After last week's loss against the Dogs, Senior Coach Brad Scott looks ahead to finishing off the remainder of the season on a good note.

Scott shares his approach to the current injury list and highlights some big decisions that need to be made in the near future, particularly on the list management front.

The rundown from Wednesday morning's presser:

Scott on... debutants

When you have two thirds of your games this year feature a debutant, there's always a chance for another one. Although it's getting thinner and thinner because we've got 47 players on a list because we took four players in the mid-season draft, so, you know, there's only a certain number you can play.

There's a couple of guys that we we'd like to see push maybe just that little bit harder to get an opportunity, because look, as much as we're in a difficult spot, we still like to promote guys on merit. 

Scott on... Essendon's ruck depth

I think our list management team have done terrific job with our ruck stocks.

I mean, we played Lachie Blakiston as a key back, mostly through necessity, but we we really feel we got ahead of the draft with Lachie. He's been a high performing ruckman at second tier level (in the WAFL), so we feel we've got a lot of ruck depth.

Scott on... Jordan Ridley's injury impact and next steps

He’s naturally frustrated.

We’ll just have to adjust. We're still capable of fielding 23 players, so we'll just shuffle our team a little bit and maybe give opportunity to some others.

We're still in the situation where we've got some players that we can play there, they may be lacking bit of experience, but you know, we're fortunate to have players like Mason Redman and (Andrew) McGrath who are experienced players and members of our leadership group who are generally part of that back six, so we'll no doubt be a bit inexperienced, but that's all about opportunity which I've been saying for the last couple of months really, and nothing's changed on that front.

Clearly we're making some changes in that part of the department where we're pretty deep into a process of looking to appoint some key people in that area and again, that's just not limited to Victoria or Australia. It's a worldwide thing.

Scott on... mid-season draftees

Unfortunately, the mathematics tells you, in our industry, there are more lows than highs. And there's the elation and the joys of players being drafted in a mid-season draft, and then six months later, you're faced with the discussion as to whether they can stay on the list or not, but we don't isolate the four mid-season draftees. It's just our list in totality.

It's a huge challenge and a bit of a juggling act at the moment, but again, you try to be as empathetic as you can to players and their careers, but the reality is we've got to make the decisions that are in the best interests of the Essendon Football Club, short, medium, long term.

There's going to be a lot of hard decisions, but we've got to make them. 

Scott on... injuries

As I said before, Will Setterfield gets his foot stomped on. We have four ACL's, we have Jye Caldwell (who) gets his ankle caught in a tackle, needs surgery on syndesmosis, which a lot of players in the competition have.

So, yes, some of it we're really frustrated in that we think they should be controllable, but we've also had a whole spate of uncontrollable injuries as well. So you look at our injuries in totality, you know, it is a real issue for us. But it's not as if every single one of those have been absolutely controllable. 

Scott on... Sam Draper

We're in constant dialogue.

I've been really clear all year about supporting 'Drapes' in terms of his decision making process. He's got a big call to make and, you know, one thing I do know is he loves the Essendon Football Club and he loves the opportunity that he got here.

My personal belief is that players have, as long as they know all the information, they've got to make a decision that's in their best interest, and the Club's responsibility is to present a vision to that. We think Drapes' future's here, but we understand the nature of the way the system works.