What in God’s name was that?
Going into their clash with St Kilda, Essendon’s finals hopes were already hanging on a razor-thin wire.
Two and a half hours later, that wire had been slashed to ribbons and the Bombers sent plummeting into the abyss – and in about as embarrassing, undignifying fashion as it is possible to do so.
At the time of writing, they remain in the eight – though any notion that they will remain that way for much longer, even if results do go their way on Sunday, is a foolhardy one. For all they achieved in the first half of the season, this is not a side worthy of September action.
In many ways, this was a capitulation greater than any of the losses the Dons endured at the end of last year to crash out of finals contention. Some of those losses, including an infamous one against GWS, were bigger; but none had quite as much on the line, or had victory quite as achievable, as this one. Inconceivable as it may seem to look at the scoreboard, the Bombers were favourites for this game, and relatively comfortable ones.
It’s among the most insipid performances I’ve seen from a team for whom the stakes could scarcely have been higher.
Deciphering what went wrong is an easy task – in one word, everything – but what’s more eye-opening is how it went wrong. And that answer lies somewhat with the Saints, who were damaging, energetic, tactically shrewd and excellently coached by Ross Lyon to ruthlessly target all their opposition’s weaknesses; but primarily, it lies in the Bombers, their shortcomings, Brad Scott’s inability to paper over them, and just like for the last two decades, how quickly the whole facade falls apart at the slightest provocation.
Let’s start with the obvious one: controlling the football. Scott’s Bombers in 2024 have remained a high-marking team; only St Kilda took more than them in 2023, and this year they ranked fourth heading into the round. This leads to an equally high disposal count, ranking fifth for disposals in 2023 and outright first 12 months later.
Most of these touches come in the back half, where the Bombers are patient, content to shift the ball from side to side, and regularly have their best midfielders – read: Zach Merrett – pushing into space around half-back to take pressure-relieving marks and retain possession. Once opportunity strikes, they go and they go fast: but they are confident enough in their ball use to bide their time, sometimes for frustratingly long period.
The key difference this year, though – or at least, what the key difference was until recently – has been the Bombers’ shifts in denying the opposition possession. In 2023, Dons games were uniformly high-mark, high-disposal matches, meaning they sat tenth for disposal differential and eighth in marks. This year, that was up to second and third.
The answer is partly pressure, partly a higher and more aggressive press, facilitated by the arrival and early-season impact of Jade Gresham as a sprightly half-forward designed to make defenders nervous, and partly more support in midfield for Merrett. In 2023, just three Bombers on-ballers – Merrett, Darcy Parish and (from limited games) Will Setterfield – averaged more than 20 disposals a game. 12 months on, Jye Caldwell and Sam Durham have been added to that trio, with Caldwell an in-and-under, hard-tackling machine and Durham an eye-catchingly explosive attacking stoppage force good enough defensively to tag some of the game’s biggest stars and hurt them offensively.
All this has meant a drastic reduction in how much ball the opposition gets, and with Essendon’s numbers still high, they can have an overwhelming majority of time in possession, crucial given their forward line is still questionable and their backline increasingly leaky. In 2023, 18 times in 23 games they conceded more than 350 disposals; they did it just nine in their first 18 games this season before St Kilda, for the first time in 2024, put 400 on them on Saturday.
It’s a similar story with marks: 14 times in 2023 the Bombers gave up more than 100 marks, down to just three before their Saints horror show.
It’s worth mentioning all this because when Scott said, to much derision from Bombers fans, that his team are ‘infinitely better’ in 2024 than 2023, he’s right.
The problem, though, is twofold: one, to play in this way requires a level of fitness in ensuring defensive coverage that the Bombers seem to still lack, and two, that there’s no Plan B if things go against them.
Against the Saints on Saturday, the Bombers actually won both the clearance and the inside 50 count: but their eagerness to handball their way out of trouble from stoppages and eventually emerge into space was shut down by the Saints’ fierce pressure, and all too often they bombed aimlessly to a forward line whose two leading goalkickers this year are the mid-sized lead-up markers Kyle Langford and Jake Stringer.
This is not a forward line like North Melbourne’s when Scott was in charge during their two preliminary finals a decade ago, when there was Ben Brown, Drew Petrie and Jarrad Waite to kick to in such situations: Peter Wright is woefully out of form, and all the experiment with Sam Draper and Todd Goldstein as twin rucks with one serving as a makeshift key tall is proved that neither are cut out for it.
