Despite a mounting injury list, Senior Coach Brad Scott isn’t letting his confidence in his young talent be deterred.

With 10 of the Club’s listed players over 190cm ruled out to injury, Scott could look to utilise the mid-season draft and potentially throw magnets around to fill the void from a key position perspective, especially in the short-term.

While he admits the current situation is uncharted territory in his coaching experience, Scott remains excited by the opportunity it creates for young players, as shown by six debutants just this season alone – Angus Clarke’s dream debut the freshest of them.

The agenda from Scott’s weekly presser:

Scott on... embracing the unknown

Yeah, it is (unprecedented) but if I’d had it previously, fortunately, we've now got a mid-season draft to mitigate that somewhat, but that's far from perfect either, obviously.

It’s a different challenge for us, we're in a difficult spot in terms of availability, but the way I look at these things is it’ll create opportunity for others and, you know, if we had 100 per cent availability on our list, we wouldn't have unearthed six debutants this year, Angus Clarke wouldn't have got his opportunity last week, which he clearly took.

It’s a challenging situation, but we can be down in the dumps and focus on, you know, the negatives or we can be optimistic about the opportunities it creates.

Yeah, we have (had to change the way we play due to injuries), but the reality is we're always iterating the way that we play anyway.

What we're ultimately trying to build with this team is always going to evolve over time and it's a real challenge for us to have to make changes to the way we play based on the personnel we've got available, but it's really interesting that the young players that have come in have actually been fairly easy to coach because they're a blank canvas.

They come in and almost to a man, have executed what we’ve asked them to. Again, (that’s) the silver lining of getting young players in who are really eager to learn and really keen to execute what we're coaching.

Scott on… the mid-season draft

It's not beyond the realms of possibility (to have a mid-season pick play on Thursday).

We haven't finalised that (strategy) yet. We'll meet again post-training today because it's moving a little bit with our availability even based on some updates today.

It's exciting in a way. We’re going to be looking at players that that even a week ago, we probably weren’t considering, so our recruiting team are working overtime at the moment and they're still finalising their report - we'll go through that this afternoon.

It'll be an enormous amount of preparation for our coaches to bring guys up to up to speed in terms of how we want them to play, but again, I talk about opportunity all the time to the players.

Players do the numbers, they work out where they sit in the pecking order and they feel like they're a mile off it, so in situations like these, things change really quickly and it doesn't change more quickly than having a mid-season draft pick play the next day, which is a possibility.

Scott on… Ben McKay, Zach Reid’s injuries

(McKay) won't play this week, the short turnaround's going to make that too difficult.

We're still assessing that – he got scans this morning, so we'll get those results, but it's just too tight a timeframe to turn that around for him. He'll be unavailable and then hopefully we'll have an update on where it sits later this afternoon or tomorrow.

I think it's a positive that the troublesome areas that (Reid’s) had have mostly been back and hamstring, and related to that (other) side. The deficit that was there has been remedied.

He’s done a fair block of work, a whole pre-season, obviously played the first 10 or 11 games this year without issue and the real positive basically is we've seen what he's capable of at AFL level.

If he reinjured himself at VFL level, he’d be doubting whether he's even capable of playing AFL footy, which I've never had any doubt, no one at Essendon has. It’s a setback but we think it’s only a minor setback.

Scott on… Darcy Parish’s positive VFL return

(Parish is) a very good chance.

I thought he performed really well at VFL level, he's had a really good block of training. He would have played VFL two weeks ago, except we had a bye, so we’ll see how we trains today, sit down with our high performance and medical team and make a decision there.

Scott on… Brisbane

Well, they’re clearly the reigning Premier. I think by their own admission, prior to the game against Hawthorn, they haven't been at their best, but they returned to their best last week.

They're what you describe at the moment as a very complete team in all parts of the ground. We’re going to have to think a little bit differently about how we attack this challenge, but we're going to attack it nonetheless.