Brad Scott has conceded his side was taught a lesson by second-placed Geelong, following a heavy loss at the MCG on Saturday afternoon.
Essendon's loss to Geelong was a "harsh but good lesson" for our young side. Senior Coach Brad Scott conceded a "big gap" exists, especially in a backline riddled with inexperience and players out of position. Despite skill errors and costly turnovers, Scott remains optimistic, seeing the defeat as a chance to grow and improve.
The Bombers will look to bounce back quickly when it travels to Perth to tackle Fremantle on Thursday night.
Scott's talking points from Saturday's post-game presser:
Brad on ... a big lesson learnt
It's a harsh lesson to learn, but I think it's a good one. It's one you don't want to have to learn. You'd prefer just to move past experiences like that, but we look around the ground and there’s two debutantes, Ruckman who's never played as a defender up until last week in the VFL, just due to the circumstances that we're in that we when you look forward and Shannon Neil and Jeremy Cameron, and they're sitting there, we can't go in with Jayden Laverde as our only key defender, as we did last week.
I've been really proud of our boys and our club the last of the previous two weeks in terms of going out and really taking on the opposition and setting up to win the game, and we set that up again today, now we clearly didn't execute that and we got exposed on turnover time and time again, we'll frame this as an opportunity to continue to get better.
Even with us at full strength side, there's a big gap between where Geelong is and where we are.
I've got a frustrated coaching group because it's hard to coach skill errors on game day, but that's why we're here. We're here to get better throughout the week, to keep improving our skill level, our decision making. But when you've got a team with two first gamers, a second, third or fourth or fifth - it's a challenge.
Brad on ... Our young defence
I get excited about coaching that (young players), but you're coming up against the most organised best drilled and experienced team in the competition, in my view, and they taught us a lesson.
We've got enormous, enormous optimism about players like Archie Roberts, Angus Clarke and Zak Johnson, they're in the infancy of their career.
Both Johnson and Clark are in their first year, Roberts in his second year, we're looking to those guys literally, quite literally to lead our backline.
Jayden Laverde had a massive task today on multiple players. I've been really impressed with the way he's been able to lead our young boys under a significant amount of duress back there.
Brad on ... coaching a young group
We're trying to educate the chess pieces where to go, and that's what we've got to get excited about as a coaching group.
We stepped back tonight, without doubt, but the previous two weeks has shown that there's enough fight and there's enough capability within this group, and we'll never concede.
We'll keep coaching, keep working with them, I've seen enough intestinal fortitude to suggest that that there's reasons to be optimistic about the future, albeit it doesn't feel like that right now.
Brad on ... the quick turn-around
It's only five days till we play again, we've also got a bit of a challenge of 'you don't bring eight guys back all at once' either.
The positive of that is we've exposed players to AFL footy that wouldn't have played otherwise, and there are some of those young boys that I don't think would go out of our team for a long time.
