The need to provide a ray of hope to Essendon’s restless, success-starved supporters was the primary reason the Bombers jettisoned coach Brad Scott.
That was the principal explanation proffered by veteran Age football journalists Jake Niall and Michael Gleeson when they dissected the ruthless move by the Bombers board on Tuesday, hours after Scott’s departure was confirmed.
The pair recorded a special episode of the Real Footy podcast, exclusively about the Scott severance.
“I think it’s been brewing for a little while; just that the win:loss ratio and the competitiveness, in some games, wasn’t there. One [win] out of 24 games [was what sealed Scott’s fate],” Niall said.
“You don’t have to make massive progress but you do have to be moving forward, and I think that’s what they [the Essendon board] didn’t see.”
Notwithstanding the 78,000 who attended Friday night’s Dreamtime at ’G game – where Essendon lost to Richmond to assumed bottom spot on the ladder – Gleeson said declining crowds had been a bad omen for Scott. He also questioned whether the club’s supporter base understood the extent of the list rebuild that had been undertaken under Scott for the past three-and-a-half years.
“In the end, when you are one win in 12 months and that win only came in Adelaide [round five, against Melbourne] it is leaving your fans with nothing and the idea of [the club] not making progress,” he said.
“It felt like a shift to me the other week [round10 at the MCG against Fremantle] wen they had 25,000 at a game,” he said.
“You start to see the despair of the fans; just going: ‘Really! This is what we’re going [through for] another 12 months?’ And in that time they’ve only had one [win] and it was in Adelaide.
“Fans in Melbourne haven’t even had a chance to have any moment of joy for that length of time and when they [the board] see it start to translate to attendances, it feels like they haven’t brought their fans with them on the whole journey to rebuild.”
Neither Gleeson nor Niall expect former Bombers great James Hird to get a third stint as the club’s coach, but his spectre was a hot topic of conversation on the podcast.
“It would be a highly risky and contentious move [to re-appoint Hird], so I doubt they’ll do it. But in this world, you never know,” Niall said.
Less than 24 hours earlier, Scott’s tenure at the Bombers was debated on the weekly episode of the Real Footy podcast, where Age columnist Caroline Wilson joined Gleeson and Niall, predicting Scott would be gone from the club’s bye in round 15.
That podcast traversed all the big issues in football after round 11, including a left-field suggestion about the future of Western Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge.
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