This has not been the best couple of weeks for the Essendon Football Club. Not since the club’s crisis was at its pee-in-a-cup high tide has the Twitterverse, or at least the AFL’s little corner of it, lost its mind over the Bombers. So too callers to Melbourne’s 3AW, whose phones lit up at a Royal-Children’s-Hospital-Good-Friday-Appeal-rate when they opened the lines for Bombers fans at half-time.
Consider the numbers from Saturday night. After kicking the game’s first goal less than 20 seconds into the contest, Essendon conceded the next 21 goals to the Western Bulldogs. The Bombers went 37-minutes without a single score and 108-minutes without a goal.
It wasn’t just Essendon’s backline that was testing the very limits of their fans’ faith in mankind. The Dogs won the possession count by 125 and the contested possession count by 36.
While three junk-time goals helped the Bombers reduce the margin to 104 points, it was not enough to prevent them from becoming the first side inside the eight to lose to a team outside it by more than 100 points since… well, since the introduction of the final eight in 1994.
In the last two weeks, which their coach John Worsfold has described as a “flat spot”, Essendon’s percentage has dropped from 104.3 to 93.8. The Bombers’ season seems to have cleared the shark by about 20 nautical miles.
But more than the numbers it was Essendon’s lack of effort outside of anything other than their capacity to drive nails into their own hands that has Bomber supporters foaming at the mouth. At times you felt as though Essendon would’ve been better served by running marmosets through the midfield, or at the very least replacing Orazio Fantasia with one in a forward pocket.
Even in the most ordinary times – and these are far from Essendon’s most ordinary times - if you hit a Dons supporter in the knee with a hammer after consecutive losses like the ones they’ve had they’d say “sack the coach!” Uneasy would be the head that wears the heavily sponsored coaches cap, even if sacking a coach with two rounds to go when you’re still inside the eight would be an intellectual insult to a box of hammers. Although at this point, so would any suggestion other than the Bombers are merely cannon fodder come week one of the finals.
Still, it was enough for the Herald Sun’s chief football writer and Essendon supporter, Mark Robinson, to unload on 3AW. “Last night was pathetic by Essendon,” Robinson said. “It was the kind of game that puts John Worsfold’s position at the club under immense pressure. It puts the players under pressure. Clearly there is a lot going wrong at the club if that is the performance we get.”
In a list of adjectives likely to be ascribed to Essendon’s past few weeks, “ferocious” falls well below “pathetic”, but if you had “apology”, “lack of effort” or “embarrassment” in your Worsfold post-match drinking game, you’d be the designated driver. In his media conference, Worsfold appeared to be heeding the words of Stendhal who wrote in The Red and the Black: “A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded.”
At times during Worsfold’s conference it was hard to tell if the Essendon coach was tired or simply uninterested. “That’s not who we are, we understand that. We’re not that far behind the Western Bulldogs, but we were tonight,” he said. “We have to wear that and be disappointed by it. But we won’t mope around because we’ve got work to do.”
That work might well start in the midfield. On Saturday night, in Josh Dunkley (39 disposals, seven clearances and a goal), Marcus Bontempelli, Jack Macrae, Lachie Hunter and Patrick Lipinski, the Dogs had five of the leading six ball-getters. Even then, the numbers again don’t quite tell the full story of the humiliation of the Dons’ onballers.
“We have to own our embarrassment tonight,” said Dylan Shiel uttering the word Worsfold would not. “Embarrassment is the only way to describe it.”
It’s also fast becoming the only way to describe a backline that in the last three weeks has shown all the resistance of throwing eggs at a bulldozer, allowing the last-placed Gold Coast Suns to kick their highest score of the season and a middling Port Adelaide their second-highest, before conceding 21 straight goals against the Dogs.
While Worsfold may say that over the course of a 22-game season it doesn’t matter when you get your wins, it’s hardly the form-line you want three weeks out from September. And with games against Fremantle in Perth and fifth-placed Collingwood to come, September may be irrelevant – and it will require a more spirited performance from Worsfold when he sits in front of the Essendon Board.
