AWOL players to Arizona: Inside Brad Scott’s on and off-field rebuild of Essendon
In Brad Scott’s first pre-season, multiple players didn’t rock up to the first session of the year. Fast forward 12 months, and the Bombers mentor tells JAY CLARK the club’s culture has done a 180, on and off-field.
AFL
Don't miss out on the headlines from AFL. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Even Brad Scott was a little shocked.
When Essendon’s senior coach wrapped the whistle around his neck for his first day of pre-season training late in 2022, there were a small number of players absent.
Their flights home from an overseas holiday, which were booked to return on the day before pre-season training started, were delayed.
It meant a couple of Bombers missed their time trial under a new coach because one was still stuck overseas, and at least one other was too jet-lagged after a long return trip.
Scott may have maintained his usual calm exterior at the time, but it was clear in that moment just how big his job at Essendon was.
Before the club could rise up off the canvas after two decades without a finals win, Scott knew there had to be a complete reprogramming of habits, behaviours and lifestyle expectations inside the bowels of Tullamarine.
And flying back to Melbourne within 24 hours of training starting seemed a remarkable misread for some professional athletes.
But more than 12 months on, Scott was happy the needle had moved significantly in the right direction with about 16 players this time around giving up their holiday time for a self-funded altitude training camp in Arizona.
“There is always a kernel of truth to these things, so, yeah, I was just shocked,” Scott said about last summer’s surprise no-shows.
“You can make excuses for it. The players went off on their break and they didn’t have a coach, they didn’t have a schedule. They didn’t know what was happening.
“They have got to book their holidays.
“But to summarise it, I thought we needed a realignment on what was important about being an elite athlete and the expectations at AFL level.
“I say to the players all the time, the game is not for everyone.
“As soon as you think you are sacrificing something by playing AFL – Friday knock-off drinks with your tradie mates or going out on weekends with your uni mates – it is going to be really difficult for you over a long career because you are going to feel like you are missing out on something.
“The best don’t think they are sacrificing anything. They think they are investing.”
Around the same time last year, the club’s new CEO, Andrew Thorburn, lasted only one day in the job amid a religious row, and the board was effectively overthrown.
The club’s cynics would say it was typical Essendon instability. They’ve had six different senior coaches, plus three interims, in 17 years.
But Scott, along with new chief executive Craig Vozzo and president David Barham, have vowed to return a steady hand along with a clear long-term vision that has been designed to help Essendon enjoy a decent go at the top without any short-term gambles.
And this season will be another big test for a team planning to integrate their full crew of prized third-to-fifth year draftees, including Harry Jones, Nik Cox, Zach Reid, Archie Perkins and Ben Hobbs, as well as blooding first and second-year studs Nate Caddy and Elijah Tsatas.
It is a group which has been challenged to take more responsibility and ownership of the club’s direction entering 2024 because this is where the bulk of the team’s growth will come from, Scott said.
It means this season will be an exciting glimpse into the future, and in particular down the new-look spine, with 205cm Reid combining with former Kangaroo Ben McKay and Cox down back, and the hard-running Jones working off Peter Wright and Caddy in attack.
The defensive recalibration has been a major focus this summer to try and fast-track the synergy between two new key pillars in McKay and eight-gamer Reid.
Essendon has been a poor defensive side for the best part of a decade, but Scott plans to change that with the help of the new pairing.
“Essendon sides over time have been pretty good at attacking, not so good at defending,” Scott said.
“That is simplistic, because there are a lot more complexities in the game than just that.
“But it was an easily identifiable trend (poor defensively) when I was even contemplating entering this process (Essendon job) – through multiple coaches through multiple eras.
“So it was a case of actually trying to get to the bottom of what was going on here.
“We have made significant progress in aspects of it. We were able to slow the opposition down and defend pretty well particularly for phases of last year.
“Certainly it looked a lot better (in the first half of the season).
“But clearly we weren’t able to defend the big forwards very well. That is hard when you have got Zach Reid, a 205cm key defender sitting on the sidelines watching.
“I’m cautious not to lump too much expectation on a player who has played only eight games, but he is an exciting prospect for us.”
Cox will play wing-back alongside superstar-in-the-making Nic Martin who has made the shift from wing to rebounding defender, while underrated hard nut Sam Durham has moved from wing to onball.
Tsatas, who Scott said was a “young man in a hurry” to play AFL, had 24 touches on a wing against the Cats in a much-improved pre-season hitout.
It means the midfield will bat deeper than last season. Will Setterfield is back from a serious foot injury, Ben Hobbs and Jye Caldwell have grown in confidence after stepping inside last year and Dylan Shiel is out to prove he isn’t done.
But what does the mix look like for round 1 against Hawthorn on Saturday and how will they move the footy this year?
“I’m not concerned that I don’t even know what our best midfield looks like because players will surprise us, and it is a matter of giving them enough opportunities for them to show us what they can do,” he said.
