With his side showing promise in defeat to regular top-four staple Brisbane last week, Essendon Senior Coach Brad Scott is confident they can keep evolving and fronting up for the challenges ahead.
The Dons have found themselves on their toes from a selection and recruiting perspective in recent weeks, utilising four mid-season picks including former Carlton VFL gun Liam McMahon.
Scott will keep his newly acquired talls in consideration this week, while the return of another star midfielder will also be at the forefront of his thinking ahead of Sunday.
The agenda from Thursday’s presser:
Scott on… Darcy Parish
Yeah, (he’ll play this week).
The only caveat on that is he has to get through our main session but we planned for this for quite some time and he's had an uninterrupted last month in terms of his build.
He played two games in the VFL and played really well and barring incident today, he will be available.
Scott on… adaptability
I think that there's no doubt we had to change certain things (last week), but our game is in a bit of a state of evolution.
(The injuries last week) forced a more aggressive style, which ultimately we want to get to, and not relying on talls just taking contested marks all over the ground even though our forwards held up really well.
I thought the slight and subtle changes were positive and probably even more positive that they were implemented with only a week's notice.
We didn't go up there (to Brisbane) to have an honourable loss. We went up there to get the job done and we didn't do that. We've got reason to be optimistic, but we’re certainly not satisfied.
Scott on… Merrett, midfield depth
Merrett, we'd like to use him in about four different places, so he's a really flexible player, and we'll just assess where we play him based on the opposition.
(Our midfield’s) probably the one part of the ground where we do have great flexibility at the moment and it's a good thing. I mean, you want to have multiple options running through the midfield – we’d probably like one of those midfielders to be six foot five, but we'll have to work through that.
Again, that just gives us the flex with Zach being probably the most flexible of those mids.
Scott on… Liam McMahon
Yeah, we’re certainly considering (playing McMahon). We think he's been probably the dominant key forward in the VFL for certainly this year.
He's just been starved of opportunity but we have a pretty strong philosophy that, barring absolute necessity, we want to set guys up to succeed.
In an ideal world, he'd fit into our system for a couple of weeks before we consider him, but with our tall situation at the moment, we're considering him this week.
Scott on… rucks
I don't think we'll go down the path of pre-planning anything.
We'll obviously have some ideas in mind but most of our time will be directed towards assessing how (Goldstein’s) recovering from games, how he's performing. I thought he was outstanding on the weekend.
The reason we brought Lachlan Blakiston in, clearly, is to play in the ruck and we think Vigo Visentini had a very, very good game in the VFL on the weekend, as you know, probably one of the standout rucks in the VFL as well.
Fortunately, we've got three options there that we didn't have two weeks ago.
Scott on… weather, game style
Yeah, everyone's been saying it's going to rain on Sunday, but I've lived in Melbourne long enough to know you don't make those predictions this far out.
I think that regardless of conditions, we will play a similar style, so we won't be relying on the weather to bring the ball to ground, we’ll have to do that ourselves.
