Two weeks ago, 25,000 people turned up to an Essendon home game at the MCG.
It was a Sunday, it was wet, it was Fremantle. Previously, none of these things would have mattered because it was Essendon. It was a club that knew whenever they played they had 40,000 people as a starting point queued up and ready to walk through the gates.
But they stopped coming in those numbers. Of course, they turned out for the Dreamtime Game last week because it was an event, and besides, they thought they might win. Then they lost and lost four more players to injury doing so.
The malaise about Essendon was becoming endemic. One win in 24 matches spanning two seasons, and that win interstate, in Adelaide during Gather Round, left the Bombers’ home supporter base starved of any moment of joy for a year.
They had not one game to get excited about for a win, and increasingly very little to get excited about within the game. There were no thrilling surges of five- and six-goal quarters, and few tight finishes to give hope and energy. Instead, the pessimism grew with the despondency of reading the same script of runs of opposition goals.
All clubs that go down and try to rebuild go through this. It is manageable when clubs are in a trough, but Essendon people began to ask, when does it cease being a trough and just become what we are? Is this the new normal?
Essendon’s Brad Scott era started well on the field, but it was undermined from the moment it began when Kevin Sheedy, a board member at the time, made his dissenting vote on the coaching decision public and insisted James Hird should have been coach.
It was a terrible breach by Sheedy. It is hard to take the people and the players with you when a club luminary says we have the wrong bloke, and I was outvoted.
The club decided at the end of 2023 they were going for a full list rebuild and sustainable list transformation, which was the correct decision in the post-Adrian Dodoro recruiting era, but compared with other clubs doing the same thing – West Coast and Richmond most obviously – they have not yet brought in a superstar player to be the face of that ride.
Nate Caddy is their best young player and will be an A-grader, but he plays a position that takes longer to have high-level AFL impact. He is not a Harley Reid, Willem Duursma or Sam Lalor. They will get access to a player of that calibre this year, such is their ladder position.
Then their captain undermined that journey more profoundly than anyone.
Zach Merrett’s declaration that he wanted to leave Essendon signalled to the club faithful: you don’t know how bad it is in here. I am captain and I want out, I am wasting my career.
That is devastating for a club. As far as leadership goes it was of the Barnaby Joyce school of self-interest, but it indicated that if the club’s leader wasn’t buying into the journey, why should you? It created doubts about the people executing the plans.
In the end the board had doubts, too. Not about the plan but who was prosecuting it.
The hiring of Andrew Welsh’s premiership teammate Dean Solomon into the coaching group at the end of last year was a first indication of doubt by the board in Scott. It gave the impression, post-Merrett meltdown, that Welsh wanted an ally, a friend whose opinion he trusted to give him honest feedback about the functioning of the coaching group.
The trend to disenfranchise and disillusion fans from persistent loss and, worse, persistent methods of loss could not be ignored. Saying you are rebuilding does not absolve a club of all responsibility to be competitive, but it seemed that was what had happened at Essendon.
Recently, as he prepared to face a bracket of games against fellow strugglers Richmond, West Coast and Carlton, Brad Scott was asked if he had to win those games. He answered honestly but unwisely when he said no, winning or losing would not alter the course the club had taken.
He was right. The strategy is the strategy; it should not be contingent on winning a particular bracket of games. But the undercurrent to the question was that the strategy wouldn’t change, but the personnel would if the team could not demonstrate its competitiveness, and that was still ahead of those other battler teams.
To be seen to be cavalier by the people you exist for – the members – about the idea that wins are important proved naive. In the end, strategies still need the nourishment of wins, and fans need the joy of wins.
That should not be seen to encourage clubs towards short-termism, but they should also not be blithe about the importance of competitiveness and giving hope.
To paraphrase chief executive Tim Roberts, the board set out on a plan with Scott, but that did not mean it was contingent on Brad Scott. “Brad was part of the strategy but only one part,” he said.
Andrew Welsh hinted at the same thing when he referenced Carlton. The Blues being ahead of them in chasing a coach was not a motivation to act now so as not to miss a step in the coaching hunt. But the change in the Blues’ mood and lightness, “the positive energy” about Carlton now that they had made the change also could not be ignored.
Essendon fans needs that lightness.
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Michael Gleeson is an award-winning senior sports writer specialising in AFL and athletics.Connect via X or email.
