Bombers caught short
When Melbourne built their premiership list they invested early, and heavily, in Jake Lever and Steven May. Two key defenders.
Hitherto teams had reserved the big pay cheques and big trades for key forwards. Melbourne built from the back.
Essendon now have a coach with a safe and an effective game style, but Geelong shone the light on the most glaring inadequacy for them and the problem that will stop them advancing to regularly threaten the very best teams. They lack one elite key defender.
Tom Hawkins booted eight goals and was too big to handle for the Bombers on Sunday.Credit: AFL Photos
The problem was magnified against Geelong because, firstly, they were without Jayden Laverde who has been very good playing on taller opponents. And secondly they were playing the best double forward combination in the league (despite Saturday’s big bag for Charlie Curnow, Harry McKay is still out of sorts and Jeremy Cameron and Tom Hawkins are the current gold standard for forward pairs).
Brandon Zerk-Thatcher and Jordan Ridley are good players, but they need to be second or third talls not the key. Essendon saw what Hawkins did to Callum Mills last week and should have known you can’t ask undersized defenders to trade weight with the most powerful forward in the game. Two under-sized defenders in two weeks have run Hawkins into form.
Jordan Ridley (left), Brandon Zerk-Thatcher and Mason Redman take in the loss.Credit: AFL Photos
Zerk-Thatcher was asked to man Hawkins. He is only three centimetres shorter than Hawkins but the Cats forward has a conservative 15 (probably 20) more kilos on him. By quarter time Hawkins had six marks inside-50 and four goals. By quarter-time the game was over.
Essendon’s problem is that the draft-led rebuild is slow when you wait on kids to play key position.
The hope and expectation is that Zach Reid is the player to build their back line around. He was taken with pick 10 in the 2020 draft but so far has managed only eight games because of injuries.
He is the single-most important player, more so than Nic Cox or Harrison Jones, for Essendon to get right and get in the team. They know it and he knows it – this isn’t news to Essendon – but getting Reid right is the biggest priority at the Bombers.
Cox and Jones are important and look likely to be very good players for a long time but the most important of the trio is Reid because he can be a genuine key defender. It remains uncertain where Cox ends up playing, but he does not look a natural key back. Jones is a huge talent and probably a second tall forward.
Brandon Zerk-Thatcher is chased by Paddy Dangerfield.Credit: AFL Photos
Very few teams have two elite tall key backs. You can get away with one, like Reid, if you then only ask players like Ridley, Laverde and Zerk-Thatcher to only play the roles they are best suited to.
Geelong is the worst team for picking at the scab of a team. Paddy Dangerfield did it to the midfield in the first term when he ripped the game open from the middle of the ground, simply denying Essendon the ball and then delivering it down Hawkins’ throat. Then Hawkins and Cameron played with the ruthless confidence of players who knew they had a physical edge on their opponents.
For all of that Essendon were good after quarter-time, especially given they were off a five-day break and they had every reason to be flat.
They were largely their own worst enemies with gifting goals through silly turnovers, but the problem – which will come as no surprise to them – was not who was on the field but who was in the stands. Reid would not have won them Sunday’s game, but he will win them a lot of games once his career actually gets started if he can become the player he looks like he could be and the player Essendon brought him in to be.
Time the Swans lanced their problem
On Saturday night Sydney won the inside 50 count in the last quarter by 20 to 10, yet GWS came from behind and won. Worse than that, 10 of the last 11 inside 50s were for Sydney. They scored just one behind.
Lance Franklin keeps an eye on the ball as he kicks a goal on Saturday.Credit: Getty Images
The Swans scored a goal from just 15 per cent of their inside 50s in that decisive last quarter to the Giants scoring from every second inside 50. Only six of the Swans’ 20 inside 50s for the term were to a direct forward-50 target.
Sydney’s goal-kicking problem was – again – because they expected Lance Franklin to win the game for them. The Swans went to Franklin 14 times inside their forward 50. The next best were Logan McDonald and Tom Papley with four each.
When he is there the Swans can’t resist kicking it to him. He demands the ball and his presence and charisma demand you give it to him, but it has made Sydney utterly predictable. GWS even without the exception Sam Taylor found it easy to defend the entries.
How they deal with that will be fundamental to whether or not they can resurrect their season from here. Getting Dane Rampe back, Joel Amartey is out at length and who knows what happens to Paddy McCartin, but the Swans can’t hope to turn their season around if they continue to focus all their attack so predictably through Franklin.
Sad Saturday
Short of Gather Round this was supposed to be Couch Day to sit back with three games end on end. Unless you were a Carlton fan Super Saturday was Sad Saturday.
If you are a Carlton fan you can happily watch replays of Charlie Curnow having his way with West Coast for the next month, and it will not get old. For everyone else it was a bad day of football.
Foxtel and Channel Seven, who pay the mega bucks to fund the game, will be justifiably asking questions of the AFL for what they offered them up on Saturday. The three bottom teams back-to-back. Agnostics interested to tune-in to an afternoon of football would have had to be absolutely bereft of alternatives to go the distance.
West Coast have an injury list, half of them old anyway, that matches only Richmond’s. They were deplorable. North Melbourne have precious few good players and the best of those, Luke Davies-Uniacke, was not there. They were uncompetitive.
Hawthorn were competitive, and have been competitive most of this year, but there was a sense of grim inevitability for a team as callow as Hawthorn’s. This was no super celebration of football.
Premature call on goal
We recently enthused at Charlie Cameron’s goal and decided it was intentional and, thus, goal of the year. Sorry, got a bit excited. At the risk of making the same mistake, we won’t declare now his Lions teammate Will Ashcroft has won goal of the year for his karate kick out of the air from the boundary, but don’t hold your breath waiting for a better one.
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