Set the tone early and held on when they needed to.

Senior Coach Brad Scott saw Essendon's eight-point win over Sydney on Saturday night as another big step forward in their push for consistency this season.

Scott ranked the first-half blitz as the best footy he's seen from his 5-3 outfit in 2025, also citing some key individual players in his press conference post-game.

The key talking points:

Scott on... system and result

I was really pleased with the way we played, full stop.

Obviously the first half was more impressive than the second, but we’ve all got to keep reminding ourselves the Swans played in a Grand Final last year and they’re a very proud and good Club.

It’s probably a hard game to analyse from a statistical perspective. We sort of got the game on our terms early and they dropped the number behind the ball, which meant that the game sort of became a chess game at stages.

I was really pleased with most facets of the game today.

McKay and Reid, early in particular but through the course of the whole game were instrumental in setting up victory for us.

There’s a different feeling at Marvel Stadium when the Essendon supporters really get going. I thought the crowd were just unbelievable today.

Scott on... debutants, resilience and grit

We’ve shown a lot of resilience throughout the year when challenged at different stages.

That’s something that usually takes a fair bit of time to build, with the stage we’re at.

I’ve said for a few weeks, we think we’ve got players in the VFL that are ready.

Hayes and Day-Wicks have been in our emergencies for the past month. Day-Wicks acquitted himself exactly the way we thought he would.

We rate him really highly, ecstatic to take him in the Rookie Draft last year. We rated him much higher than that.

Lewis Hayes looks like an AFL player but unfortunately – we’ll wait to absolutely confirm - but it's almost certain he's done an ACL as well. I don’t know how to handle all of this other than to say when you face adversity, you’ve got to come through it.

I can't remember a time, in my time in footy, where it’s just week after week this has happened.

Five debutants this year and with the way it looks at the moment, we’ll have some more but but we’ve got to quickly move onto the silver lining, which is opportunity for the rest of the list.

It’s just devastating for ‘Hayesy’, because he’s worked so hard to get this opportunity. and he took it – he looked right at home.

He knows, and I’ve told him, there's no doubt now he knows he can acquit himself really well at AFL level.

Scott on... bridging the gap

I think the difference between the best teams in the competition and almost everyone else, is the ability to do that consistently for long enough.

I think we've got the capability to challenge the best teams, our challenge is to do that for the full duration of the game. I thought at stages today, we played our best footy of the year.

It’s not a preference (having to hold on).

You have what people would describe as easy wins, and how much do you take out of that? The footy you play was really good but you don’t get to replicate the pressure when the opposition’s clearly coming at you.

The question was, could we could stand up to it and go back at them? I thought the way we closed the game out in the last four or five minutes was really good.

We aim to do it every week for 120 minutes and we'll just keep taking steps towards that.

We aspire to challenge the best teams in the competition. I think there's a gap between what they're doing consistently over time versus what we're doing, but I think we're taking steps to bridge that gap.