“But we want to focus on the fundamentals of the contest, because that is where the game begins and you set the game up around the contest.
“How we attack is most often dictated by how the opposition defend. I don’t like saying ‘This is the way we attack no matter what’ because teams all defend differently.
“We want to be flexible enough so that if they (opposition) want to fold back we will run the ball at them.
“And if they want to come at us we will potentially go a bit quicker and a bit deeper.
“It’s training both of these things so we can play multiple ways.”
But unless the Bombers work some sort of on-field miracle, this season promises to provide some challenges combining all the young talents together in the face of some increased external expectations.
Scott said there would be some “inevitable hiccups” as the club attempts to “bridge the gap” on the best teams this season.
But he said it wasn’t a case of “2024 or bust” and brushed aside Matthew Lloyd’s strong view that fans will tear down Windy Hill if they miss the eight again.
“The biggest risk to us is we get a bit shaky in the face of short-term volatility – that’s the challenge in this game,” Scott said.
“There’s a Rudyard Kipling quote. Can you keep your head when all those around you are losing theirs?
“So, it is frustrating for fans, frustrating for players and coaches (to miss out on finals), I get it.
“But the problem with constant improvement is it doesn’t just go in a straight line. It isn’t linear.
“Fremantle finished fifth in 2022 and 14th in 2023.
“It gets back to do we want to build this sustainably or do we want to try to look for quick-fixes and sugar hits?
“I look back on last year and I was criticised for not being bold or optimistic enough.
“But even when we were going OK (8-5), I was saying this was going to take time because I could see things that were still a long way off the best (teams).
“So, in a nutshell, last season which one was it?
“Were we the team that was competitive on Anzac Day, beat Melbourne early and Adelaide, competitive against the good teams early on?
“Or the team that got blown away in the second half of the year? The answer is yes to both. Both of them are us.
“At our best we are capable of competing against the best. But if we drop away we can be badly exposed by the best.”
In the last two rounds, Essendon was thrashed by preliminary finalist GWS Giants and premier Collingwood by a combined 196 points.
The hammerings left a bitter taste in the mouths of senior leaders such as Zach Merrett, Kyle Langford and Andrew McGrath, who led the Arizona altitude mission to help the Bombers start the season in better nick.
Scott is clear the expectations from an off-field point of view have gone up following the late flight debacle more than one year ago.
But fans may have to show more patience before it fully translates on-field.
“Essendon supporters want to see improvement but what they don’t want to tolerate is lack of effort, lack of commitment to the cause,” he said.
“And if you are not committed to the lifestyle that is required of an elite AFL player you won’t last here long.
“If it’s something I have learned over a long period of time I regard myself as a highly supportive coach and supportive of my players and will go in to defend players.
“But if I reflect over time, I have been potentially too supportive for too long.
“You can support, support and support, but if you don’t uphold your end of the bargain, we will move on really quickly.
“I expect, and this isn’t a threat, this is just the reality. But I suspect there will be players who just won’t be able to hold up their end of the bargain in terms of what we are trying to build.
“We will be pretty unforgiving on that.”
Last week former Bomber David Zaharakis who played 229 games from 2009-21, said: “I’m not too sure what a stable environment looks like.
“Players know when it’s an unstable environment. When you see one coach and he says one thing and then you go into a meeting with another and watch vision and he says, ‘don’t worry about what he said – this what you should do’,” Zaharakis said on Footy Talk.
“When coaches start doing that you have got no chance.”
But Scott is certain the club has much stronger foundations entering 2024.
“You can’t get the on-field right over a sustainable period of time until you get the off-field part right,” he said.
“Dave Barham is showing exceptional leadership as president, we have got a really stable board, Craig Vozzo is a really experienced football person.
“So you can talk about these intangibles, but how does it translate into something tangible?
“It translates into Mason Redman staying after saying 12 months ago I was definitely leaving.
“And when you ask him why (he initially wanted to leave), it was because we have got no direction. We have got no stability.
“So the question is can we provide that for these players? What was our biggest achievement in 2023? We provided some stability.
“We are a very fortunate club and we get to play in big games, we get quite a bit of exposure compared to some other clubs, so you will get dragged into the short-term.
“But I say bring your focus back to where it needs to be and that is on what you need to do right now to achieve the outcome longer-term.
“We have got to do a good job of communicating to our frustrated supporters who are impatient for a very good reason.”
Cat gives update on injury-ravaged veteran, hint on Smith role
Cam Guthrie has been cruelled by injury the past two seasons, but things are looking promising ahead of 2025. Plus, Bailey Smith’s potential role and the young Cat to watch.
Exodus 2.0: Will Lynch be a Tiger beyond 2025?
Richmond’s mass exodus might not be over, with Tom Lynch entering the last year of a lucrative deal in 2025. MATT TURNER delves into his future and what this year will hold for the Tigers.