John Worsfold has a busy week guiding Essendon into finals and making time for letter writing

JOHN Worsfold has had a busy week. Essendon is about to play its first final since the supplements saga but Worsfold also has to set time aside for writing.

Essendon coach John Worsfold speaks to his players.

JOHN Worsfold has had a busy week.

Essendon is about to play its first final since the supplements saga, 12 months after finishing with the wooden spoon.

The Bombers haven’t won a final since 2004, there’s a daunting trip to Sydney and Michael Hurley, Orazio Fantasia and Cale Hooker have been under fitness clouds.

But Worsfold has also had to set time aside for writing. Writing letters, that is.

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The Bombers coach has for years been sending personalised congratulatory notes to players who reach milestones at rival clubs.

“There’s a couple of big ones this week with Patrick Dangerfield, Jack Darling, but I’ll probably ring Jack because I coached him,” Worsfold said.

“Last week it was Scott Thompson for North.”

As a young West Australian State of Origin representative, Worsfold got a letter from Mal Brown he’s never forgotten. As an experienced coach he’s the man behind football’s version of the Queen’s birthday and anniversary telegrams.

John Worsfold speaks to David Zaharakis during Round 1.

“When I started coaching, a lot of the guys still playing I had played a lot of footy against and they were hitting good milestones and I respected them so much as opponents,” he said.

“I’ve got specific criteria that I use. If someone is 23 and playing their 150th game I might think they’ve got bigger milestones coming up and I don’t want to send them one every three months.

“So I sort of assess where guys are at in their career.”

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This is Worsfold as few know him. West Coast’s talented defensive sledgehammer and Essendon’s straight-talking strategist is also a sentimental deep-thinker.

A hard-as-nails backman who tickled rib cages as a player now tickles the ivories to relax.

A dedicated and talented premiership captain now seeks to better himself with regular conversations with a leadership mentor.

John Worsfold the West Coast premiership captain in 1992.

John Worsfold the West Coast premiership coach in 2006.

The Herald Sun this week sat down with a man satisfied with Essendon’s emergence from the darkness, but one hungry for so much more at a club familiar with success.

For a team with unprecedented question marks from day one of pre-season, this has been an Essendon campaign dripping in positives.

Three All-Australians — Joe Daniher, Zach Merrett and Hurley, the Rising Star winner Andrew McGrath, an attractive style of play that’s turned heads across the competition and a finals berth after one of the most hotly-contested seasons in history.

“I’ve always said there’s so many more things we measure and aim for in a footy season and within a footy club other than just winning the flag. That’s tough to do so you can’t say every year is a failed year because you haven’t won a premiership,” Worsfold said.

“There’s membership, support, attendances, the fact that people actually talk about really enjoying watching our games. I’ve had opposition supporters saying that which is nice to hear. We’re still about winning, but we want people to enjoy watching Essendon.”

With 10 players — almost a quarter of the list — walking back through the door like the foreign legion after a year out, Worsfold acknowledged he and his team were venturing into the “complete unknown”.

“You looked at the names coming back in and you thought ‘OK, that’s going to bolster our squad’, but then you’ve got to work out how they’re going to cope coming back into the game because everyone is different after a long absence,” he said.

“We weren’t sure how it was all going to piece together and also how some of the young talent we blooded last year was going to fit around these returning guys.

Zach Merrett celebrates a goal with Jobe Watson in Round 23.

“(Matthew) Leuenberger was rucking at the start of the year and he hadn’t played a game with Jobe or Dyson, who at that stage hadn’t played any midfield footy with Zach Merrett.

“Some of the forward line — Josh Green, Cale Hooker, Orazio Fantasia — hadn’t really played together. We were thinking, ‘This is going to take a long time to get to know each other’.

“There’s a lot in chemistry and understanding your teammates; how they move, which way they turn, how they kick and all that builds as you play together and we had a lot who hadn’t played together.

“We felt we would continue to play better footy throughout the year and I think we saw that.”

Worsfold’s little known, decade-long relationship with a leadership mentor helped him find clarity in uncertain times.

“He’s not so much a life coach, but someone who has taught me a lot about how to lead, how to get groups focused on a shared vision and given me a lot of tools for various situations that you face in a leadership position,” he said.

“He had barely watched any footy when I started working with him. He knows a bit now, but he’s been a visiting professor at some of the big universities around the world. I’d say we speak once a month on average, maybe more.”

It helped him in Round 6 when Daniher slewed 1.6 and put two out on the full in a 38-point loss to Melbourne. The footy world clawed all over itself to declare Daniher’s kicking unfixable, but Worsfold, kicking coach Hayden Skipworth and Daniher himself, held firm.

John Worsfold congratulates Joe Daniher on winning the Anzac Medal. Picture: Wayne Ludbey

The left-footer went on to kick 49.21 in the next 16 games to finish fourth in the Coleman Medal.

“Obviously when you have a game like that or things don’t go right, you assess it and ask, ‘Is that just a one-off or do we think it’s a pattern and have to change everything?’” Worsfold said.

“We believed it was a one-off and we stuck with what we believed and that took a lot of strength from Joe and ‘Skippy’ to not react to the swell of outside noise.

“What people didn’t understand was that Joe probably didn’t have any goalkicking practice in the pre-season with the knee injuries he’d had so we took that and how hard he was working on his kicking into account.”

Daniher (62 goals), Hooker (41), Fantasia (38) and Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti (34) have combined to make the Bombers one of the most feared offensive forces in 2017 — two years after Worsfold inherited a side struggling to hurt rivals on the scoreboard.

“When I arrived at Essendon the first thing people told me was, ‘We haven’t been able to kick winning scores for a long time’. So we felt we had to work out a way through personnel and the way we play to be able to kick scores,” he said.

John Worsfold moves the magnets at Essendon training.

“That was certainly a big focus and on top of that we’re trying to develop a really strong defensive team as well. We’re sitting 12th in scores against and we want that to be a lot better and in the top five or six in the competition. That’s a work in progress.

“The scoring has come on a lot quicker than maybe people thought, but that was partly due to personnel. When I arrived Hooker wasn’t forward, Green wasn’t at the club, Fantasia wasn’t playing forward and McDonald-Tipungwuti wasn’t even on the list, so those four guys have been instrumental around Joe.

“We knew (Jayden) Laverde was going through there, (Kyle) Langford a bit and we added James Stewart, so those guys have also been there this year.”

Scoring wasn’t the only problem in 2015. Weary from three years of ASADA turmoil and with players and fans miserable, the Dons lost 12 of their last 14 matches that season.

Yet this club has come so far that regardless of what happens tonight at the SCG, for the first time in a long time, the future is bright in red and black.