Until recently, the Bombers overcame that deficiency by being more targeted with their kicks, looking to hit leading forwards rather than bomb aimlessly: this year, Langford is the AFL leader for marks on the lead. That’s mostly why, despite minimal aerial presence, they sat fifth in the AFL after Round 19 for marks inside 50.
To defend these long, aimless bombs was manna from heaven for the Saints: Josh Battle did as he pleased and plucked four intercept marks, Callum Wilkie two to go with four spoils, as St Kilda allowed Essendon just seven marks inside 50 all match – three during the 20-minute second quarter window in which the Bombers had their only period of control.
Then, when the ball was inevitably turned over, the Bombers looked for all the world like a team knackered. Where once this team fiercely guarded its territory, ranking fourth-best in the league for inside 50 differential (behind, it’s worth noting, three of the league’s most powerful midfields in Brisbane, Sydney and the Western Bulldogs), this side was simply incapable of guarding space; nor doing anything to restrict the Saints’ most damaging ball-users.
The mark numbers are staggering: the Saints took 149 of them at Marvel Stadium, the third-highest number for the season behind Brisbane (twice!) – 129 of them were contested.
And as if you needed more proof that once the ball was out of their control they couldn’t win it back, the Saints scored nine of their goals directly from intercepts – and early in the last quarter, had won 26 intercept possessions in their defensive 50, with precisely zero turnovers from them.
Across the first 13 rounds of the season, the Bombers scored an entirely reasonable 36 points fewer than their opposition from turnovers – their strength at scoring from stoppages covered that weakness, while their flaky, Jordan Ridley-less defence justified it.
But with Ridley back, that number swelled to -36 across the five weeks preceding Saturday’s horror show, and must have swelled even more now.
Knowing their best bet against the Bombers’ fragile backline was to move the ball quickly and precisely, the Saints experimented with Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera playing much higher up the ground than usual – his four inside 50s were second-most for the Saints behind Mitch Owens. And going at 87.1 per cent disposal efficiency and having a hand in six scores, that move paid dividends.
But the Bombers had no plan to stop him – with Matt Guelfi, their best defensive forward, out injured, the Dons had no one, and used no one, to put the clamps on the Saints’ most dangerous players.
Individually, the effort wasn’t there either: if someone can explain why Essendon thought it was fine to leave Wanganeen-Milera on his own in an acre of space right on 50 in this incident, let me hear it.
That’s where the lack of a plan B comes in: the Bombers have, over the past month and a half, had no recourse in stopping the opposition on a run.
Geelong devastated them in a last-quarter rout after three tough quarters; Adelaide piled on nine goals in a row in the second term last week; Melbourne booted five goals in 12 minutes to kill a close match at the MCG.
Now that the Saints have done the same, it’s about time to ask the question of Brad Scott what his fallback is; it doesn’t have to be a shifting of the magnets, but it does have to be something tactical to try and stop a rot.
His team can be asked the same questions, too. Where was the Essendon Edge, the hard-nosed, uncompromising aggression that the Dons employed earlier in the season, and which set the tone for opponents to expect a hard and tough contest against them? Not to say that a heavy bump on Jack Steele or picking a fight with Wanganeen-Milera would have solved anything, but it would at least have given St Kilda something to think about, and showed them that the Dons weren’t just going to sit back and take being walked all over.
All this is why the Bombers conceded 20 marks inside 50 to the Saints – add to that some uncharacteristic accuracy in front of goal from Ross Lyon’s team, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a flogging.
The list goes on and on of the Bombers’ flaws that were ruthlessly exposed by St Kilda.
Having remade a powerful midfield with the addition of Caldwell and Durham to provide pace and toughness previously hard to come by in a Dons on-ball brigade, Darcy Parish’s return in the same team as Dylan Shiel muddled the mix again. Neither are quick, nor great users; the result was that Durham, arguably behind only Merrett as the Bombers’ best midfielder this year, attended a third of the game’s centre bounces, as did Caldwell.
Jake Stringer attended more than two-thirds, a move that reeked of desperation considering it was about double the attendance rate he’s had over the last month and a half: an injection of speed was certainly what the Dons needed, but with so many midfield options ineffective elsewhere it only lessened the impact actually winning a clearance could have.
The lack of pressure was evident – in the 12 minutes it took the Saints to blow the game to smithereens in the third quarter, the pressure rating read 238-137. You don’t need me to tell you which team was which.
Is it fatigue? Is it lack of leg speed? Is it plain and simple giving up? Everyone has a different opinion; but what can’t be denied is that Bombers were simply outworked, outhunted, outrun and outcoached on a disastrous Saturday afternoon.
And with their season all but shot, just one question remains: where on Earth do Essendon go now?