The Good-Bad Bombers

The Good-Bad Bombers

GuyWhoLikesSport

Every year in every sport one team is the Mendoza line for good and bad.

If you lose to that team, you’re probably bad. If you beat them, you’re probably good.

It’s the team sport version of the old combat sport staple: the gatekeeper.

Cowboy Cerrone served that role for years in the UFC’s lightweight division. If you got through him, it was championship contender status for you. I

f you didn’t, time to get used to making 12 and 12 while doing irreparable damage to your brain.

Through five games this season, the good bad team is Essendon.

Their three wins have come against a young and growing Hawthorn, a poorly coached Bulldogs side, and they had a gutty win against a similarly mid-table St Kilda.

Their losses have come against two of the four best sides so far this year in Sydney and Port Adelaide.

The only game that sticks out as being an outlier was the St Kilda win. Essendon and the Saints are getting by more on system and coaching than overwhelming talent, but any sober look at those lists sees the Saints with far more high-end talent now and into the future.

In that game, though, the Saints had the better of the game and won by 10 points in expected score. They were the better side for the entire game and won the expected score, but just stopped in the fourth quarter.

Essendon didn’t stop, and they got home.

Other than that game, Essendon as the good-bad team fits.

Essendon is the good bad team because playing them is a skills test.

Good teams can pick through the Essendon zone on offence, and choke them defensively, while bad teams get beaten by the system that Scott has put into place.

While they have made some improvements around the ball, currently sitting second in the league for clearance differential and 6th for contested ball differential, they don’t want the game in contested situations often.

Indeed, their games contain the fewest ruck contests in the AFL this season by nearly 2 per game. Their games have nearly 22 fewer ruck contests than Geelong games and they are 10 below the league average.

While last year they were second for ball movement and this year they’re far lower as they’ve pivoted to trying to win from centre clearances and generation of repeat entries,they still want a more open game than most other sides.

That makes them relatively easy to play if you have good skills and are well-coached.

The most instructive game for that was the game against Sydney in round 2.

Time and again, Sydney cut through the Bombers like a chainsaw through butter with their exceptional ball use, particularly from McInerny and Warner. Indeed, one of my notes simply read “Sydney’s ball use is sex”.

The Bombers wanted to send them up the wings, and did so occasionally, but more often than not Sydney found the corridor like they were Ray Shoestring from Mr Inbetween finding dimmies.

Simply, Sydney has a better list. Sydney has more A-grade talent. More B-grade talent, and a far better bottom end with exceptional coaching to boot.

Watching Essendon play the Bulldogs, on the other hand, and you saw the advantage that good coaching can give you against a poorly coached side like the Bulldogs.

While the Dogs are clearly better than Essendon player for player, Brad Scott is a far better coach than Bevo and that alone can get you wins if you have enough talent.

Again, it was an extremely low-stoppage game which should have helped the Bullodgs who are allegedly dangerous in transition.

Early in the game you saw that danger. Essendon couldn’t move the ball at all while the Bulldogs cut through them, but were unable to put it on the scoreboard.

However, the Bombers were able to stem the tide in the second and third quarters. They were dangerous from the few clearance situations and were especially good at generating repeat entries inside 50.

They were able to get those repeat entries largely because Scott’s system forced the Bulldogs to the boundary and into hack kicks forward where Essendon could pick them off.

The recruiting of Ben McKay in particular has added some real grimness to Essendon’s defence.

McKay is the rug that ties the team together. Among players with more than 4 defensive 1v1s per game in 5 games, McKay has been the second-best player behind only Alex Pearce.

But it’s not just his 1v1 work, among players who have played at least 5 games, he’s fifth for intercept possessions per game.

McKay is doing it all.

And he did it against the Bulldogs too, helping Essendon to choke the Bulldogs when the game was there to be won.

Better-coached sides would be and have been, able to pick through Essendon’s press and move the ball quickly against them while constricting Essendon’s ball movement. Look at the Port game, who moved the ball easily but shifted to a straight man to stop Bomber ball movement.

Bevo doesn’t have that arrow in his quiver, despite having a better list than Essendon.

And that’s the point. The Bombers employ a number of Bs and Cs, and then Zach Merrett, who is probably their only A-level player.

While I have my favourites, particularly Sam Durham and Kyle Langford, the fact that those two stand out as much as they do is instructive.

 

It’s a list full of good average players, and they need to go big game hunting.

As the list gets better and as players improve internally, the Bombers will have a stew going. But until then, the coaching will be good enough to have them competitive against most teams, but the list will let them down when the game becomes a mano a mano game.

They’re not bottom-4 material. They’re not top 6 either.

That sounds like the good bad team to me.

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