From the Pocket: Essendon have all the hallmarks of a team deep in rebuild – just not the stomach to acknowledge it
When Andrew Welsh took over as Essendon president last September, he won rave reviews.He brought warring factions to heel.He interviewed potential recruits at the draft combine.He said things like “we’ve lost our mongrel” and “I want to get the swagger back”.He refused to acquiesce on the Zach Merrett trade.
Welsh is one of the most successful property developers in Australia,He’s said to be worth close to half a billion dollars,Even as a builder, however, he’s been reluctant to utter footy’s most dreaded word,For many clubs, and for Essendon in particular, the concept of a rebuild is a protean one,From month to month, it’s either a rethink, a re-stump, a re-wiring or a total re-do.
Welsh himself opted for reset.“We now have a high-talent young core in place, the heavy lifting of the reset is done, and we are ready to climb,” he said.“We will not stop working until we restore this club to its rightful place.”The people running Essendon clearly saw last year as an aberration.By holding firm on Merrett and by backing in coach Brad Scott, they thought they had a system that could hold up, and a core group of senior players who could shepherd the younger players through.
They clearly believed that the state of their list didn’t warrant a rebuild in the mould of Richmond or West Coast,It was consistent with the policy throughout Scott’s tenure – the cautious hope that their glut of high-ish draft picks would come good, the constant assurances from Scott that slow and steady, rather than scorched earth, was the best way forward,Scott has been criticised for his press conference after Essendon’s loss to Port Adelaide on Sunday,But it was the most honest thing to come out of the club in years,Here was a coach who had toed the line for years, a coach who had finally grasped the reality of his list.
After all, as a senior coach, you often have to live the lie,You have to be the last to yield,But when you’re a coach as cautious with your words as Scott, the use of “demoralised” said more than any pre-season documentary, any best and fairest speech, and any quarter-time blast could,It wasn’t about effort (though that was deplorable),It wasn’t a question of “what do we stand for?”.
It was a matter of talent.It was a coach who’d finally grasped the limitations of his list, a coach doing the real time calculus of who should be held responsible.This was later summarised in pie chart form on the Agenda Setters’ Wheel of Blame.Rebuilds are hard.And rebuilds are risky.
But they provide clarity,The question is whether Essendon has the stomach for it,It takes a club with a lot of nerve, a club that won’t jump at shadows, that won’t turn on itself when things get tough,It helps to be a club that has had recent success,The slog of Richmond’s rebuild is tempered by the memory of their three premierships.
All they need is a quarter here, a passage of play there and some good on-field leaders.It’s the easiest marketing campaign of all time – land half a dozen guns in the hottest draft in years and watch them grow.Essendon don’t have that luxury.For a start, they’ve never had the picks.But more importantly, they’ve never properly explained what they are doing.
The messaging has been mixed,One minute they’re calling for patience,The next minute they want to get their swagger back,And always, underpinning everything, is a deference to the glory years,It’s there in Welsh’s vow to “restore this club to its rightful past”.
It’s there with the calls for James Hird’s return,It’s there when Kevin Sheedy and his former champions are down on the fence, waving their scarves,When it comes to Essendon’s current predicament, there’s so many angles you can take,You can blame Stephen Dank,You can blame Brad Scott.
You can blame Zach Merrett,You can blame Adrian Dodoro, who ended up taking the club to the Fair Work Commission,You can blame the drafting and development – the parade of players who looked so assured at the under-18 level, and who within a few years are running around like ghosts,You can blame plain old rotten bad luck,Essendon’s performance on Sunday was a confluence of all those things.
But it shouldn’t have been a surprise.It was a long time coming.It was the performance that had all the hallmarks of team deep in rebuild – everything except the rebuilding high draft picks, the rebuilding coach, the rebuilding optimism and the rebuilding reality.So much of Scott’s frustration seemed to stem from his inability to come out and say that, and his club’s refusal to acknowledge it.This is an extract from Guardian Australia’s free weekly AFL email, From the Pocket.
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