Heading into the 2020 season, the Bombers had two main areas they wanted to see progress in: Hitting the scoreboard more and tightening up on defence.
Playing finals wasn’t a guarantee but no-one would have been surprised if Essendon made them. But the concern was: could the Bombers actually win a final if they made it?
Sitting here now after a 6-10-1 year it’s going to be riveting to see how the next few weeks play out with trades, who stays, who leaves, and to see how the club handles the external pressure throughout pre-season. If, internally, they can stick together, that’s surely a good sign that their culture is on the right path. If they don’t, it will make life hard to be as successful as they can be in 2021 if they are fractured.
For the record: for a team that believed they could hit the scoreboard more this year, and defend, they’ve gone backwards. In 2020 the Bombers averaged 55 points per game, and gave up 69 points per game. Offensively that made them the 14th best attack in the AFL. In 2019, they were ranked 13th, ninth in 2018 and third in 2017. Defensively, they were the third worst in 2020, and between 2017 -2019 they have hovered around being the seventh and eighth worst team.
“The Essendon playing group have been through two massive transitions in my short time at the football club,” said outgoing head coach John Worsfold. “I also believe really strongly in these young men I know so well. I respect there will be those who don’t share my confidence. The future will reveal the reality.”
Right now all eyes are on Essendon and what the future brings. This year felt like halted progress and fell well short of what their best can look like. There’s talent on their list. But most of this season was hard to watch, like a sputtering motor that never really got going.
Essendon started the new year with 15 players undergoing postseason surgery and then injuries sprouted everywhere. Dyson Heppell. Cale Hooker. Orazio Fantasia. Patrick Ambrose. Joe Daniher was months away from joining the team. Tall forward James Stewart hadn’t played since R11, 2018. New recruits Tom Cutler and Jacob Townsend arrived with a wait-and-see feeling. Aging defensive duo Hooker and Hurley were 31 and 30 respectively. There were more questions than answers for the Bombers.
Even with a 5-2 start no-one was convinced that this was the year the Bombers won their first final in 16 years. They scraped home against the Dockers by a goal after leading by 26 at three-quarter time. They beat a rebuilding Swans team by the same margin. They lost to the Blues by one point but were outgunned, with Carlton putting up 17 scoring shots to 11. The Collingwood win was impressive but then they limped to a 14-point win over a fairly weak Roos unit. Throughout the cluster of the early games there were warning signs the Bombers had problems, going through periods where pressure fell away, lost momentum and made mistakes that cost them goals. The good was short-lived and electrifying. The bad was agonizing to watch.
In between all of those games, Conor McKenna had a false positive COVID-19 test which suspended the Bombers-Demons match and sent football media into meltdown. Jake Stringer went down with syndesmosis after leading the Bombers to an uplifting win over Collingwood. And the global pandemic hit, forcing the round two restart to kick off June 11. But that’s as good as it got for the Bombers. From their last 10 games they netted just one more win against another rebuilding team, the Hawks – and that win took a miracle comeback from 36 points down at half time.
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This year was meant to be a foot forward. It was believed widley that the Bombers had enough good working parts to play finals football and potentially win a final. But it didn’t go as planned. The Bombers lacked consistency. They ambitiously tried to take on a new game plan. The lack of forward personnel made kicking goals harder than it should’ve been – inside their 50 became a disaster zone. And while the backline stood strong under intense pressure and repeat entries, they just weren’t able to withstand the volume of entries for long periods. But never did the Bombers look like a real contender or threat.
The numbers from this year help explain Essendon’s story. They were ranked 17th for contested ball, which is a gap they still haven’t filled – and vowed to – since the 2017 Elimination Final loss to the Swans. Not since Jobe Watson and tagger Heath Hocking has Essendon had bulk inside the contest. Kyle Langford is still maturing but was used in the forward line a lot more this year because of injuries. It’s clear they are missing some grunt and midfield depth and a guy that can rip open a game in three centre bounces.
Without a host of marking targets for large periods of the year – Daniher, Stewart, Hooker, Laverde – the Bombers were ranked 14th for marks. This was highlighted in the final game of the season against Melbourne, with the Demons owning a 117-79 statline. The Bombers were ranked 16th for hitouts which makes sense when you consider they were blooding a young Sam Draper fresh off an ACL ailment. And they were ranked fourth for clangers: If you watched the Bombers this year you would have seen simple mistakes under pressure that emerged into opposition goals.
In the hard fought losses the Bombers showed grit. They lost to the Blues by one, Giants by four, they drew with the Suns, lost to the Tigers by 12, Eagles by 15, and Demons by 19. But the common thread in most of these losses, they failed to score more than 10 goals which makes winning games that much harder without scoreboard pressure. Even when those games were hanging in the balance, something would fail – a 50m metre penalty goal, an errant handball goal, a kick down the line turned over by an intercept mark – which was usually followed by a period of opposition dominance. It was like players were watching on trapped inside a glass box. And this is why they ended up with six wins this year: they weren’t good enough for long enough and went long periods just hanging in games.
Xavier Campbell said at the Crichton Medal: “We want to deliver our members the 17th premiership. We are committed to doing that as quickly as we can,” he said. “An uprising is defined as an act of resistance or rebellion, a revolt. Within this team, our players and staff, you can feel there is an uprising.”
The thing about what Campbell said is that the Bombers aren’t horrible. They’re not perennial wooden spooners. But they aren’t Richmond or Geelong. They don’t have forwards that kick 70-goal seasons. They haven’t won a final for almost two decades. They don’t get let off the hook for their 2020 season. They need to prove that they can be elite and match it with the Top Eight teams. They have talented individuals but they need to evolve into a talented team.
The Bombers didn’t get a whole lot out of Tom Cutler, nor Jacob Townsend this year. Cutler looked like he found it hard to get himself in the play. Townsend will be a better fit with a fully functionally forwardline – not the no.2 option. Guys like Clarke, Guelfi, Laverde, Redman all have another year to prove their worth. And then there’s the off-season trade chaos where Daniher, Fantasia and Saad could walk. It’s still early to know what the team is going to look like in 2021 or how many gaps might need filling. Rutten and Dodoro probably don’t know what that looks like either right now.
I felt there were a lot of actual reasons why the Bombers backfired this year – transition, injuries, new game plan, playing away from Melbourne, limited training etc. Yada, yada. Yes. We’ve heard all this ad nauseam. But the wolves are out for the Bombers. People keep saying the team isn’t feared, the midfield can’t compete, they lack passion and the club is drowning in mediocrity. The answer: all those things have defined the club since Sheedy was shown the door some 14 years ago and now it’s all being exposed. Since the supplements saga the Bombers have been playing catch up and have looked off-beat and a step behind the rest of the AFL.
Come next year with a full list, a whole pre-season under Rutten, and those actual reasons for not performing will start to sound like really poor excuses. And maybe they already do sound like excuses to some. But patience from the Bomber faithful is gone. Rutten and Campbell need to move the dial next year. They need to make the hard decisions between now and Round One to make sure the Bombers don’t have a repeat of 2020.
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