managed to sack off another 300-game North Melbourne icon at the Bombers in Todd Goldstein. In the AFL era, as far as I can find, only ten players with 275 games or more of experience have ended their careers with delistments rather than retirements.
Ten.
Brad Scott is not only responsible for five, but has delisted as many 275-gamers as every other coach in the history of the game, combined.
So I wonder what he felt about his Swiss cheese side getting carved up by a 300-gamer in Lachie Neale, and Dayne Zorko whose birth certificate was carved from stone by Moses himself. Only future Hawthorn ace Zach Merrett found more of the ball for Essendon than either of Chris Fagan’s friends from his old folk’s community. Even Lester, who’s had more one-year contracts than I’ve had hot dinners, found the pill 23 times. There’s a lot of schadenfreude in that.
THE ENDING THIS ONE DESERVED
I have a question for you, actually.
What are Essendon?
What do they mean as an organisation?
What values does their play represent?
I’ve got nothing.
They’re afraid of competing in contests on the ground, their aerial game save for Nate Caddy is practically non-existent, and they play like an outside team despite having inside pace, and by ‘inside’ I mean frozen ‘inside’ a block of ice. They can’t kick, can’t really handball, got out-tackled whilst also having the ball for around nine less minutes across the game’s length, and when the game was there to be remotely won they kicked for goal like drunken mules. If you can answer those for me, I’ll answer this question – when was anyone last scared of Essendon? Like, truly worried about facing them? I’d argue the last time I, as a Crows fan, truly feared a Bombers matchup was maybe 15 years ago. They’re a joke. And, in the last, Brisbane proved it.
They started the last term like they really had better things to be doing. I can’t blame them, I certainly felt that way having to watch it. It was embarrassing. Seemingly reluctant to put too much effort into blowing Essendon out any further, the margin hovered around the ten goal mark while mildly aggravating things happened in the background. The umpires, for example, stopped a Brisbane counterattack so that Saad El-Hawli could travel five metres to the bench with a shoulder injury, and then doubled down with another completely unnecessary 50 metre penalty. Nate Caddy was revelling in Brisbane’s expired interest in defending, especially as Harris Andrews had been hobbled, and sprayed wildly for goals with his many chances in the true Essendon fashion that has settled over their forwards like a heavy tarpaulin. Three goals five for him, and only one Bomber had multiple chances while maintaining a positive K-D ratio, as it were.
But the biggest insult to the game, Essendon’s legacy and more importantly, my time, was how the Lions attacked. They were ostensibly bored with shelling Essendon’s meagre defence like peas, to the extent that the Bombers home crowd was giving Ben McKay Bronx cheers on the exceedingly rare occasion he touched the ball. So, they wasted chance after chance trying to feed debutant Cody Curtin who, to be fair, played a very solid game and looks every bit as good a prospect as his almost visually identical brother.
This prolonged session of buffoonery and boondoggles culminated in the play that best summed up this entire game. Lachie Neale received the ball by the boundary and handpassed it – admittedly from the high-up TV angle it looked like a throw but from a reverse angle it was clearly a handball, something none of the four umpires noticed as they pinged him for a throw, and gave a 50 for dissent when Lachie pointed it out on the screen. Or maybe he was pointing out his next mistress in the crowd, who really knows? The Bombers then turned the ball over with their usual ruthless inefficiency, Charlie gets on the end of it, messes around with it for a while because bugger actually scoring, and finds Cody at last. One problem, Cam Rayner didn’t get the memo and intercepted it. He then gives a handball to Cody, much like a Make-A-Wish kid would receive in a charity game, who blazes away to the disinterest of the Essendon defence who had the length of an average season of TV to see it coming. Of course, he missed, because it was the ending this game deserved.
This is normally the point in which I’d pithily sum up the game, its best performers and what the result means for both sides. But realistically, what’s the point?
We went into this game knowing the outcome…well, I did, hopefully you did something productive with your Saturday afternoon. That outcome played out in perhaps the dullest fashion imaginable.
We exit it having learned nothing. Brisbane are still good, if unable to really put the screws into a side that’s orders of magnitude worse than them, while Essendon are still the complete car crash that I picked like a dirty nose at the start of the season. I cannot believe some folks (hello Mr. Cornes) had this rabble making a final just because they did Melbourne in. Maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon because I spent all my weekend’s allocation of emotion in the final two minutes of a Showdown that took several years off my life expectancy, but if the best thing the media has to talk about from this game is someone taking a picture of a whiteboard through a door (which naturally we’ll hear about ad bloody nauseum for the next few days), I think we can pretty much just forget about this one and move on.
Or laugh at Essendon.
