Essendon is ramping up its match-play over the next few weeks ahead of its opening JLT Community Series match against Collingwood.

The Bombers meet the Pies at Etihad Stadium on February 16 – the first of three pre-season matches.

High Performance Manager Justin Crow has been happy with the progress made throughout the pre-season and said replicating the intensity of match-day will be a focus over the next few weeks.

“The pre-season has been very good, certainly in the sense we’ve got the majority of our playing group through the majority of our pre-season,” he said.

“We’re really pleased, given how many of the group are either young new players or returning players – how many of them are getting through most of our training load. 

“We’ll keep doing more and more match-play in training, and match-play like drills, we’ll continue working on our high volume work and continue to work on peak intensity training which is basically getting up to the highest intensities that we see on match-days.”

The Essendon fitness team has had to balance a pre-season program that involves the players who featured throughout 2016, the ten returning players and the latest batch of draftees.

“The returning players are doing a great job – we’ve really got to the point where we’ve got 45 individual players because each of those returning guys did different amounts of work last year, they’ve all got different histories and they all respond to different types of training,” Crow said.

“To this point – with the exception of (Tom) Bellchambers – we’ve got them through the majority of the pre-season which is really promising for the year ahead.

“The draftees are going great – we’re prioritising the match-play at the end of the week and they’re doing a lot of athletic development in between to supplement the reduced training load.”