Off a 16-day break, Essendon are keen to get back in action when they face Gold Coast in the Club's Community Game at Marvel Stadium this Saturday.

Senior Coach Brad Scott is confident in the 23 the Bombers can field, especially with some key players in line to return such as Sam Durham from suspension, with Zach Reid and Jordan Ridley also being considered coming back from injury in a huge match against the SUNS following two close losses in 2024.

The recap from Scott's Wednesday morning press conference:

Scott on... the Gold Coast challenge

Yeah, I think that they're very sharp.

You only have to look at the first quarter of the Melbourne game and the GWS game to suggest that their best is is capable of mixing it with anyone.

They've got some very good players, Jake Rogers, Lombard and these guys, David Swallow, Ned Moyle running around in the in the VFL. I think they had 15 players playing their VFL team on the weekend.

We think we're in a position where even though we've got some young players, they're very capable, and the challenge for us is a really big one that we're looking forward to.

Scott on... the ruck dilemma

(Visentini) showed that he's going to be an AFL player over the future and we just have to pick the team based on what's available.

I mean, we took the considered decision to give 'Goldy' the two weeks off, given he's done a power of work for us, and there's still a long way to go in the season for us.

Scott on... our player availability

We're just in a situation at the moment where we've just got to roll on, and we'll select 23 fit and very capable players this weekend. That's where our focus is.

We do a lot of work and investigation into what's happening, as all Clubs do on a regular basis, and we do that as an ongoing matter of process. The risk for me personally, is that we get distracted from the task at hand, which is 12:30 at Marvel this Saturday, so we'll just stay locked into that.

There are a lot of really unfortunate stories (injury-wise) that we've got to try and manage, but within that we've also got a game to play each week, so we've just got to let the Club do what they need to do in that space and just focus on what's in my control.

That's the thing about the headlines (of) injury crisis and all these things, I guarantee it's not a crisis to those players who are on the fringe of selection. It's an opportunity to put their name up in lights and and get the opportunity that they've been working so hard for, that's the silver lining for us.

We'd love to have better availability, but we've had players emerge that wouldn't have had their opportunity so far this year, so that's exciting for our fans, and even if we did make seven changes this week, Angus Clarke wasn't going out regardless. I couldn't have said that seven weeks ago.

Scott on... Langford and Parish

Whenever there's an injury, we investigate the causes of that. Nick Bryan ruptures his ACL in a ruck contest on the Adelaide Oval, on a perfect surface in a fairly innocuous incident, but it's still a deep investigation as to the mechanism of what happened and why. We do that on an ongoing basis.

The frustration for two of our players - a lot of our players are injured - but two in particular, Darcy Parish to a recurrence of a calf injury, and Kyle Langford a recurrence of his quad. Both scans are relatively minor, but they're a recurrence to the same injury, so that turns a minor injury into something a little bit more of a concern for us.

(Parish) came back in after a long layoff and looked pretty sharp, so it's a loss to us, but we've just got to keep pushing ahead, and he's got our full support to try and get to the bottom of why he's had another recurrence.

I've heard some people say 'that's it for the season'. That's not our attitude, we're going to rehab them as best we can, and our intention is to get them back and playing as soon as possible.