EFC: Essendon Fool-All Club

[BenDoolan]

Sigh.

When are we going to stop blaming one individual (the coach) for the failures of this insipid organisation called EFC?

Where is the club’s vision, and what does it stand for? Anyone know???

Are we just going to meander along and accept Docklands as our main home ground - forever? Are we just going to stay at that shit hole Tulla facility until it decays? It does a great job of decaying our players.

Are we just going to accept that player fitness / conditioning and injury management be the joke of the competition?

Are we satisfied with the pathetic player development program that doesn’t develop a single recruit?

Can’t blame that on one individual.

The place is comatose. It is non-responsive to anything.

I sensed Brad Scott is incensed with the constant injury and re-injury situation. It has been going on for faaaaaarking years! Does anyone want to investigate why? Are the facilities, SHIT? Are the programs, WORSE?

I ain’t going to blame Brad Scot until they get every other department in order first. It’s a junkyard, and the results prove it.

I keep saying it, but the club is a toilet. There is so much shit around that it all can’t be flushed in one go. The pipes are blocked - by useless board members.

[s'dreams]

Both Caro-whine WIlson and Jake Niall are both blaming the "wrong people in recruiting and management for the past 20 years".

https://www.3aw.com.au/caroline-wilson- ... o-decades/

Jake has repeatedly pointed to our recent history of trading out our first round picks for Devon Smith (1 good season, the rest poor) and Dylan Shiel (a slight improvement over the cattle that was there, but definitely not worth the 2 first round picks).

I took the exercise of looking at who we could have got for the pick traded by looking at the pick taken and the next one.

2017 Pick 11 (Smith) Aiden Bonar or Darcy Fogerty ... remember that GWS had so many first round picks, Bonar was a speculation
2018 Pick 9 (Shiel) Jye Caldwell or Zac Butters
2019 Pick 14 (Shiel) Miles Bergman or Cody Weightman

Even overlooking the second round selections traded (Carlton got Tom de Koneng, West Coast got Bailey J. Williams from our traded 2nd rounds)...

Any three of those (bar Bonair) would have been massive for us ... and lets dream we went Butters instead of Caldwell.

But then again our master recruiter probably would have gone for three 5'6" weedy athletes who couldn't kick straight.

[s'dreams]

Another journalist pointing the finger at recruitment.

The thing is ... what to do about it?

Essendon the big losers, Blues’ Houdini strikes again: Key takeouts from round four
By Peter Ryan
April 8, 2024 — 9.17am

Excuses have run out for Essendon

It wasn’t a winning edition of Gather Round, however, for Essendon. Wise heads in the rooms after the game acknowledged the powerful statement Port Adelaide’s midfield had made in their 69-point demolition of the Bombers on Friday night.

From Essendon’s perspective the easiest story to tell was still unpleasant. That one involved a regurgitation of statistics showing Essendon were -20 in inside 50s and -13 in centre clearances, a situation their coach Brad Scott quite reasonably described as an aberration.

If this season is the measure, the coach, in his second season at the Bombers, is right. If he wants to take a look at the past five years at the club (a period beyond the drugs saga), it’s not.

The more difficult but more relevant conversation club officials must continue to confront is how do we get the recruiting, development and injury management right?

There have been excuses. Those have run out.

Their string (pardon the pun) of soft tissue injuries means Zach Reid, Matt Guelfi, Jordan Ridley and now Archie Perkins are missing when the club really needs to see them playing alongside each other. Scott was blunt when asked whether it was a concern: “You’d like to think the soft tissue ones are the ones you can do something about. So we’ll need to go to work on that.”

The recently appointed new face in list management, Matt Rosa, is a calm operator with an enormous task ahead of him to rectify the mediocrity that has continued long after they moved through the debilitating drugs saga.

In 2018, Port Adelaide finished just 2.5 percentage points ahead of Essendon. At the end of that season Adelaide, the Brisbane Lions, St Kilda, Fremantle, Gold Coast and Carlton were below the Bombers on the ladder.

It was at that year’s draft Port Adelaide added Connor Rozee and Zak Butters. They then found Miles Bergman and Mitch Georgiades the following season while Bombers sat on their hands without a selection before pick 30 either season. They had instead invested precious first-round selections in Dylan Shiel.

The impact of the calls made during that time was most obvious on Friday night. But the delay such quick fixes caused to real growth at Essendon has been apparent for years.

The big Bombers stocktake has everyone on notice as eyes turn to a crop of top 15 picks – Nik Cox, Archie Perkins, Reid, Ben Hobbs and Elijah Tsatas – who hold the club’s destiny in their hands. None of them appear to have a future as bright as Jason Horne-Francis – who Port grabbed from North Melbourne – Rozee or Butters.

Bombers supporters can only dream.

Sooner or later, someone will look past just the recruitment to the rumors of inappropriate dealings between senior staff members and the business interests of board members and coterie groups.

[BenDoolan]

I just find it hilarious that most of our early picks never develop into anything like other club’s early picks.

Ours end up playing in a back pocket, sitting on a flank, or just broken down because they are built like pretzels.

I fear for Perkins, Hobbs and Tsatas. I doubt they’ll ever be midfield stars.