Watching Richmond beat Essendon on Saturday night, I thought of the end of Fight Club.
And that isn’t some comment on how gory it was to watch two barely AFL standard sides play and comparing it to Brad Pitt laughing and bleeding on that guy.
No.
In the nadir of what has been an average second half to the season, it occurred to me that both sides are at the same point in their rebuild: embryonic.
Neither is reinventing the wheel with their method of rebuild.
Both are like the FBI running the universal terrorist playbook in Die Hard, doing a version of the rebuilding model that has come out of the Gold Coast failure
Both are scouring the country to find kids wherever they can while preserving enough adults around the ground to stay competent while the kids grow.
Essendon’s injury crisis has made that harder, but in theory they would have had at least one mature player on every line.
Each side is in the top five for players used this season, and the bottom five for age and experience of players who have played this year.
Both sides were well out of the bottom 5 for either of the latter two categories in 2024, suggesting they both entered 2025 with the same goal: start again.
It’s just that, like Brad Pitt and Ed Norton in Fight Club, the same thing feels different.
The difference is packaging.
Specifically, how are you allowed to package what is in plain sight?
Richmond is rebuilding from a glorious era that brought me personally more joy than almost anything that has ever happened in my career or my personal life (my girlfriend doesn’t read these so don’t worry about it).
Richmond has been candid about rebuilding.
Coach Adem Yze said it himself after what was always going to be the high point of Richmond’s year when he said “we’re starting a journey with a young list and we’re going to have some bumps in the road”.
Their political capital to lean into the rebuild was strengthened after their early wins against Carlton and Gold Coast, and by the fact that they have the bones of an elite back line, but license was set up by the dynasty.
Even if I have questions, especially around Richmond’s anachronistic and boring game style, the most ardent cynic has to be happy with how the rebuild is going a year in.
Essendon, on the other hand, is trying to phoenix.
They’re a once great club trying to rise from ashes of their own making.
They’re like the Russians who burned Moscow when Napoleon was coming, except instead of rebuilding it they just kept burning it because the next fire would be the fire that solved all the problems.
From their inability to fire Kevin Sheedy after a disastrous final three years, to the drugs crisis, to the quick fixes in non-premium positions of Shiel, Stringer, Smith, Saad etc, to the barnacle Adrian Dodoro hanging onto his job irrespective of how poorly he performed, for 20 years Essendon has had an extraordinary ability to fashion rods for its own back out of thin air.
You might consider that with Brad Scott and President David Barham each in their third years, Essendon is actually in the third year of their rebuild.
Wrong.
They walked into a broken club, and it is taking time to lay the foundations necessary to fix it.
To rebuild a club as broken as Essendon has been, you need both the right people in place but also the wrong people out.
It’s the Zuckerberg theorem: Get rid of the guys who don’t “get it” and replace them with guys who do.
Essendon have had to do it slowly.
The biggest domino to fall was Dodoro, replaced by Matt Rosa, but they’ve also had numerous other staff changes.
Reports that senior players are losing faith in the high-performance staff at the Bombers indicate to me that the club is turning its mind now to the way to keep the new players they’re unearthing on the park.
To my eye, the Bomber build is basically working.
They have found genuinely exciting forwards in Nate Caddy, Isaac Kako and even Archer May more recently.
They’re also de-centring Zach Merrett so younger players like Durham and Caldwell can lead the midfield and even Zach Reid has had moments.
I also have faith in the coaching staff in a way that I don’t with Richmond, though my Brad Scott trutherism is getting tested with every short kick sideways or backwards.
But there isn’t a single Essendon fan I know that’s happy with the season, even though it’s been better than Richmond’s by the simple measure of wins and losses.
Because of the recent history of Essendon, the most ardent Richmond cynic looks like Chris Traeger compared to a relatively optimistic Essendon fan.
Also, because of that history, Essendon can’t call a spade a spade the way Richmond can.
The way the AFL is meant to work is that, because of equalisation measures, the good don’t stay good for long (other than Geelong) and the bad don’t stay bad.
After as much sustained success as Richmond had between 2017 and 2020, they’re supposed to be bad now and in time the idea is that they’ll be good again.
All Richmond fans expected this.
Essendon hasn’t won a final since 2004.
They haven’t held up their end of the bargain.
That’s not to say one is easier than the other, mind you.
Look at the UK, look at Syria.
Rebuilding a broken country and restoring a fallen empire are both hard — just in different ways.
The difference is that Adem Yze can say “we’re rebuilding” after a period of success.
Brad Scott can’t say “I’ve walked into a broken club and it’ll take time to rebuild it” because the word rebuild isn’t meant to apply to a team that has been bad for as long as Essendon has. So, when he was asked the question of whether they’re rebuilding, the best he can say is “I think it’s pretty clear what we’re doing”.
He’s right. It is.